So many sessions to choose from!
Taking a look at the sessions available at WordCamp NYC, I thought I’d post the ones I’m most interested in and see how they shake out in terms of scheduling.
WordPress-Powered Intranets. Need a quick intranet to have a simple directory of your team members? Or a comprehensive content management portal that can hosts requirement documents, manuals and other critical information? Using many of the ready available functionalities of WordPress and free plug-ins, your team or organization can have a full-scale development tool that will increase your team’s efficiency and replace expensive and antiquated corporate intranets. In this session, you’ll learn how to set up WordPress for this purpose, craft strategies and best practices, and have the team collaborating immediately, harnessing its group genius. Speaker: Ramil Teodosio.
Building Your First Plugin. This session will be in introduction to writing a plugin with a real-world example showing how to create a plugin with an options page, shortcodes and a dashboard widget. Speaker: John Hawkins.
Beyond the Theme Directory: Creating your first WordPress Theme.. Learn the basics of creating your own WordPress themes. Starting from a very basic sample theme, this session will explore the anatomy of a WordPress theme, starting with the most basic elements and then building upon them. Other topics will include adding additional functionality to themes using WordPress template tags, hooks, filters, custom fields, custom taxonomies, custom page templates and more. Speaker: Daisy Olsen.
Children Are The Future: An Introduction to Rapid Theme Development with WP Child Themes. For front-end and user experience designers, tweaking WordPress themes to your liking has always been a cinch. Even without knowing PHP, you can pretty much get the results you need through trial & error and a good amount of time. But what happens when it’s time to upgrade your theme to include features in a new version of WP? What happens when another designer needs to come in and sift through your trial & error coding? In this session, I’ll be introducing you to Child Themes which will allow you to speed up your development time and make future-proof theme edits, while also leaving the inefficient processes of trial & error behind. I’ll mainly be covering 3 subjects: 1. What is a Child Theme? 2. How to build a Child Theme; and 3. WordPress Theme Frameworks. This presentation will cater to front-end developers, web designers, and beginning theme developers who are a bit more focused on design and user experience and not so interested in memorizing WordPress template tags and PHP. If you’re planning to attend, please download and install my child theme Boumatic which I will be referring to throughout the session. Speaker: Allan Cole.
Using jQuery in your WordPress Theme. jQuery is a lightweight JavaScript framework that’s extremely popular with Web designers and developers. This session presents an overview of jQuery and how to start using it. I’ll walk through a case study that uses jQuery with a new, homemade WP theme and demonstrate layout techniques, animation effects, DOM manipulation and AJAX/JSON. This session will show beginners how to start using jQuery and how to begin making WordPress themes. Speaker: Jim Doran.
Intermediate Plugin Development Techniques. Learn how to write a great WordPress plugin using intermediate plugin development techniques. These techniques will include splitting the plugin into separate files, using classes in plugins, localization, WordPress cron, WordPress rewrite, Ajax and more. There is a lot to cover here so we may have to skip topics for which there is not a strong interest. Speaker: Matt Martz (sivel).
Writing Secure Plugins. Plugins are double-edged swords. Their power and flexibility are
benefits, but they also mean you can shoot yourself in the foot when it comes to security. Mark helped develop much of the WordPress security API and in this session he will give plugin developers a complete and in-depth guide of how to code a secure plugin. Speaker: Mark Jaquith.
Code Faster and Smarter PHP with IDEs and Other Free Tools. Simple efficient tools are fast and easy to use, but they don’t understand the code you’re writing. I’ll talk about and show you how Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like NetBeans or Eclipse (both are Free Software and cross-platform), can take care of a lot of the tedious annoying work to let you focus on getting things done with your code. This switch has changed the way I work and I don’t think I could ever go back. 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. If you’re planning to attend consider installing NetBeans beforehand so you can follow along. Speaker: Jeremy Clarke.
WordPress Zen: Better Approaches to WordPress Dev Environments. Learn the best ways to set up and manage your WordPress installations, development environment, and other projects which integrate WordPress. Beau will cover how to quickly and easily set up a development environment on Mac and PC, how to manage your WP installs using Subversion and some more advanced tips to make your life easier while developing around (and within) WordPress. Speaker: Beau Lebens.
Writing Plugins for WordPress/MU. This session will be directed toward plugin developers. We will discuss platform differences & guidelines to keep in mind when writing a plugin for both WordPress & WordPress MU. Speaker: Ron Rennick.
Publishing and Sharing Research with WordPress. Lots of web services we use have become very good at letting us save things — We can “star” them, “favorite” them, “like” them, share them, and tag them to our heart’s content. We get suggestions from “followers” and “friends.” It’s great for the “collecting” part of doing research, but what can we do with this all this stuff after we’ve starred or favorited it? How can we find specific things or things that overlap across a dozen web services, with the end goal to actually write something about all this stuff we’ve found? I’ll share some ideas for making this happen, and present some development I’ve done to make WordPress a platform for publishing and sharing research. Speaker: Jeremy Boggs
Every Freshman at Baruch College is Blogging: Now What?. In Fall 2009, 1200 first-year students began writing to 60 blogs about elements of their transition to college. Their posts (close to 3000 thus far) have been published both to their individual blogs as well as to the central portal for Freshman Orientation. Each seminar blog is overseen by a peer mentor, and the project is directed collaboratively by Baruch College administrators and the presenter. This session will detail how and why the project was launched, explore the pedagogical, curricular, and intellectual implications of the endeavor, and crowd source some of the technical challenges created by our use of WPMU as a platform for Freshman Orientation blogging. Speaker: Luke Waltzer.
