Tag: WordPress

Advanced API resources (WordCamp Mid-Atlantic)

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 Advanced API resources (WordCamp Mid-Atlantic)

September WordCamps

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.

Editing a book

I have some very cool news — this fall, I’m going to be a technical editor for a book on WordPress plugin development, written by three of the best developers in the WordPress community: Ozh Richard, Justin Tadlock, and Brad Williams.

Ozh reached out to me earlier this week to see if I was interested, and this was a no-brainer. When I was first getting started with WordPress, before I was active in the community, I remember reading Ozh’s posts to get up to speed, not to mention relying on a few of his excellent plugins. Justin is my favorite WordPress tutorial writer out there. And I had the opportunity to meet Brad in WordCamp San Francisco, and I’ve been repeatedly impressed with his work for WebDevStudios, Pluginize, his WordCamp presentations, and the Sitepoint podcast.

I’ve reviewed their book outline, and I’m very impressed by its breadth and depth. Seeing entire chapters dedicated to some very advanced (and awesome) technical topics is music to my ears. (So much, that my talk at WordCamp Mid-Atlantic next week is dedicated to some of these advanced topics.)

These three are highly respected in the community and they’ve all been involved for far longer than I have. So for me to be working with them over the next few months, tasked with reviewing their work, is quite an honor and I’m looking forward to it. During the core development cycle, I review code, patches, and ideas every day, and I’m excited to translate that into the development cycle for a book. (As long as they let me submit diffs instead of track changes, of course.)

Here’s the announcement posts from Justin, Ozh, and Brad. Thanks to them for their very generous words — Justin suggested I was “actually a super-advanced robot that has been programmed to do nothing other than write awesome WordPress code” (no comment), Brad hopes I bring “endless knowledge of the internals” to the project, and Ozh described me as “more active than hyperactive kids drinking coffee on steroids, who blogs, commits, speaks, twitts and never sleeps” (also no comment). You guys are awesome.

You should probably also follow them on Twitter. (Me too.) Looks like we’ll be using the hashtag #plugindevbook to document progress.

As a sidenote, I’m also going to be the editor for the Core Contributor Handbook, which I’ll be starting this month. Lots of writing and editing about code coming up. (Good thing the 3.1 development cycle starts tomorrow to balance it all out.)

WordCamp Savannah

I ventured to WordCamp Savannah this weekend. It was an awesome group of people, and even with my WordCamp schedule (see the sidebar) growing, it’s going to be a really tough event to top.

I spoke three times at Savannah: two presentations (both posted below), and I sat (stood?) on a core team Q&A panel with Matt Mullenweg, Jane Wells, and Mark Jaquith.

The first presentation was Contributing to WordPress. With a few core contributors and a solid group of developers in the audience, I had to kick it up a few notches once I got going, but I think I adjusted that well.

In the second presentation, I presented the goals of my Google Summer of Code project, theme revisions. I received some great feedback from Mark (on FTP integration), Matt (on SVN integration), and many others. I also confessed that my first experience three years ago was with the file editor, in version 2.3.2. It hasn’t changed much, but I tried my best to convince the crowd that a lot more could be done.

Daryl Koopersmith also showed off his visual theme editor, and John James Jacoby demonstrated EventPress. We also discussed scribu‘s project that is now soaking in WordPress 3.1-alpha, and Justin Shreve‘s project on the ideas/suggestions theme.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36220285/Contributing-to-WordPress-WordCamp-Savannah-2010

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36363131/GSoC-Theme-Revisions-WordCamp-Savannah

My DC PHP presentation

Via @DCPHP.

Last night I spoke at the DC PHP August meetup, hosted by Fathom Creative near Logan Circle.

The topic was WordPress 3.0, covering custom post types and taxonomies, multisite and the MU merge, and advancements in theme development. I also spilled the beans that we’re moving to PHP 5.2 with WordPress 3.2 (gasp!). I shared our development and release philosophies, and also had an engaging talk about security, BlindElephant, and shared hosting, which is always fun.

It was a great group (about 30 people) and a good warm-up for my WordCamp presentations this weekend at Savannah.

The presentation was 68 slides in all and lasted about 75 minutes. Without hearing the talk though, you wouldn’t know that the second slide was my first patch ever, but there you go. (I’ll be talking much more about that this weekend at Savannah.) You also wouldn’t know that I actually go into a spirited defense of shared hosts after boldly declaring they suck, so don’t read into the slides too much:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36135238/WordPress-3-0-at-DC-PHP