Tag Archives: WordCamp

WordCamp Seattle

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I’m here at WordCamp Seattle, and wanted to post my slides and a few other notes. I’m giving two talks today, one in the development track on best practices for plugin development (“Y U NO CODE WELL”), and an Ignite talk on contributing to the WordPress community.

First, during my development talk, I was asked for five tips on writing secure code. In return, I pulled up a recent email I wrote where I provided 10 tips:

Never trust the user. You need to assume that all user input is insecure, and that all output is unescaped. The primary points are:

  1. Always escape attributes, URLs, and text on output.
  2. Always sanitize, scrub and validate input.
  3. Always prepare database queries.
  4. Never trust the user.
  5. Never output anything that is unsanitized or unescaped.
  6. Never store anything that is unsanitized.
  7. Know the difference between authority and intention.
  8. Never trust the user.
  9. Always use the many helper functions — we make it easy to write secure code.
  10. Never trust the user.

Best Practices for Plugin Development

Ignite Talk: Ask Not What WordPress Can Do For You

WordCamp Netherlands

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Last month I traveled to Europe to speak at WordCamp Netherlands in Utrecht. It was a great experience and I had the chance to meet a number of awesome WordPress developers and users.

I’ve forgotten to post my presentation until now, so here it is. The video of the talk should be online soon enough. I’m excited about that, because despite giving somewhere around two-dozen presentations since August, none of them have been successfully recorded yet. I’d really like to watch it and study how I can improve.

My favorite talk at NL was one on designing for WordPress (and how decisions are made) by my friend John O’Nolan. I’m really excited to see his posted as well.

My main presentation was on what’s next for WordPress. (I gave the same talk in WordCamp Philadelphia the week before.) For my developer talk on APIs, see my post from WordCamp Mid-Atlantic.

There’s also some great photos of the event on Flickr. The pool has more than 900 photos, and I’m also in a fair number of them.

New York and Philly, here I come

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I’m attending WordCamp NYC at Baruch College this weekend, where I’ll be presenting advanced WordPress APIs. I gave this talk at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic (check out the slides) but I’ve promised to mix it up quite a bit for the New York crowd. That means new functions, new use cases, new plugins. From my speaker proposal: “This talk will be high tempo, engaging, challenging, and fun. The goal is to expose the potential of WordPress to new, skeptical, or even advanced developers. While a high-level talk, beginning developers are sure to find inspiration. Advanced individuals new to WordPress development, or considering WP for their next project, will ideally be convinced it is a worthy development tool.” Woo.

I also plan to hold an unconference session on contributing to WordPress. I have it on good authority that I may also be confined to a room at one point to work on WordPress 3.1 feature development with Aaron Jorbin, Daryl Koopersmith, Matt Martz, and others. Which sounds awesome. You know what else is awesome? The lineup of speakers, a bunch of whom I’ll be meeting for the first time.

On Saturday, October 30, I was asked to present what’s next for WordPress at WordCamp Philly. In this shared session, I’ll be able to talk about WordPress 3.1 with a lot more substance than I had at WordCamp Birmingham last month, as we expect to freeze feature development next week. Check out the program and speakers.

After Philly(’s after-party), I’ll be taking a redeye train or bus back to D.C. to participate in Hacks/Hackers/Hacking. This hackathon is hosted by Hacks/Hackers — journalists and developers — and timed for the annual Online News Association conference taking place in D.C. that weekend. I won’t be at ONA10, but there’s no way I would miss out on a journalism-themed hackathon in my backyard. I’ll be attending as the resident WordPress plugin developer, of course. :)

A few more meetups this month — I was at WordCamp Raleigh last week, DC PHP last night, and I’ll be at the joint WordPress DC — Hacks/Hackers meetup next week at NPR. (We’ll be hearing about the Argo Network, which I’m really excited about.) I also attended Accessibility Camp DC over the weekend, which was quite an experience, and I’ll be writing more about that in the future.

Advanced API resources (WordCamp Mid-Atlantic)

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As part of my WordCamp Mid-Atlantic presentation on advanced WordPress APIs, here’s a list of resources for each API I’ve discussed.

Nothing is better than browsing the source. You may also want to try phpxref, which is truly an amazing resource for tracking down how things get executed and called. (This one, based on trunk, is hosted by one of the lead developers, and is updated each night.)

Slides and descriptions of each API are after the jump.

Continue reading →

September WordCamps

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On Saturday, Sept. 11, I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic in Baltimore, Md. I’ll be speaking about a number of advanced WordPress APIs for plugin developers. I intend to transition quickly from one API to the next, providing quick hits and a use case or two, hopefully introducing many of them for the first time to a captivated audience. (One can hope, right?) Expect a high tempo. I’ll have a lengthy blog post prepared with further explanations and examples as well as copious links to resources.

Other speakers at WCMA (which is organized by Aaron Brazell) include Brad Williams, Scott Kingsley-Clark, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and Jake Goldman.

On September 18, while all the cool kids are attending WordCamp Portland, I’ll be traversing only one timezone to WordCamp Birmingham in Alabama. I’ll be discussing what’s next for the WordPress project, including a look at 3.0 and a look forward to 3.1. I’ll also try to answer some questions, but Matt did a town hall Q&A here last year so I can’t really best that.

Other speakers include Sara Cannon and Dougal Campbell (both of whom I met at WordCamp Savannah last month). Literally everyone else will be at Portland, but I’m not jealous, I swear. :-)

Want one of these awesome badges? Mid-Atlantic’s was designed by Whitmoyer and the Birmingham badge is by Sara.