November 14, 2019 — Static sites (or JAMstack sites) are all the rage now. In this talk, I want to discuss why you need to consider Static Site Generators like Gatsby. Are they eating up WordPress’ market share? How can WordPress stay relevant in this age of Gatsby and other SSGs? I will talk about my personal experiences using WordPress with Gatsby.

A few lessons and tips will be shared for anyone deciding to use WordPress as a Headless CMS for their static sites.

March 8, 2019 — It’s no secret that WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world.

Gatsby is quickly becoming one of the most popular tools to build static sites, using Node and React.

In this talk, we will explore using WordPress as a CMS for static sites generated by Gatsby.

We’ll cover the benefits of static sites, such as:
– performance
– free hosting
– much lower security risk

Then we’ll cover how to build a basic Gatsby site that gets it’s content from WordPress via WPGraphQL.

Presentation Slides »

December 27, 2018 — A department within a state government recently launched a new site on WordPress, using Gutenberg as the primary editor.
This talk will showcase some of ways Gutenberg was used to provide a custom editing experience that would have been much more difficult without Gutenberg. We’ll also look at how using GraphQL, via the WPGraphQL plugin, with Gutenberg led to performance and developer experience enhancements while delivering custom blocks.
After this talk, developers and users of WordPress should feel excited about the possibilities of Gutenberg, but also have realistic caution about jumping all-in with the new editor and be aware of some real pain points, but also some proposed solutions and workarounds to said pain points.

February 26, 2018 — In this talk, we will look at what WordPress looks like as an Application Data Graph and how WPGraphQL enables a GraphQL API for WordPress and allows us to interact with the WordPress graph via GraphQL queries and mutations.

In previous talks, (WordCamp US 2017, WordCamp for Publishers 2017, WordCamp Orange County 2017) I’ve talked a lot about the history of WordPress APIs and how GraphQL compares to them and helps solve some problems of using other APIs.

This talk will focus less on the history of why WPGraphQL came to be and how it compares with other existing WP APIs, and focus more on how to use WPGraphQL, how to extend WPGraphQL to work for your site.

We’ll start by looking at basic usage of WPGraphQL: querying posts, pages, terms, etc. Then we’ll explore some features of the query language such as variables, aliases, and field arguments.

Then we’ll look at Mutations (creating, updating and deleting data) and we’ll discuss how WPGraphQL handles Authentication and Authorization, and other features like fragments.

Throughout the talk we’ll look at the internals of WPGraphQL and how it goes from a request to the WordPress server to resolving data back to the client, and how it makes use of core WordPress technology to efficiently resolve data.

Presentation Slides »

December 10, 2017 — WordPress has successfully transitioned from a Blog to a CMS and now is becoming a platform for which anything can be built. However, the evolution is still continuing, and GraphQL is part of the platform evolution.

GraphQL is a query language spec that allows data from any system, including WordPress, to be queried as if it were a Graph of data.

I will walk through what WordPress as an Application Data Graph looks like, and how GraphQL can make querying data from the WP Application Data Graph easy, declarative and highly performant.

We will look briefly at how GraphQL compares to REST, some similarities and differences.

We will look at some examples of WPGraphQL in production on large publishing sites, such as DenverPost.com and SiliconValley.com.

We will dive into how to use GraphQL to query data from WordPress using the WPGraphQL plugin (https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql).

In this portion of the talk, we will look at demos of querying and mutating (writing) data in WordPress using a GraphQL IDE tool called GraphiQL.

Then we will discuss what benefits GraphQL provides for decoupled applications, the tooling around GraphQL that makes it a pleasant experience to work with.

Some benefits I will highlight are: performance gains over REST, the ability to request multiple resources without round trips to a network, tooling around GraphQL (such as GraphiQL IDE and other IDE plugins).

November 8, 2016 — This talk will cover using React, Redux, and the REST API to create decoupled JavaScript apps to interact with WordPress.

Presentation Slides »