WordCamp New York City 2009

Jim Doran

I wish I was jQuery. Then, all the designers would love me.

See, jQuery makes using JavaScript so easy that it feels like cheating. My presentation practically wrote itself (Code is Poetry, after all).

WordPress and jQuery have a lot in common – both have large communities of smart people extending, sharing and developing ideas around these tools. WordPress is flexible and allows people to publish their words, photos, ideas and magic without getting in the way of that process. jQuery makes it a snap for developers AND designers to enhance a Web site/user experience in a standards complaint way. JavaScript has become invaluable in a world where IE6 is still a reality.

Over the years, I’ve tinkered with Prototype, script.aculo.us, Moo, Dojo and Spry. The documentation can be obtuse at times – which sucks when you are in a hurry to solve a problem.

And then I met jQuery – within 5 minutes, I was able to get it working. My students are able to get something working within about 15 minutes – imagine all we’ll get done during my 30 minute talk! It’ll go something like this:

• A look at the current state of jQuery
• A look at DOM manipulation and some popular aspects of jQuery
• An overview of some handy plugins, including browser fixes, gallery tools, AJAX/JSON, etc.
• Adding jQuery to WordPress themes

I am beside myself with excitement for WordCamp NYC09! Feel free to say “hi” before then – @jimdoran on Twitter.