July 14, 2022 — While WordPress is still the CMS with the largest market share by far, certain proprietary CMSs have been heavily catching up in the past few years.

Despite a much more limited feature set, they are gaining popularity, and much of that can be attributed to better user experience and performance.

Admittedly, proprietary CMSs hosted in a controlled environment and maintained by a single company have a much easier job improving performance, compared to an open-source CMS with a massive third-party ecosystem with over 60,000 plugins and themes like WordPress.

But exploring ways to enhance performance in WordPress at scale is crucial for long-term success and, with over 40% market share, should even be a responsibility towards the open web.

In late 2021, the official WordPress performance team was formed, to tackle monitoring, enhancing, and promoting performance in the WordPress ecosystem.

This session will take a closer look at the origin of the team, its focus areas and initial priorities, the goals achieved so far, the roadmap for the future, and how you can help.

July 14, 2022 — WordPress as an Open Source ecosystem is decentralized and we all enjoy the benefits.

There are tradeoffs of decentralization, though. Strategic partnerships are the key to mitigating those tradeoffs and growing in the WordPress ecosystem.

July 13, 2022

July 13, 2022

July 13, 2022 — Automating the deployment process is a must if we don’t want to spend our time worrying is everything working. During my workshops, I’ll show how to automate WordPress deployment and run all the tests.

July 13, 2022 — Testing WordPress websites and applications can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. Yet, most people manually test their work in the browser… assuming they do any testing at all. Bring up automated testing and most people will write it off as complicated, a maintenance burden, or they simply don’t understand the value.

In this hands-on developer workshop, we will be learning to use Cypress, an end-to-end JavaScript testing framework that makes automated testing easy. Essentially, Cypress acts as a user on your website by visiting pages, filling out forms, and clicking buttons. It can also validate CSS, perform accessibility checks, and run tests across different viewport sizes and browsers.

The beauty of end-to-end testing is that tests are quicker to write and are more robust than any other type of testing. A unit test will only tell you if a function is working properly, but an end-to-end test can alert you if something in the code, the database, or even the design isn’t right. If you are new to testing, this is the place to start!

July 13, 2022

July 12, 2022 — The WordPress Hooks system is what makes WordPress so extendable, and allows you to build anything on the foundation of WordPress, from a blog to an online ecommerce platform.

In this lesson, you will learn about action hooks, how they work, how to choose the right hook, and how to use them in your code.

Presentation Slides »

July 11, 2022 — When you need to apply some customisations to your WordPress site, the best place to put them is in a child theme.

A child theme allows you to change small aspects of your site’s appearance yet still preserve your theme’s look and functionality.

Join us to learn how child themes work, the relationship between parent and child themes, and how to create your first child theme.

Presentation Slides »

July 8, 2022