November 13, 2019 — If you build websites, you inevitably run into problems. Maybe there’s no way to achieve an aspect of your design using CSS. Or maybe there’s a device feature you really wish you could tap into using JavaScript. Or perhaps the in-browser DevTools don’t give you a key insight you need to do your job. We want to know your pain.

November 13, 2019 — Joining such a welcoming and inspiring community as is the WordPress project can be exhilarating and makes people want to contribute their part to join the movement and strengthen their feeling of belonging.

The initial enthusiasm can easily lead to contributors slowly spiraling into overcommitment and a feeling of obligation and responsibility towards the project. There’s a cost attached to anything we do, even when we’re talking about unpaid volunteer work done in the spare time. And that cost will be paid in some way, no matter what.

We need to more openly talk about the adverse effects of doing open source contributions in an unsustainable way, destigmatize the money topic when it comes to “”free”” software and directly address immediate issues of frustration and burn-out as they surface.

Let’s all have our fellow contributors’ backs, and make sure we’re all in it for the long run!

October 29, 2019 — Modern infrastructure technologies like serverless computing and real-time databases offer a huge potential for new and improved online user experiences.

In this session, we’ll go through a practical use case to find out how we can harness their power in the context of WordPress.

We’ll build a Gutenberg block that shows status updates, to be incorporated into a status page. We’ll use serverless computing to allow adding status updates via a Slack command, and we’ll use a real-time database so that all visitors receive these updates in real-time without any impact on our WordPress server.

March 27, 2019 — Four key members of the WordPress community discuss what the future of WordPress holds – a panel discussion led by Ana Silva.

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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