August 11, 2023 — Global variables are a concept in PHP that allow you to access these variables from any scope during a page request. WordPress ships with a specific set of global variables, and it’s useful to know what they are, and how to use them correctly. In this session you’ll learn how global variables work, the list of global variables available in a typical WordPress request, and now to correctly use and interact with them.

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August 4, 2023 — Internationalization is the process of developing your application in a way it can easily be translated into other languages. WordPress is used all over the world, by people who speak many different languages. If you’re building a plugin or theme, you need add any text strings in your code in such a way that they can be easily translated into other languages. The process of translating those strings is known as localization. In this session, we will define what Internationalization and localization is, why it’s important, and show you examples of how to implement this in your code.

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July 28, 2023 — With WordPress 6.3 due on August 8, 2023, now would be a great time to help test the release candidate, as well as confirm that your plugins and themes are ready for the 6.3 release. In this session we’ll be installing the WordPress Beta Tester plugin, convert a local install to WordPress 6.3 for testing, test it against a theme that is in active development, and then revert it back to WordPress 6.2.

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July 7, 2023 — WordPress contains an extensive list of APIs for performing common tasks across a WordPress site. From interacting with the database to creating responsive images, there’s an API for practically everything. This session will be the first in a series of an introduction to the common WordPress APIs, starting with the Dashboard Widgets API.

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June 30, 2023 — While the default WordPress database schema is perfect for most content related data types, there may be instances where you need to create custom tables in a WordPress database. One example of this is when a plugin has a specific use case that extends beyond what the custom post type functionality of WordPress offers. In this session, we will look at what you need to know to create and manage custom WordPress database tables, how to create and interact with these tables, and some maintenance considerations.

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June 23, 2023 — In order to extend WordPress, a developer needs to have a foundational understanding of the WordPress database as well as knowledge of how to interact with and manipulate the data stored there. In this session, we’ll take a high-level overview of the WordPress database, review the default ways to interact with the core schema and data.

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June 19, 2023 — This week we will take a break from writing code, with a WordPress developer quiz! In celebration of WordPress 20th Anniversary on the 27th of May, 2023, I’ll be asking 20 WordPress developer related questions.

Join me for a fun hour as we dive deep into the WordPress developer handbooks and see how many questions you can get right!

June 2, 2023 — Writing code, especially in a collaborative environment like open source, requires all participants to follow specific standards. Coding standards help avoid common coding errors, improve the readability of code, and simplify modification. In this workshop, you’ll learn about the WordPress Coding Standards, where to find information about them, as well as how to automate the process of formatting your code to meet the coding standards.

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May 26, 2023 — When developing WordPress plugins or themes, it’s a good idea to have tools in place to help improve your code quality and debug your code in the case of errors. Enabling error logs, inspecting the values of variables during code execution, and looking at the database queries being run are all tools that developers can use to find and fix problems. In this workshop, we’ll dive into some of the options built into WordPress that you have at your disposal, learn about various debugging plugins and their uses, as well as look at one or two third-party tools to consider.

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May 5, 2023 — When developing plugins or themes there are certain considerations one needs to make if you want to make sure your plugin or theme supports multsite. In this session, we’ll cover those considerations, look at some specific multisite APIs, and convert an existing plugin to support multsite.

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