June 5, 2017 — The WordPress community and how much we are all changing our and the lives of others, every day.

Our community helped me a lot to get through some pretty rough period in my life last year, and this is going to be my first talk about it and probably the only one.

I am going touch base a little bit about #WPDrama, and probably about the future of the whole community.

Presentation Slides »

June 5, 2017 — When I first contacted Marco Andre about doing an interview, he stated that he would like to have some of the other organizers sit in and take part in the interview.

I did not realize how lucky I would get to interview the group while they were preparing for their Meetup.

Marco Andrei, Rodrigo, Gustavo and Eduardo were part of the ograinzing team for WordCamp Porto Alegre, which was held on May 6thof this year. WordCamp Porto Alegre has been held twice in the past few years and this group hopes to make this an annual event.

We talk about their involvement in the WordPress Community, as well as being involved in other tech related groups in their area.

In preparation for their evening Meetup, Marco Andrei, Rodrigo, Gustavo and Eduardo had prepared a cake and cupcakes to celebrate the 14th anniversary of WordPress.

June 4, 2017 — You wrote a really awesome bit of code and submitted it to the directory, only to find out your code MAYBE wasn’t so great. And worse, even after it was approved, people can be pretty terrible about things. Judgmental. Mean. And now you have complaints, conflicts, bad reviews, broken code, security patches, and more. AUGH!

It’s OKAY!

Everyone’s first plugin sucks. Everyone runs into unexpected conflicts. Learning how to handle them is what will take you from a good developer to a great one.

In this talk, I’ll discuss :

* That first review (what really happens)
* Preventing name conflicts (classes, functions and when to use if-exists)
* Replying to reviews (and when not to)
* Replying to support tickets (and when to say ‘no’)
* Handling security reports (what we really mean by ‘responsible disclosure’)

June 4, 2017 — Prior to the development of the current Campus News site, there wasn’t really a public facing news site as much as a static archive of press releases without rich content, pictures, seo, or any kind sorting mechanism. Since we migrated in to the new site, we’ve seen a huge improvement in the quality and volume of news content and a dramatic increase in engagement with UTHSC news.

This talk will focus on how we were able to leverage custom post types, taxonomies, fields, and templates and other built-in features to develop a highly customized, powerful site with lots of cool features including our campus-announcements system and an archive of press coverage from outside media. I’ll also emphasize some of the steps we took to ensure a quality user experience for the Communications and Marketing department who maintains the site’s content.

Presentation Slides »

June 4, 2017 — Shortcake is a “feature plugin” (under consideration for inclusion in WordPress core) that helps developers create a simple user interface for inserting shortcodes, and renders previews of those shortcodes inside the Visual Editor. At NC State, Shortcake offers solutions to some of the biggest challenges of running WordPress at a big, decentralized institution.

This presentation will discuss how to build Shortcake-powered shortcodes, how the way we think about themes has changed, and the future of the WordPress editing experience.

Presentation Slides »

June 4, 2017 — A case study on using Docker to develop from multiple machines. Covering docker-compose, docker files, basic commands and a few clever nginx hacks to round things out.

June 4, 2017 — We’ve given the content owners of our big, complicated, custom WordPress intranet a great way to safely stage their pages on a private site, then move changes over to the live site without having to copy the entire database.

But when they need to launch a new section of the site, things get very complicated – and deploying a lot of new content to the live site on launch day is a stressful and time-consuming process. Content owners quickly get in over their heads when they try to manage a launch, so developers spend precious hours planning and executing content launches.

Dark launch to the rescue! Borrowing ideas from software companies that use feature flagging of new software to test the waters, roll out gradually, or roll back quickly – we’re gradually moving new content areas over to the live site well before launch day, as the new content is developed.

The cool thing is, no one knows the new content is there until we decide to make it available – not even the search engine – unless we tell them exactly how to find it.

Content dark launch is saving our sanity and giving hours back to our developers, and I’ll explain just how it all works.

June 4, 2017 — In this talk, we’ll cover building a WordPress site that leverages the power of Express.js and WebSockets to enable things like live publishing, commenting, and alerting users when content is being edited. We’ll build a simple Express app to handle POST requests from a WordPress site and turn them into events emitted to users, and build REST API endpoints to handle data from users. We’ll also talk about integrating something like this into a production site.

June 4, 2017 — Keynote WordCamp Raleigh 2017

June 4, 2017 — Plugin or theme development for WordPress is not an easy task. It becomes much harder for developer when distributed plugins/theme get rated very low or number of supported tickets is overwhelming. This not only may affect developer’s productivity but also health and personal life.

My extensive experience as developer with a few plugins in the official WordPress repository allowed me to define few methods that turn any feedback into action that makes my products better and end users happy.