September 4, 2014 — WordPress 4.0 “Benny” (named after jazz great Benny Goodman) is all about deepening the seamless experience of creating, managing, and publishing your content. You can learn more about the release here.

September 3, 2014 — Backbone.js and Underscore.js are exciting additions that allow more scalable Javascript creation, both on the front and back end of the system. Along with these great tools came some other, smaller utilities and helpers that make the life of a WordPress Javascript developer just a bit easier.

So let’s explore just some of the hidden wonders in the wp object: wp.ajax, wp.template, wp.shortcode, and wp.html.

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September 2, 2014 — Pseudo-selectors are my favorite CSS tool. They make it possible to create some amazing visual effects, while keeping your HTML semantic and minimizing the images on your site. This presentation introduces the basic concept of pseudo-selectors, and goes over the various pseudo-selectors that are available and when they are useful. It provides examples from sites I have developed of how I have used pseudo-selectors to achieve visual effects that would have been very difficult or even impossible without them.

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September 2, 2014 — When we make it easier for users who face vision or mobility challenges to use websites, we make them easier for everyone to use. From larger hit areas to clear indications of state we’ll cover a few simple things we can start and stop doing with CSS to make websites faster to navigate with a keyboard, easier to use with a course pointer, and understandable without visual formatting.

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September 2, 2014 — We all know not to cowboy code our applications, yet it’s the Wild West when working on building and maintaining your servers. This talk discusses provisioning, deployment, and development setup for infrastructure. By working through a case study of rebuilding my company’s infrastructure, It demonstrates the advantages of building servers in a development environment. Using this workflow, you will be able to see how easy it is to build and maintain infrastructure through sane and logical development practices.

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September 1, 2014 — There’s no magic behind building a successful online community (unless blood, sweat and tears count), but there are a few key actions that lead to increased engagement. With over 5 years of experience in building communities online (in various forms), plus data gathered from 4 expert bloggers, Michael G. Calvert of Disqus will offer real-world examples as a guide. Join him for a talk outlining the 5 steps you can take build a vibrant, active community.

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September 1, 2014 — Changing your workflows can improve everything for everyone.
Project phases covered include:
Kicking it off
Planning/Project Management
Design
Development
Content/Bugs
Testing
Launch/Handing the site off to the client
Perfecting your workflow can help you level up your professionalism, relationships with clients & colleagues, and happiness levels!

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August 30, 2014 — Creating an effective custom theme for your website or blog might seem like a daunting task at first. When you take a look at the files inside a “commercial” theme it sure seems like there are a lot of files. I mean… a lot of files! It is easy to take a look… and be overwhelmed. Thankfully, themes can be pretty easy to create once you understand the basic building blocks; the required template tags, a couple functions here and there, and a few php template files. After that, it’s all about adding other features… like a “sidebar” widget or two, a couple custom fields, a featured image, and a loop or two. This session helps you make sense of the code and files you need to make a simple theme… and some of the features you can add on to make more advanced themes. It also dives into the template hierarchy, custom template files, useful functions, child themes, and customizing loops via wp_query, get_posts and query_posts (if we have time). Lots of code will be demonstrated, so it is best that you have a good foundation in HTML at least.

August 29, 2014 — We’ve all heard the same talks: a very calm, hip developer talks about working on or releasing some cool project. They’re bold, confident, and appear to have everything under control. If you’re like me, you don’t feel that way at all. You’re terrified of letting anyone else see what you’re working on. You assume that everyone is smarter than you, and that you have no business trying to start a business. Let’s strip away the false pretenses and talk frank about how we really feel. Releasing a plugin to the public can be a very scary prospect. Charging people for the privilege of using your code is even scarier. When do you release? How often do you update? Will you make any money? If your plugin is open source, how do you get people to commit to your project?

August 29, 2014 — Simon presents some of the techniques, applications and shortcuts that he uses to help him in his WordPress workflow, generally for when he is building themes. The talk is an overview, including things such as git, bitbucket, cli, sass, ACF, local dev. environment, staging and live, apps, shortcuts, browser testing, etc.

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