Notes from WordCamp Victoria 2013

Just a couple of days ago, I took part in the annual Victoria WordCamp, a day for WordPressers. I had the fortune to be invited to guest-blog at WP Daily; this led to me writing three posts:

I was a little light on details previously. While I was live-blogging I was rapidly switching back and forth between WordPress for blogging and MarkPad for taking notes. Here, I’m sharing the notes I took, and some additional links to presentation materials.

Plugin Development 101

Joey Kudish

Vancouverite, works for Automattic

Plugins add functionality to WordPress, beyond core functionality. Code can be in theme, but functionality-related should be a standalone plugin.

Use hooks to add functionality. Look at WP Codex, Debug Bar + Debug Bar Action Hooks plugin, or search core.

Make use of built-in APIs
Follow WP coding standards
Namespace classes and functions
Add hooks
Documentation
Security
- Distrust users
- Sanitize input, escape output
- Use nonces to validate actions

Distribution primarily through WP plugin repository. Must follow WP guidelines.

Further reading

Websites
Books
- Professional WordPress Plugin Development
- WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook

Keynote

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

web history
advent of WordPress, blogging
- huge increase in user-generated content
- ~2003

Expert Panel

Morten Rand-Hendriksen
Joey Kudish
Ben Lobaugh
Grant Landram

Various questions about design and development. Not all about WordPress per se.

Ben recorded some notes and relevant links from the discussion.

Site Navigation in Responsive Design

Adam McFadyen

Large navigation not suitable to mobile views
Navigation needs to be responsive too
WP admin -> Appearance -> Menus (needs to be enabled for the theme)
Theme Locations – areas defined in the theme template to hold a menu
- register_nav_menus()
- e.g.
  - primary menu
  - footer menu
  - mobile menu
Create a custom menu, then assign it to a location
In a template file, display the menu assigned to a location
- wp_nav_menu()

Concept has been implemented at e.g.:

Points out:

jQuery Masonry – counterpart of floats in CSS; arranges blocks vertically, then horizontally
enquire.js – lightweight JavaScript for matching media queries

Code samples on http://dabzo.com/web-development/responsive-web-design-wordpress-menus/; also covers menus for membership sites, where different menus are shown based on member status

10+1 Essential Plugins for WordPress

John Overall

AntiSpamBee – more effective than Akismet
Count per Day – local stats
DB Cache Reloaded Fix – reduces number of queries by caching
- biggest overhead for WP is number of PHP-MySQL interactions
- DBCRF has low overhead, and speeds up site
Faster Image Insert – simplifies adding images to content
Google Analyticator – easily adds Analytics code to site, adds summary widget to dashboard
Gravity Forms – simplifies creating forms with actions – spendy but worthwhile
iRobots.txt SEO – easily create/update robots.txt file
SEO Smart Links – helps with internal links for SEO
Wordfence Security – monitors the site for issues, updates, changed files
- Emails notices
WordPress File Monitor Plus – monitors all files for change
- Can be configured to check and report with chosen frequency
WordPress SEO (by Yoast) – control SEO on site, such as descriptions, keywords, sitemaps – very customizable, globally or by post
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin – point out posts related to current one for visitor to browse

Important point: it’s not the number of plugins that matters. One hundred plugins could be active, and site would be fine. But some plugins may step on each other – quality counts!

Use WordPress to Build a Membership Website

Rayhan Abdulmughnee

WordPress can be extended w/ free plugins to create a membership site. Can create membership levels, free and premium, and integrate PayPal for payments.

s2Member
- flexible – very configurable
- powerful
- well supported
- free and O/S, paid option available
- can impose post-level restriction to member levels
- integrates w/ WP’s user system