October 15, 2023 — WordPress Playground is an innovative tool that lets you run WordPress directly in your web browser, within Visual Studio Code, or as a standalone local environment. This innovative solution changes the game for WordPress development, testing, learning, and showcasing.

Learn how to leverage the unique capabilities of WordPress Playground by running some examples:

– Showcase your plugin or theme on your homepage with admin access on the frontend without registration and without the possibility of getting hacked.

– Build an entire website and preview it in Visual Studio Code.

– Run WordPress with NodeJS and use it as a local environment.

– Test your code on different WordPress and PHP versions.

– New applications built on top of WordPress Playground.

October 15, 2023 — Not every project needs custom developed blocks to provide a great block editor experience for clients. You also don’t need to be a JavaScript expert to make adjustments to the WordPress core experience.

This talk covers tools and methods for developers to curate the editor experience. Learn about the nature of block.json and theme.json, and when to use block styles and block variations.

Presentation Slides »

October 15, 2023 — In this workshop, learn how to adapt a shortcode-based plugin so that it also renders content in a custom block for use in the WordPress editor. The plugin will therefore no longer need to rely on the build-in Shortcode Block.

Starting with a scaffolded project, you will go on to build out a dynamic block that works with a CPT (Custom Post Type) and a CT (Custom Taxonomy). Learn how to use the hooks provided by the @wordpress/core-data package to pull content into the editor while also ensuring that the content is correctly rendered in the front-end. You will also learn how to use block attributes both in the editor and in the front-end.

You will learn how a dynamic block differs from a static block and the use cases for each.

If you already have, or are thinking of building, a plugin that uses a shortcode to render content, and would like to learn how to also render that content in a block, this workshop is for you.

October 13, 2023 — In our ever-evolving field of front-end development, it’s easy to become comfortable with our familiar stack and tools. However, relying solely on what we already know can lead to stagnation and hinder our professional growth. In this talk, I want to introduce the concept of adopting a lean front-end mindset, empowering developers to stay up-to-date with the latest front-end techniques and tools available today.

By embracing this mindset, not only can we ensure that our projects and industry knowledge remain relevant, but we can also alleviate the stress of constantly catching up with new trends. This approach promotes lean development by avoiding unnecessary reliance on external libraries when they are not required.

Attendees will gain valuable insights on when and how to apply different development approaches, allowing them to create lean and effective solutions that meet project requirements.

October 13, 2023 — Nothing about accessibility means you have to be boring. It just means you’re making your websites better. Just like when we realized there were a ton of different screen sizes to adapt to, it made our websites better for more people to use, accessibility is another way to give more people access to the sites you make.

We stick to conventions and best practices. We ask about audience and cater to their needs. Accessibility is about integrity. It’s about learning the basics, and using each new project as an opportunity to learn something new.

Let’s go over some amazingly creative ways to make fun and accessible websites.

October 13, 2023 — Navigation is the main component of a website when it comes to moving around different pages and finding content. For this reason, it is critical to design and develop accessible navigation. This means keeping those using different devices and assistive technologies such as screen readers in mind.

Accessible navigation is easy to understand, semantic, and adaptive. In this session, Steve will review the best practices to design and develop accessible navigation from start to finish. He’ll also discuss how to replace the navigation in an existing theme.

October 13, 2023 — This developer-oriented talk offers advice from an SEO expert for setting up a WordPress site for SEO success.

October 13, 2023 — This talk examines what performance and scalability mean from a server-side development perspective and how to optimize for this environment.

It covers basic mechanisms like profiling, deferred processing and caching first.

Then go deeper into code that simply needs to run faster or in a more scalable way, including topics such as loop optimization, static data, opcaches and other concepts.

October 13, 2023 — The workshop for WordPress developers offers an opportunity to understand and work-with hooks. Learn more about some of the hooks WordPress has to offer and find out how to create your own.

October 13, 2023 — Learn about the approaches that enterprise agencies use to keep client sites secure. Find out why the White’s Local Family Business site gets hacked but whitehouse.gov does not.