November 2, 2013 — This talk is for people new to creating themes. It goes into the basics for creating your own theme. It’s simple and to the point, easy to follow and understand. Just the basics, an introduction to creating custom themes.

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October 1, 2013 — The Customizer has been around since WordPress 3.4, yet it is one of the most unknown and under appreciated features around. Learn what the Customizer is, from where users can access it, and why it is so awesome. Then the Customizer API, how to integrate it in your themes and plugins, and dive into how you can extend existing functionality. Finally cover some tutorials and example implementations, what default themes do with it, and how to encourages its use.

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September 28, 2013 — This talk covers the advantages of developing in underscores (_s) and why it is the only starter theme that you should use. It shows how to customize this theme to make it do exactly what you want and nothing else. It also discusses the “€œgotchas”€ and what not to do. github link »

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August 15, 2013 — This presentation covers some of the more common and problematic errors made by commercial theme developers, and how to fix them. It analyzes what constitutes best practices in each instance, and the problems brought about by doing things the lazy way. Some of the topics included in this talk are …

* Why shouldn’t I just use Google Hosted Libraries like jQuery? CDNs are awesome and save on bandwidth!
* Why shouldn’t I just hardcode links to my theme’s CSS and JS files?
* Stylesheet Directory and Template Directory? Those are the same thing, right?
* Trust my users? They bought my theme! Why wouldn’t I trust them?

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August 8, 2013 — A lot has changed in WordPress, in themeing, and in wider web application development in the intervening years. We’re currently deep into the process of building the next generation of P2, which we’re calling o2. Learn about what’s different, what’s new, what works and what doesn’t. Hear about some of our plans for the future, and how we’re morphing WordPress from its server-side roots into powering a dynamic, flexible, front-end heavy web application.

August 1, 2013 — Theme developers tend to overlook some of the APIs, principles and WordPress best practices. This talk covers a few of them in detail, and includes the reasons behind each one.

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July 12, 2013 — Learn how to tear apart your static HTML wire-frame, and create a dynamic WordPress theme from it. Famous WP features such as custom fields / post types, and feature images are used. Learn how to use the powerful wp_query function to pull a specific list of articles / posts from your database in different orders.

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June 30, 2013 — Building a WordPress theme is like playing guitar: easy enough for anyone to do pick up and hit the right notes, but really hard to become a virtuoso. This beginner session, teaches the fundamentals of WordPress themes to set you on the path to theme perfection.

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June 13, 2013 — This presentation covers techniques and coding standards for developing concise, high-quality, re-usable theme functionality using Object Oriented Programming methodology. Learn how to employ the WordPress actions and filters API to create communication channels between objects without creating fragile object dependencies. Topics covered include encapsulation, re-usability, singletons and best practices. Naming conventions for symbols and files will be covered and explained.

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May 4, 2013 — Learn how to mod themes the right way. Using child themes you won’t loose your edits when there’s a theme update.

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