October 4, 2023 — In the fast-paced world of software development, it’s easy to get caught up in cutting-edge features, captivating user experiences and sleek designs. But we must not overlook another critical aspect: performance.

This talk will challenge you to adopt a performance-oriented mindset, and consider the impact of performance from the initial stages of your projects. Together, we’ll explore several guiding principles that drive performance and demonstrate how they can be applied to any software development context, regardless of the platform or language you work with.

Join in on the journey to unleash the hidden power of performance and elevate your software development skills to new heights.

October 5, 2018 — Thorsten first provides a high-level overview of unit testing in general, and classifies it in terms of test level, and testing methods and techniques. He then explores and explains different possible units. The second part of the talk is dominated by one of the key principles of unit testing: testing in isolation. What is it? How can it be done? What is this mocking that pops up here and there? Next, Thorsten shows different unit test examples, involving both PHP and JavaScript, and highlighting different (yet simplified) aspects of real-life code. Thorsten concludes with a few tips for writing good unit tests.

August 13, 2018 — This is a development-specific workshop, so you should have an idea about coding in general. Besides that, the workshop itself does not require any specific skill or knowledge.

We’ve all had these “Wait, what? That worked the other day!” moments. They usually happen after we introduced a new feature but broke existing functionality in the process. This is why we often don’t feel confident that our code is working as expected. When developing plugins—or whole websites—this is important, though. Clients expect that making changes won’t break their sites. But can we be sure of that?

There is a solution for that, and it’s called Unit Testing! During this hands-on workshop, we’ll help you understand what testable code is and how to write unit tests for it. Armed with this knowledge, you’ll be able to prevent these embarrassing moments from ever happening again.

May 6, 2018 — Rules are meant to be broken. Nevertheless, rules are there for good reasons, and even more when you have a say in them.

In this talk, Thorsten will start by providing an overview of the rules and best practices for coding in the WordPress universe. If you want to know about code style, coding standards, code conventions, code quality—and why it all matters!—this talk is for you.

The second half of the talk will cover applying these rules via a WordPress-specific Composer package based on the well-known PHP_CodeSniffer tool. Both projects changed a lot recently, so you might learn something new. And now with Tide, this is getting more and more important for plugin and theme authors.

Don’t forget to bring a towel!

April 2, 2018 — In this talk, Thorsten will start by providing an overview of the rules and best practices for coding in the WordPress universe. If you want to know about code style, coding standards, code conventions, code quality—and why it all matters!—this talk is for you.

The second half of the talk will cover applying these rules via a WordPress-specific Composer package based on the well-known PHP_CodeSniffer tool. Both projects changed a lot recently, so you might learn something new. And now with Tide, this is getting more and more important for plugin and theme authors.”

Presentation Slides »

October 14, 2017 — In the PHP world in general, there is a standard (recommendation) when it comes to HTTP messages: PSR-7. Despite things like Calypso, Gutenberg and the growing JavaScript codebase in general, WordPress is written in PHP. Thus, wouldn’t it be nice to do what the rest of the PHP world is doing? Isn’t there some way to leverage all the existing PSR-7 middleware and incorporate them into the WordPress REST API? Well, there is.

In this talk, Thorsten will give an overview of the PSR-7 HTTP message interfaces. After that, he will compare these with the structures of WordPress Core, and analyze whether or not they match with the PSR-7 interfaces. Finally, Thorsten will provide a closer look into an example implementation of PSR-7-compliant WordPress REST requests and responses, respectively, and explain their inner workings.

April 2, 2017 — WordPress powers more than every fourth of all websites in the world, in one or more of the 6,500+ world languages. WordPress itself does not allow for multilingual content, though, so that’s where plugins come in handy. One of these is MultilingualPress: THE multisite-based free open source plugin for multilingual websites.

In this talk, Thorsten provides a short introduction to both MultilingualPress and WordPress multisite. By means of several user stories, he then explains how to set up your multilingual WordPress website with MultilingualPress.

Presentation Slides »

October 18, 2016 — WordPress powers more than every fourth of all websites in the world, in one or more of the 6,500+ world languages. WordPress itself does not allow for multilingual content, though, so that’s where plugins come in handy. One of these is MultilingualPress: THE multisite-based free open source plugin for multilingual websites.
In this talk, Thorsten provides a short introduction to both MultilingualPress and WordPress multisite. By means of several user stories, he then explains how to set up your multilingual WordPress website with MultilingualPress.

Presentation Slides »

April 21, 2016 — In this session, Thorsten explains IT certifications in general and how different they can be structured. He then provides several examples of what a certificate in the IT industry can mean for both employees and employers. Based on his experience from by now six seven certification exams with three different providers, Thorsten gives an overview of appropriate certifications for WordPress engineers.

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April 18, 2016 — This session is about writing code that can easily be tested. By means of negative examples, Thorsten explains what makes code rather hard to test, or even untestable. Each „bad practice“ is first presented in an abstract way, and then illustrated and discussed using one or more concrete PHP and JavaScript code examples. In the end, Thorsten shows how to solve the individual issues at hand, and thus produce testable code—even if you don’t test it yourself.

Presentation Slides »