December 30, 2021 — This lightning talk examines the past and present of WordPress theme development, with a look towards role of themes in the future of WordPress.

December 16, 2021 — This talk looks towards the horizon of modern website development.

Learn more about core WordPress tooling and how blocks, patterns and theme.json interplay with the new Full Site Editing experience.

October 29, 2021 — This talks suggests that good themes are more important than ever in this newer era of Full Site Editing and the block editor. If you are a theme developer — or want to be one — learn more about how to build well-designed themes with all the right guide posts for Full Site Editing.

August 30, 2021 — This talk encourages tool creators to ensure that their work and their tools enable accessibility.

As creators of themes, plugins, and code that might be used by millions, tool creators have a significant responsibility to ensure that accessibility is a consideration in everything they build.

When a platform improves accessibility, the change can be powerful, trickling down to millions of websites that were built using it.

May 27, 2021 — This talk shares the current status of Full Site Editing development. It provides a look behind the scenes at some themes created as early examples for theming WordPress with Full Site Editing. The session covers Templates, Template Parts, experimental-theme.json and more.

March 18, 2021 — Learn about block-based themes and how to use features like menus and widgets. This talk introduces using a block-based theme and also provides a brief demo of how you can easily build a block-based theme.

November 23, 2020 — “Tailwind CSS ist ein hochgradig anpassbares Low-Level-CSS-Framework, das Ihnen alle Bausteine zur Verfügung stellt, die Sie für die Erstellung maßgeschneiderter Designs benötigen, ohne lästig aufgezwungene Stile, um deren Überschreibung Sie kämpfen müssen.”

Die Integration von Tailwind CSS in ein WordPress Theme um mal kurz auszutesten, gestaltet sich ziemlich leicht. Die Einbindung eines Links aus einem der vielen zur Verfügung stehenden CDNs reicht für das ausprobieren aus. Wer aber das volle Potenzial des Utility-Frameworks ausreitzen will, kommt um ein lokales Setup nicht herum.

May 30, 2020 — In 2015, Matt Mullenweg suggested that the WordPress community invest some of their time to “learn JavaScript deeply”. Well I am late to the party, and maybe some of you are as well, but Gutenberg is here and JavaScript is amongst us.

This talk is intended to be a humble narrative about my journey to learning JavaScript, and some React. One that is still ongoing, and that has stopped and started a few times.

I was originally a WordPress user, turned webmaster, turned developer. This transition has shaped my perspective on development and hopefully allows me to provide some unique and WordPress-oriented insights into how one might move from a PHP-based, WordPress paradigm to make room for JavaScript and React in our workflows.

We will explore the current evolution of theme development. How JavaScript fits into a WordPress developer’s workflow and where a WordPress developer may end up leaning on an amalgamation of what they know and they may still need to learn. And from that, I hope to open up a conversation about knowing WordPress as a platform and PHP developer, while perhaps not being the best JavaScript developer in the room.

Presentation Slides »

December 31, 2019 — Creating and working with WordPress themes is a great way to learn more about WordPress as well as make your site look and function exactly how you want it. We’ll go over what goes into making a WordPress theme, as well as concepts like “the loop,” “actions and filters,” and the “template hierarchy.” By the end of the talk, you should have a good overview of WordPress themes, as well as places to go for further learning.

October 9, 2018 — Timber is a WordPress integration of the popular templating language Twig. The powerful combination of Twig with WordPress enables developers to efficiently build Themes for WordPress. In this talk I am going to explain how Timber and Twig work and how to avoid the pitfalls that come with this integration.