(I had intended to get this posted early last week, but pushing all of the meetings, etc. from the week prior to WordCamp Utah to last week torpedoed that pretty effectively.)
WordCamp Utah was a great event – well organized by Joseph Scott (thanks Joseph!), well attended and with some very good speakers.
I gave a presentation about WordPress plugins. This was a challenging talk because of the vastness of the topic combined with the variety of the interest and technical background of the audience. Here are the slides.
Some folks seemed upset that I didn’t give a technical demo of how to build a plugin. However, I chose to keep the talk at a high level based on the make-up of the audience.
Instead of getting into the code, I talked about techniques and approaches, and different kinds of plugins. My intent was to give people an idea of what they can do with plugins; and a little start on how to approach writing one. We may change this at WordCamp Denver and have some technical presentations.
I also announced a couple of goodies at the end of the talk. We pulled an all-nighter on Friday getting everything ready for release. My presentation might have suffered a bit as a result. 🙂
We’ve released some development tools for other WordPress developers to use. These are things we’ve had to build over the years, and thought others could make good use of.
- WordPress Install (SVN Checkout) Script – a shell script will walk you through a checkout of multiple versions of WordPress from SVN and set up the requisite config file and database structure. This makes it easy to create a series of installs for testing purposes.
- WordPress Compatibility Plugin – sets some constants and some other little things that provide backward compatibility for older versions of WordPress.
- Quality Assurance (QA) Checklists – checklists to help guide plugin and theme testing. Includes considerations such as WordPress version, theme compatibility, browser type, WordPress settings, etc.
The biggest announcement – and the one I’m most excited about – was the Carrington theme, but I’ll have a follow-up post about that as there is just too much to cover here.
Thanks again to everyone who made WordCamp Utah a success.
UPDATE: Oh yeah, the presentation was recorded. (Thanks Jeremy)
I enjoyed your presentation and felt you gave a good overview of the overall plugin writing process. I for one benefited from that. Thanks Alex and the Crowd Favorite team! The great presentations and speakers made the drive from Montana worthwhile.
Thanks Mark, nice to hear it was useful for you. Hope to see you at WordCamp Denver in January.
You know, in most of your files in the Carrington, you rely on the $_SERVER key for checking whether or not the user is accessing that file directly. In a recent presentation made by a security expert, he noted that to be one of the common security mistakes.
He noted that since you are using the $_SERVER superglobal, anyone can override the page you are using. You are better off checking for ABSPATH or some other constant you create for whether the user is accessing the file directly.
I don’t think that’s an issue in this case.
[…] but as time clicks along I plan to make changes and customizations. I was at WordCamp Utah when Alex King announced this new theme along with useful new development tools for WordPress […]
Thanks for the presentation. As a long-time developer, it gave just enough to dip my toes in the water, but not so much detail to start causing Zzzzzz. 🙂 Good balance.
Your topic hooked me just enough to show up in the morning, and I was glad to stay through to the end. The plug-ins presentation was a great way to finish of an awesome WordCamp.
Thanks James; I appreciate the kind words.
[…] for the event. Joseph Scott and the crew in Utah did a great job and I think we learned a lot by attending. We’re going to stick with a lot of the things that worked in Utah, and also make a couple of […]
Great video presentation and nice speach, Alex. As I’m just learning WordPress, i found the video very usefull.
Btw, is your Carrington theme free to use?
Cheers,
Fish.