February 1, 2019 — Design Patterns in software engineering are a huge help for developers, providing a common, shared vocabulary across languages and platforms that facilitates communication and reasoning. Due to their very nature, they are rather abstract and difficult to properly assimilate and apply in a practical context. This session will discuss the construction of a real WordPress plugin while using several of the more common Design Patterns to demonstrate their real-world usage and highlight the benefits they provide.

January 6, 2019 — WordPress draws a lot of its success from the fact that it jumps through hoops to maintain backward compatibility. Most WordPress sites can be smoothly updated to the latest version of WordPress Core with the click of a button. However, this compatibility comes at a steep price: through this absolute priority on backward compatibility, the project sets itself up to continuously accumulate technical debt in the process. The effects of this are an increasing effort to maintain the codebase and an increasing difficulty to add new features. Let’s examine how these two factors interrelate and what this means for WordPress’ current state and future evolution.

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October 9, 2018 — Gutenberg is a major change to how you develop software for WordPress. The changes will start with the WordPress editor but the long term plan is for Gutenberg to slowly take over the entire admin interface.

If you already have existing plugin or theme code that you need to maintain and make ready for the upcoming Gutenberg update, you will probably face some architectural design challenges. This session will help prepare you to make those changes in a clean transition.

October 5, 2018 — We will look at the basic mechanisms that make Composer as flexible as it is. Then, we’ll go through some of the more useful and/or exotic examples of how to use Composer for solving problems that it wasn’t really meant to solve.

August 7, 2018 — You know a lot of pattern buzzwords and OOP syntax, but fail to get actual benefits out of their practical use? You’ve read about principles and best practices but cannot apply them to your daily problems? We’ll work on a simple WordPress plugin to discuss fundamental principles like dependency injection and discover useful design patterns that solve real pain points in your development work. We’ll combine these techniques to give you strategies to better deal with ever-changing requirements.

This workshop assumes solid knowledge of PHP and basic knowledge about classes and objects, how the PHP OOP syntax works and what the notions of polymorphism, encapsulation and inheritance mean.

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December 25, 2017 — As the plugins you develop grow bigger, you need to spend more effort on getting the structure just right, to keep the plugin maintainable and easily extensible.

This session will briefly go over several key concepts of dealing with growing plugins, like using Composer to split your plugins into multiple reusable libraries or using a dependency injector to make the code independent of any specific implementations.

The session assumes knowledge of basic OOP principles and is an unofficial follow-up to the session “OOP Plugin Development Basics” held at WordCamp Nijmegen 2017.

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December 8, 2017 — This session tries to give a brief glimpse into the timeframes and the usefulness of Computer Science as a discipline and wants to make the point for looking at known solutions first before reinventing the next few wheels.

December 1, 2017 — Das Pluginkollektiv hat einige beliebte Plugins von Sergej Müller übernommen und betreut und entwickelt die Plugins weiter. In dem Video erzählen euch Entwickler des Pluginkollektivs was es damit auf sich hat und zeigt euch wie ihr mitmachen könnt.

October 14, 2017 — Building WordPress plugins in an object-oriented way presents some particular challenges, due to the fact that the WordPress APIs you’re coding against are mostly procedural in nature.

In this session, we’ll go over a real-world plugin to see how the code should be structured, and how best to hook into the WordPress lifecycle when you want to take full advantage of the benefits of OOP PHP.

June 22, 2017 — Alain is a freelance software engineer and WordPress consultant living in Germany.

This session presents a detailed overview of the exact execution flow that launches your WordPress site on each page request, giving you detailed insights into:

the order in which files are loaded
how & why the different global constants are set up
what functionality is “pluggable” and can be replaced by custom implementations
how the database is connected
how caching is set up
how localization is set up and loaded
how a multisite (network) is identified and loaded
how the Plugin API is initialized

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