May 9, 2019 — Gutenberg is here! If you’re a plugin developer, you’ve maybe already taken steps to ensure that your plugin is ready. And if you’ve done so, you know how much a step forward the new block-based editor is.

Unfortunately, with over 1 million installs, the Classic Editor is going to be a reality that you’ll have to deal with for a long time to come. Fragmentation between user bases is a difficult problem to solve, because it can mean maintaining two entirely separate user interfaces for different editors. Choosing to support one editor or another limits the potential reach of whatever awesome thing you’re building, while choosing to support both can lead to serious headaches.

Thankfully, with a few abstractions, it can be possible to build React applications that can just as easily target Gutenberg or TinyMCE, or another context altogether. This talk will provide a basic outline for building interfaces that can handle different contexts with maximum reuse.

October 19, 2017 — For WordPress developers in 2017, knowing JavaScript is more important than ever. Unfortunately, with new frameworks and tools sprouting up seemingly everyday, learning JavaScript in 2017 is also harder than ever. Even for experienced devs, it can feel frustrating keeping up with rapid pace of the JavaScript ecosystem. What are arrow functions and object destructuring? What’s transpilation? Why isn’t it hip to use for loops anymore? What’s the deal with functional programming? Why are there so many competing module bundlers? What even is a module bundler? Why does any of this matter? This talk is designed to help experienced developers who may feel like they’ve fallen behind to catch up, and to help less-experienced developers get a leg up in their learning, all with a focus on how this fits into the WordPress ecosystem.

Presentation Slides »

June 16, 2017 — For BeerNC, Cardinal Media used WordPress for content management but served content and user data over a custom Express App. This provided a content management experience the client was comfortable with and the security and control of Express for the app’s internal-facing API.

Takeaways:

Using Express and an ORM can be better for some use-cases than the baked-in WP-API features.
Using WP-API methods and hooks can be used to create webhooks to keep an external API in sync with WordPress content, while giving content creators the ease-of-use that WordPress offers.
Shortcodes can be integrated into a front-end framework – we used Ionic2 to build BeerNC, but the methodology should be similar for most front-end frameworks.

Presentation Slides »

June 16, 2017 — *This is a 15-minute Lightning Talk*

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.

Takeaways:

Writing a node.js application with Express and Socket.io to send content to users in real-time
Writing a plugin to send data to an external app through webhooks
Extending the WordPress dashboard

Presentation Slides »

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.

August 19, 2016 — WordPress 4.4 was a milestone release, with the addition of both responsive images and a REST API. In this session, I’ll demonstrate API endpoints and JavaScript I’ve written for using the REST API and AJAX to load responsive background images into sites.

This technique has several advantages: first, using the background-image property is more semantic and powerful than traditional s. Second, you can have a dynamic background on an otherwise cached page. Third, you have more information available about how your user is viewing your site than just their viewport width.

The session will include three short demos: First, a basic demonstration of the technique. Second, using array_rand on the server to pull in a random background image. And as a finale, using the ambient light API in OSX Firefox to load in “day time” and “night time” images.

Take aways:

The addition of responsive images into the WordPress core was powerful, but it doesn’t solve every problem and isn’t always semantic.
Using AJAX to load images has many benefits because you can know more about the client.
The WordPress REST API can be used for more than you realize.

Presentation Slides »