March 28, 2019 — The process of developing a bespoke WordPress website from scratch is a lengthily one. When you’re repeating it on a regular basis for your clients, it soon becomes necessary to “boilerplate” certain aspects of this process to save time, reduce repetition and increase profitability!

In this talk I’ll share my experience of building Kapow!, the bespoke WordPress development boilerplate that I’ve been working on at Make Do for the past few years.

I’ll cover some of the important things you need to bear in mind when creating your own development boilerplate, highlight some of the decisions and challenges you’ll face as well as share some of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

June 5, 2016 — Why switching to WordPress Coding Standards will make you a better developer by Dave Green

WordPress Coding Standards have been around for a while, yet many developers don’t write code with them, let alone know they exist. This was the case with me until September 2015 when I made the switch, and now I wish I’d dived in earlier! In this talk I’ll explain what they are, how they will help you write better, cleaner and more secure PHP code and why you should be using them for all WordPress projects.

See the slides for Dave Green’s Talk Why Switching WordPress Coding Standards will make you a better Developer

Be a better developer with code review by Philip John

Code review may sound boring – as developers we want to *write* code, not read someone else’s. But if there’s one thing we must do as developers it’s continually learn, and code review is one of the best ways to do that. This talk will help you improve as a developer by talking about code review, what it is, and how it can improve the security, scalability and readability of your code.

Building a SaaS product in WordPress by Elliot Taylor

Last year Elliot put his focus from his agency business onto developing his product business YoGrow. The talk will discuss some of the benefits of moving to a product business and how YoGrow uses WordPress and WooCommerce as a foundation.

January 9, 2016 — If you’re not already using the customizer to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customizer action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls.

Presentation Slides »

December 18, 2015 — If you’re not already using the customiser to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customiser action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls for more advanced input options.

December 17, 2015 — This WordCamp Manchester 2015 presentation by Dave Green covers the fundamentals of creating WordPress themes using the customizer including the fundamentals of getting your theme ready, adding controls, sections, settings and panels.

Presentation Slides »