Sessions

Check out the presentations for this year’s WordCamp Toronto: Developers!

From Wireframe to WordPress Theme in 10 Minutes

WordPress isn’t just user-friendly, it is very developer-friendly as well! In this session, you will learn how to tear apart your static HTML wireframe, and create a dynamic WordPress theme from it. Famous WP features such as custom fields / post types, and feature images will be used. You will also learn how to use the powerful wp_query function to pull a specific list of articles / posts from your database in different orders.

Creating Your First Plugin, The Easy Way

This presentation will cover: What is a plugin? When to use a plugin for your WordPress project vs. a theme function; Best practices for plugin structure, unique naming conventions; Creating a secure settings page for your plugin; Sanitizing and storing your plugin data, the WordPress way; Safely retrieving data from your plugin and using it in a theme; What to do when a plugin is deactivated, or uninstalled; Structuring a WordPress readme.txt file; Submitting a plugin to the WordPress.org repository.

The presentation will take 30 minutes, with 15 minutes for questions following the main portion of the talk. Sample plugin files will be made available, along with code samples and presentation notes.

Faster Development with Frameworks and Starter Themes

There is no lack of WP themes out there. You could spend a lot of time searching for just the right look and feature set for yourself or your client. And if you are in the business (and pleasure) of building WP sites for a living, you could repeat this process over and over again. But why?

Learn how frameworks and starter themes can help you develop the sites you want faster, better and smarter. A range of such themes – from “point and click in the backend” to bare CSS canvases – will be introduced, as well as how to choose a good one.

Panel: Building a WP Development Business

Interested in starting your own company? Want to learn about what you should not to do, as well as what you should do? Get your questions answered here. This panel will bring together experienced professionals who have made WordPress a core part of their business. Audience participation is encouraged!

WordPress Remote Controller

We’ll take a look at how to wire up WordPress to third-party APIs using the WP_Http class. The presentation will include a brief primer on HTTP communication and the popular remote interface models built on it. Then we’ll dive into practical examples and explore the limitations of WP_Http.

Responsible Responsiveness

Using responsive web design responsibly in your projects. Some theory, some examples and usable snippets of code. Toward the end we will get WordPress specific and touch on how you can start using responsive design in your WordPress sites today. Prepare to start looking at the web a bit differently.

Mobile Apps in WordPress: Version 2

At WordCamp Toronto 2011, Trevor Mills presented a popular session on building Sencha Touch mobile web apps using WordPress. The code he Keynoted was a hastily hacked together plugin.  Since then, he’s continued development of the plugin, and he’s back this year to present lessons learned, coolness attempted, and new trends and potentials of using WordPress to develop rich mobile apps.

Women in WordPress

An informal unconference event which will look at the role of women in the WordPress community. We’ll look at why women make up more than half the bloggers, but usually about a quarter of WordCamp speakers, and an even smaller percentage of developers, coders and contributors. We will also examine ways of increasing other forms of diversity in the WordPress community. This isn’t a traditional presentation but a group brainstorming session. If you don’t like something, change it. Here’s your chance. Audience participation is expected. All are welcome (men too!). This session is for everyone.

WordPress for a large site: boundary use cases and legacy systems

From the perspective of migrating a large existing site into WordPress  I’ll speak on content migration, coordinating presentation across multiple installs, integrating legacy content, satisfying stakeholder requirements and minimizing developer involvement.

Case Study: How I built hirshhorn.si.edu

The Hirshhorn website uses novel sideways slider to display the content. In this talk I will be showing fragments of code that I used to create the slider as well how I extended the tinyMCE editor to provide the boxy layout used on the site.

Structured Data in WordPress

Not just for blogging anymore, WordPress is an effective platform for powering websites with a variety of types of content: product catalogs, store locations, employee directories, and more.

Using advanced WordPress features like custom post types, store this content as structured data to make it easier to maintain and better suited to live in new contexts like mobile applications.

Learn about these structured data features, custom plugin and theme development, and mobile device optimization.

Leave with plugin recommendations, code samples, and techniques for extending current WordPress sites and developing new ones.

Git, Capistrano, and WordPress

Git is a tool that can, and will, save you a lot of time. Combining it with the use of Capistrano, a Ruby based tool that allows you to execute local and remote commands, we can make deploying our local and staging environments a breeze. Oh, did I mention it migrates your database too? And takes all of 10 seconds to run? I will give a crash course in how to use Git and how to set up your local and remote environment for use with Capistrano.

Simple WordPress development sites and site migration.

As you begin doing any website design or development, or even just a site restructuring, you will quickly realize that a place to work, test and/or demonstrate a new site without impacting a production site is a necessity. A development site provides that place.  This presentation will show you how to setup a simple local (on your pc/laptop) dev site or a hosted dev site. we’ll also see how to migrate WordPress sites, either to clone an existing site to a dev site for updates/testing or to move your finished dev site to the final production site.

