July 28, 2015 — I’ve built a lot of sites, and it seems that the final 20% can be the hardest to complete. I want to teach designers and developers about the 80/20 principle and how it applies to their project workflow. Then I will talk about tools and tricks that I use to finish a project strong, particularly when building a custom theme.

Presentation Slides »

July 12, 2015 — When you start to use WordPress as an application platform, one thing is very soon clear: WordPress defines very little base structure for your application code, where to put and how to write tests, how application is loaded, or for example how dependencies should be managed. Because of this, applications or just complex sites built on top of WordPress tend to get really messy.

There are application frameworks built on top of WordPress, but none of them seem to have wide enough use for to build any serious applications on top of. Until any of those gets wide-spread adoption, combining existing, non-WordPress specific PHP technologies as a custom solution probably is a more future-proof solution. We will be looking into one possible stack of technologies.

July 9, 2015 — Ethics are an important topic, and they are no less important when applied to the complex interactions we have with software or on the web. Mark discusses some of the ethical concerns that come up when developing WordPress core, plugins, and themes, and when managing the communities around those projects.

June 20, 2015 — This talk looks at WordPress in the context of other historical CMS that have offered users a scaffolded entry into web development while offering actionable insights into the use of WordPress as a tool to help guide development skills level from entry level onwards into advanced proficiency.

May 30, 2015 — A common refrain when building software is “think of the user first!” Let’s take a look at how we define our users, how that shapes what we build for them, and what that might mean for the holy grail of a core API.

May 1, 2015 — Nico Danneberg – Erfahrungsbericht aus der Plugin-Entwicklung
WP Meetup Potsdam 04/2015

March 30, 2015 — A discussion with four agency owners in a moderated panel. Learn what makes them tick.

February 18, 2015 — WordPress itself shows how important usability is. One of the major reasons why WordPress became the industry standard is because it’s so easy to use. It is (relatively) easy to develop with WordPress and it’s easy to run WordPress sites. Sure, there are more ‘powerful’ tools, but are they that friendly to use?

Presentation Slides »

February 18, 2015 — WordPress Meetup Potsdam 02/2015
WP-CLI – Eine Kommandozeile für WordPress

January 26, 2015 — Getting started with WordPress Development is a talk exactly as the title states. This talk introduces the basics of getting into development in the WordPress platform itself. This includes examples of code used in WordPress, languages that need to be known, resources to get started, what users need to know about development, and more. This talk also incorporates examples from my experience working with WordPress and learning how to develop on the platform to give the audience a better idea. (This talk can range from beginner to intermediate)