October 29, 2014 — The theme of your site at minimum controls how your site looks and many times may offer a multitude of the functionality. The basics of understanding how WordPress themes work is understanding patterns in the 3–5 core files that are required for a theme.
This sessions walks you through a cursory overview of each of these files so you understand how they all work together to create a WordPress theme.

Presentation Slides »

October 29, 2014 — Making the leap to writing your own WordPress plugin can seem impossible, but you can make it easy! In this talk, I’ll show you how to write the simplest possible WordPress plugin. The plugin won’t be able do much, but after writing it you will. You’ll learn how to add your own javascript, css, and php while making sure that all the code you write works correctly with WordPress and any other plugins you run.

The truth is that working with WordPress plugins opens up a new universe of creativity and it’s easy to feel a little overwhelmed by it. Some of the best plugins can have thousands of lines of code and might even interact with several web services. If that’s what a plugin needs to be, how could anyone ever get started? The solution is to figure out a Minimum Viable Plugin and start learning by creating the smallest plugin we can get away with.

You’ll be surprised how far you can go just by writing simple plugins, too. Sometimes, you just want to slightly tweak the functionality of WordPress, or even another plugin, and a simple plugin will get the job done. We’ll look at a few other small plugins I’ve written that make the WordPress sites they run on a little friendlier or just work better.

And, after you’ve built the simplest possible plugin, you can try developing the second simplest possible plugin on your own. We’ll talk about a few ideas you might like to try next. And once you’ve made a few simple plugins, you’ll find yourself making plugins that might have seemed to hard to even begin before. There’s a while lot of plugin development to do after you make the simplest possible plugin, but it’s an excellent way to get started.

Presentation Slides »

October 29, 2014 — Hast du schon einmal ein Bündel Funktionen in eine Klasse gesteckt, um weniger Präfixe verwenden zu müssen oder eine Variable in mehreren Funktionen zu verwenden? So steigen viele Entwickler in die objekt-orientierte Programmierung ein. Aber wie geht es von hier aus weiter? Welche Funktionen gehören tatsächlich in ein gemeinsames Objekt, welche nicht? Wie kommunizieren Objekte miteinander?

In diesem Workshop möchte ich die Grundlagen objekt-orientierten Codes vorstellen, wie man prozeduralen Code erkennt und umschreibt (Refactoring) und welche Probleme man speziell in WordPress zu lösen oder hinzunehmen hat.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — Cory Miller is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time entrepreneur. In 2008, he started iThemes, which builds web design software and offers cutting-edge web design training for thousands of customers around the globe.

Named the 7th fastest growing company in Oklahoma City in 2011 by the Metro 50, iThemes employs over 20 people around the globe with headquarters in Edmond, Oklahoma.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — I this presentation Susan Ramsey discusses best practices for choosing and understanding how best to extend the functionality and design of your WordPress site using themes and plugins.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — In a distributed working environment with employees spanning multiple countries, it’s very important to get everyone using the same tools for stable development and deployment. In this presentation, Brando Dove walks through the vagrant provisioning process, 3rd party services, and home grown tools that are successful with enterprise clients.

October 28, 2014 — When many of us take the dive to set up our first WordPress site, whether it’s for yourself or a client it’s easy to lose enormous amounts of time. For many veteran WordPress developers it is very easy to forget that first experience of stumbling through the dashboard, or sifting through countless plugins. Marc walks through the process of getting a domain to launching a basic site.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — Accessibility is a growing concern in the WordPress community at large. Accessibility in web design means creating a site that everyone can use. The U.S. Census Bureau says that over 47 million Americans have a disability of some kind. The UN and the World Bank say this adds up to 650 million people worldwide. That’s around 10% of everyone in the world. At some point in our lives, disability will affect most of us, no matter who you are. Every decision you make as a developer affects hundreds of thousands of people (or more!).

The mission statement of WordPress is to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software. WordPress ‘out of the box’ is already a great way to make a website accessible. As theme developers we can do more. People who can’t see or hear, others that can’t use a mouse, people who use special assistive devices to access the web — these people need to access websites. As theme developers, we need to know about accessibility.

Accessibility Statement: “Accessibility is the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible.” Cynthia Waddell

There are 2,655 themes in the WordPress.org theme repository. Only 12 of those themes have the tag ‘accessibility-ready’. We can meet those accessibility guidelines with just a few extras steps. We will start with basic things like creating readable headlines and adding alt text to images. From there we will cover some of the information in the Section 508 and WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

Trisha will provide real world examples from the perspective of her visually impaired son.

We are all responsible for making our part of a project accessible. You will need to shake things and change your processes a bit in order to achieve accessibility.

Presentation Slides »

October 26, 2014 — Town Hall at WordCamp San Francisco 2014. See also: State of the Word 2014 Presentation.

October 26, 2014 — State of the Word WordCamp San Francisco 2014

Presentation Slides »

See also: Q&A that followed and summary post on Matt’s site.