Developing a Client-Focused Admin Panel

Making the admin panel friendlier to clients is a great way to make sure they’re happy (and won’t need your help to make small updates). Fortunately WordPress provides all the functionality you need to strip down and customize the admin panel so it feels tailor-made for your clients’ needs. You’ll learn how to add custom TinyMCE styles and remove unnecessary buttons (or add new ones), customize admin menus, add custom dashboard widgets, and more. A client-tailored admin area is the perfect way to minimize broken websites and maximize client happiness!

Debugging for WordPress Developers

Techniques, tools, and examples on how to debug WordPress development issues.

The Big Move: Brandon University (Case Study)

A study of some of the challenges encountered, and solutions discovered, in moving the Brandon University websites from IIS/ASP to WordPress.

Being Mobile: The How and Why of the Mobile Web

In “Being Mobile”, Martin explores a variety of strategies for mobile web development including responsive design, dedicated mobile sites, and server-side adaptive sites.

Sharing anecdotes from his experience on both the client and agency sides, he will help bridge the gap between developers and stakeholders, preparing participants for critical conversations about the mobile web.

Getting started with .htaccess for WordPress

An introduction on how to configure your .htaccess file to do more than what WordPress provides by default. The talk will cover basics like setting up a preferred URL, and redirecting old page URLs for better SEO. How to optimize your site’s files using gzip will also be covered, as well as preventing image hot linking, and more. A sample .htaccess file will be provided to all attendees. A useful introduction to a very important file for any shared hosting environment.

Working with Geolocation in WordPress

More users are using mobile to access online content.  And with a bit of tweaking, WordPress can be the backbone to create and maintain location-aware content – useful for local searches, as the content to a mobile app, and more.

Fundamentals of Theme Development

It’s easy to get going with WordPress theme development, but this can lead to us overlooking some fundamentals along the way. We’ll cover important aspects such as hooks, validation/sanitization, enqueuing, namespacing and The Loop, as well as how our themes work within the WordPress environment.

Improved image manipulation in WordPress

WordPress 3.5 will have a new way of manipulate images and by default it can also use Imagick instead of GD. With this we hope developers find it easy to manipulate images to their needs.

Within this talk I will go into several code examples starting with a simple one what explains how to create a new resized image from a random file on disk. I will end the presentation with explaining how you can write your own implementation and will show code how you can implement WPThumb as WordPress main image manipulator. Note: This is an intermediate-level session!

Breaking the mould with Scoped CSS

The greatest advantage to using a CMS like WordPress can also create stylistic limitations. Using Scoped CSS we’ll look at how to create striking exceptions for various content elements.

The Power of WordPress’ Roles and Capabilities – Understanding map_meta_cap

In the second installment of this talk, I’ll discuss the true power behind WordPress’ roles and capabilities system, map_meta_cap. Starting with an overview of how it relates to the system as a whole, including the functions discussed in the first installment, this talk will then use real-world examples to demonstrate how the map_meta_cap function and filter can be properly used to fully leverage WordPress’ capabilities system. For anyone who’s ever needed to conditionally grant or deny a user or group of users a certain ability, or wondered what the map_meta_cap flag in register_post_type() does, this talk will provide the answers.

Custo(my)ze

Custo(my)ze is about not having to live with an out-of-the-box or off-the-shelf WordPress theme because that’s how it comes. With a little Photoshop knowledge and a little WordPress knowledge, you can take your theme and Custo(my)ze it to make it your own just by replacing some graphics and other elements.

Why we click publish: advocating for user centricity through interaction design

Most — if not all — of us are attending WordCamp to make, use, and learn about the world’s best publishing platform, but it’s all too easy to lose focus thinking about twitter widgets, image sliders, facebook integration, and other wunder-plugins than the thing that really matters; making what we publish count.

This isn’t a plea for minimalism, it’s a plea for interaction design. Topics covered include the theory of goal-directed design, mockups, prototyping, user testing at various stages, heuristic evaluation, and using feedback.

Code Faster and Smarter PHP with IDEs Like NetBeans

Simple text editors are fast and easy to use, but they don’t understand the code you’re writing. This talk will show you how Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like NetBeans or Eclipse (both are Free Software and cross-platform), can handle the tedious parts of programming to let you focus on getting things done with your code. Stop having to memorize function arguments and type out PHPDoc by hand! If you haven’t tried working with an IDE, or even if you have and got scared, this talk will walk you through the why and the how of saving time and headaches by committing to one. I’ll also cover using PHPXref, a simple alternative to IDEs that offers a lot of the same utility without changing any of your code workflow.

This talk is targeted at people coding PHP. Though IDEs are also useful for HTML, CSS and Javascript authors, their value is relative to how serious your coding is. If you’re planning to attend consider installing NetBeans beforehand so you can follow along.

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