Did someone say custom plugins?
The focus in discussions of WordPress often is on how easy it is, and how many things can be done without any need for development skills — but that’s only true because of the robust community of WordPress developers. Sessions for this track should not center on design or content issues, and can assume a background in PHP as well as other server side languages.
Topics we’d like to see covered:
- Debugging for WordPress
- Building your first plugin
- Selling your plugins
- Frameworks and starter themes
- Structured data in WordPress
- Custom post types and custom taxonomies
- Developing a reponsive WordPress theme
- Using version control (Git) when developing in WordPress
- Best Practices for incorporating JavaScript in your theme
- Use of CSS pre-processors (LESS and / or SASS) for rapid theme development
- Developing WordPress locally – Desktop Server, Xampp, etc
- Using open source code in your product – overview of GPL license
- Using the theme customizer to add options to your theme
- Using Backbone.js / Underscore.js in your theme or plugin
I’d like to give a talk on how to properly build a plugin and set up a plugin options page. The goal is to show how a plugin is best built using object oriented programming and that the plugin’s settings are best saved in a single database row with a unified options key to minimize errors and other plugin conflicts as well as to save memory on database queries. This method is much easier than having to have a prefix before every single function and variable within a plugin. Also, I will show how to use the same method to properly add custom post meta. This will include an example of how someone can easily update hundreds of custom post meta entries with a single line by using a multi-dimensional array. This too, aids in faster and safer database queries.
Also, I’d like to give a second talk on how to properly use Compass (the SASS Framework) to build themes and plugins. I would like to walk through setting up a proper file structure, how to configure Compass for a WP theme, how to properly add the generated stylesheets to the theme or plugin, and how to properly create image sprites for the theme. The most important part of this talk would be on how to properly use Compass to generate correct urls inside stylesheets. Many developers break sites when they move their WP Theme to a live server because they used relative urls during local development rather than absolute urls. Compass can help solve this problem extremely easily by properly setting up the Compass configuration.
It would include a presentation of how Compass can be used with a Genesis child theme to set up and style a simple and fully responsive theme grid in a matter of minutes (maybe even seconds). It will be interactive and will need lots of audience participation.