January 11, 2016 — Adam Soucie will share how the LEGO Master Builder techniques apply to building WordPress themes, plugins, and full websites.

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January 11, 2016 — CSS preprocessors make developing clean and semantic stylesheets effortless. My talk will take someone through a basic structure for organizing Sass within a WordPress theme, using the Bones theme framework as an example.

I will go through some of the benefits and cool tricks you can implement with this structure including breakpoint includes, variables, functions, nesting, and mixins.

Finally I will address perhaps the greatest hurdle to immediately implementing Sass in your WordPress theme — compiling. I will take people through the common methods of doing this including Grunt, Compass, and WordPress plugins like WP-SCSS.

Learning Outcomes:

– Look at their current workflow and ask the question: Why am I repeating myself? And how can I automate it?
– Embrace a CSS workflow that is made up many small components instead of one large component.
– Gain familiarity we core features of Sass like nesting, variables, mixins, functions, and imports.
– Feel confident in using a library like Bourbon to write stylesheets that have better browser compatibility, all while writing less lines of code.
– Be aware of build tools like Grunt/Gulp, which can be used to compile Sass in addition to many other front end tasks.
– Feel confident in implementing Sass in a WordPress theme immediately.

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January 9, 2016 — If you’re not already using the customizer to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customizer action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls.

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January 7, 2016 — The classic contest. Themes against plugins. Which are better? Which can solve your problems, fix your site and grow your business? In this epic showdown we’ll explore the purposes and use cases, pros and cons, strengths and weaknesses of these two critical components of any WordPress website.

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December 23, 2015 — Cómo hacer un Smart Theme
– Pancho Perez

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December 22, 2015 — Desarrollando Themes con Underscores
– Joan Artes

December 18, 2015 — If you’re not already using the customiser to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customiser action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls for more advanced input options.

December 17, 2015 — This WordCamp Manchester 2015 presentation by Dave Green covers the fundamentals of creating WordPress themes using the customizer including the fundamentals of getting your theme ready, adding controls, sections, settings and panels.

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December 16, 2015 — This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass. While earlier talks focused more on design decisions and planning, I will talk about coding, implementing, and testing!

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December 12, 2015 — It’s 2020 and the majority of Internet traffic is mobile. Billions of the world Internet users have never owned, touched, or seen a computer larger than their pocket. Just as we were inquisitive kids, tinkering with Kid Pix and Geocities themes, the digital natives of today will be builders on the same platforms they use for consumption. Can you install and configure WordPress via your phone? Theme it? Create custom plugins? Launch it? Spoiler: I did, and I’ll show you how.

This talk is both a trend forecast thought piece and a proof-of-concept demo. I’ll share some technical learnings, discuss why they matter to our profession, and hopefully inspire you to attempt something just as crazy.