WordCamp New York City 2009

Scott Kingsley Clark

WordPress is an amazing platform, and it’s used to power millions of blogs and sites. As it becomes used in more complex ways though, it can be difficult to manage the multitude of types of content required for your site, project, or application. In just under 30 minutes, I will perform a song I wrote about using WordPress as a CMS to power your site, I will show real world examples of complex content types in action, give a run through of the backend management of Pods, as well as show features from the Pods UI plugin I’ve developed to make it all even easier.

What’s Pods got to do with your content though? Need some more information about Pods and how to use it? Freshen up over at the Pods website. Warning: Pods is still primarily best utilized by developers and I recommend you put your developer hat on! Don’t worry, I won’t be able to completely lose you in my 30 minute presentation!

I’m really looking forward to speaking about the subject of Pods, and how it can completely transform the way you develop complex sites with WordPress.

BUT WAIT! Don’t let the 30 minute presentation slot fool you, I’ll be hanging around – Tweet me or e-mail me to have a one-on-one walkthrough or ask your questions! In addition to this, I will also be hosting an unConference Session on Pods and will Tweet / Post the room and time on my site on Saturday!

You can always feel free contact me via Twitter @scottkclark or on my website.

Jeremy Clarke

Hey WordCampers, hope you’re having fun gearing up for what will undoubtedly be a pretty insane Saturday of website goodness. I’ll be doing two separate talks in the ‘advanced dev’ track so I’ll post both descriptions below. Remember they are not at the same time, you can come to one but not the other if you want.

Code Faster and Smarter PHP with IDEs and Other Free Tools

This talk is aimed at people who are already writing PHP to some degree for their WordPress work. If you’re just writing HTML and CSS an IDE might be the right tool for you, but most of its features won’t apply. If on the other hand you are doing any of the following, and haven’t tried (or haven’t REALLY tried) an IDE you are missing out on industry-standard awesomeness:

• Writing PHP functions
• Creating PHP objects
• Using the WordPress API seriously, reading the source to see how things work.
• Creating custom plugins/complex themes
• Getting frustrated with how dumb most tools are compared to smart tools you use for other things like word processing or spreadsheets.

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.

The switch to using Netbeans 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.

Tuning WordPress and the LAMP for Speed and Stability

Upgrading your hosting plan, your server hardware or your sysadmin budget are all acceptable ways of improving the stability and performance of your site, but with a little effort there is a lot you can do to squeeze more performance out of your existing setup without paying more.

This talk is targeted at site administrators who have control of their LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP) server or are planning on upgrading to dedicated hosting soon but don’t really understand what they can do to make it go faster.

We’ll cover Apache and MySQL tuning and how to make sure your server isn’t misconfigured, a common problem with expensive repercussions:

• What are the components of a LAMP stack
• Tools for investigating server performance problems
• Editing Apache/MySQL config files
• Common Apache/MySQL config settings that need tuning
• Brief overview of front-end/WordPress-level caching that will save your life.

Thanks for reading guys, hope to see you there, I know I won’t even be able to see all the talks I’m excited about.

Allan Cole

We’ve got about 11 days till WordCamp does NYC and I couldn’t be more excited! This will be my first time attending a WordCamp and it looks like tons of fun. It’ll also be my first time speaking publicly since college (YIKES) so I’m a little nervous as well but I’m sure I’ll enjoy myself regardless.

I’ll be speaking about Child Themes, which I’ve been using to develop both WordPress themes and full-blown websites for various clients and organizations. I first discovered child themes while following Ian at ThemeShaper.com and I’ve never looked back. As a mostly front-end and interaction designer, Child Themes really allow me to speed up my development time and make future-proof theme edits which are essential to any development strategy. My session will mainly cover three subjects: (1) What is a Child Theme?; (2) How to build a Child Theme; and (3) WordPress Theme Frameworks. If you are a front-end developer, a web designer, or a beginning theme developer who’s a bit more focused on design and user experience and not so interested in memorizing WordPress template tags and PHP, then you should definitely check out this session. If you do plan on attending, please download and install my Child Theme Boumatic, which I will be referring to throughout the session.

About 9-10 months ago I decided to develop almost exclusively using Child Themes. It makes development so much easier and cleaner. Hopefully, sometime in the near future Child Themes will become a part of the WP repository.

If you have any questions for me, just leave a comment.

Best,
Allan