WordPress

I’m attending WordCamp Seattle 2013 today.

Who is in attendance?

• Designers
• Developers
• Users
• Bloggers
• dads, moms, babies
• … all kinds of folks

Why do people attend?

I’m attending in order to learn, to interact with the WordPress community, and to see how much WordCamp Seattle has grown since I organized the first two of them in 2009 and 2011.

Whose talks did I go to?
Scott Berkun’s talk “Write or Die”.

• Words are the central purpose of WordPress. Writing is the point.
• Not all traffic is equal – most traffic is drive-by trash
• “There is a big gap between work that is popular and work that is good.”
• “If you can’t figure out how to write as often as you want, stop trying.”
• There’s no pressure for the first post on a new blog. Nobody will read it anyway.
• Good books about writing: “Writers at Work“
• When writing a post, consider: “What is my angle? What is my promise?”
• “You only write as well as what you read.”
• “The first draft of anything is shit” – Hemmingway
• Recommendation: The Best American Essays of the Century
• “How to write 1000 words“
• “When I am stuck, now I am ready to be a writer. I have to start thinking. I have to be a writer now.”

mor10@ – Why WordPress?

• Over the past 10 years the web has evolved into a place to exchange ideas
• “WordPress is a gateway drug” for web development and design

Eric Mann – Automated WordPress Development
Summary: follow best practices for CSS and JS development. Separation of concerns. Use meaningful names. Concatenate and minify.

Don’t use too many files. (See Souders roundup on parallel connections which has much more detailed and accurate information than the presentation.)

Use GruntJS to make your CSS and JS build process less painful.

grunt-wp-plugin – generate WordPress plugin files
grunt-wp-theme – generate WordPress theme files