WordCamp New York City 2009

These teams will be on stage at Mason Hall today to get their entries judged:

Themes
1. A fork of the Thematic Framework (by Ian Stewart) and an original child theme.
– Daisy Olsen http://wpmama.com/ (Metro NYC)
– Ron Rennick http://ronandandrea.com/ (New Brunswick, Canada)

2. Italic Smile. This theme helps travelers or photographers easily create a site to share their journey.
http://italicsmile.com (with theme test data)
– Jake Snyder http://labs.jcow.com/ (NYC Resident)
– Tim Bowen http://CreativeSlice.com/ (Tucson, AZ)

Plugins
1. WP Manage Plugins. An easy way to give you more control over the plugins section of WordPress.
http://webdevstudios.com/support/wordpress-plugins/wp-manage-plugins/
– Matt Martz: http://sivel.net (Baltimore, MD)
– Brad Williams: http://webdevstudios.com (Metro NYC)
– Brian Messenlehner: http://webdevstudios.com (Metro NYC)
– Scott Basgaard: http://webdevstudios.com (Metro NYC)

2. Badge Grab. This plugin is designed to make it easier for bloggers to offer image link code that other bloggers and websites can place on their own sites to link back.
http://wpmama.com/downloads/BadgeGrab.zip
– Daisy Olsen: http://wpmama.com (Metro NYC)
– Lisa Boyd: http://www.lisaboyd.com/ (North Carolina)

3. We’ve created a plugin that attempts to spur conversations. This plugin allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post.
http://www.think-press.com/downloads/conversation-starter.zip
– Brandon Dove: http://www.think-press.com/ (Tustin, CA)
– Jeffrey Zinn: http://www.think-press.com/ (Huntington Beach, CA)
– Andrew Christian: http://www.pharmcountry.net/ (NYC, NY)
– John Hawkins: http://www.johnhawkinsunrated.com/ (Las Vegas, NV)

Finalists, be at Mason Hall (17 Lexington Ave, at E 23rd St) stage at 12:45.

Daisy Olsen

It’s a fact that without a theme your WordPress powered site would be reduced to an administration panel and a database.  Sure, you you could access the WordPress admin panel, install plugins, write posts, add links to the blogroll, etc. But with no theme there is nothing for potential visitors to see.  Unlike plugins, which are entirely optional, every single WordPress site regardless of size needs a theme. Whether you stick to the default theme or hire a WordPress theme superstar to create an original design, as far as visitors are concerned your theme is the single most important part of your site.

What does this mean for you, as the owner of a WordPress powered website?  It means that care should be taken when selecting, creating, or contracting for your theme. Because the need for a theme is universal the world of WordPress themes is prone to bad stuff sneaking in.

As I prepared for my sessions, one focusing on choosing themes and the other on creating themes, I went looking for examples of things to look for and also things to avoid when selecting a theme. From my perspective theme creators can be grouped into three basic, and clearly over simplified, camps:

The Good Theme Creator:

• Releases themes under a GPL compatible license
• Keeps themes updated to incorporate new and improved features of the WordPress API
• Supports the users of the theme they created

The Bad Theme Creator:

• Places restrictions on the way that the theme can be modified, used and/or distributed
• Does not keep the theme updated as new and improved features are added to the WordPress API
• Does not offer to support the users that rely on the theme that they created

The Evil Theme Creator:

• Places encrypted code in the theme, often in the footer area of the site to display “Sponsored” links
• Places functions that alter you sites content without your permission.
• Redistributes the work of others without improving upon the original*

So how do you find the good and avoid the Bad and Evil in WordPress themes?  I recommend attending the various theme related sessions scheduled throughout WordCamp!

*NOTE: This is a highly subjective point which could be argued at great length.  This author strongly believes in keeping the Spirit of the GPL license beyond the letter of the GPL license.

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.

John Bintz

After hundreds, if not thousands, of times when my code has failed for any number of reasons, the first question that now comes out of my mouth before I sit down and craft a new block of code is:

Can I Prove That This Works?

If a user comes to me and says, “Your code is failing!” how can I prove that no, it’s not the code I wrote, it’s how it interacts with this other part, or that it’s user error, or that it’s some other reason? How can I quickly find the place to look for problems by ruling out chunks of code that I know are working? How do I know that, when I get something working, it will stay working?

When we all started programming, we proved that our code worked by writing the output to a console, to a browser, to some location where we had to visually verify that our inputs produced sane outputs. While this technique certainly does work, it doesn’t scale well at all. How do you prove that the core of your four thousand line plugin stays working, month after month, after you add new features, fix bugs, and re-factor code?

Lucky for us, we have the tools nowadays to be able to prove that our code does just what we intended it to do. WordPress is built upon PHP, and in PHP, we have multiple testing frameworks to choose from. These frameworks bring to us the ability to perform automated tests on our code, making sure it doesn’t break after we add new things, allowing us to re-factor safely, and letting us say, “The problem’s not here, because the tests just passed.”

The trick is that, like any other habit, the idea of writing tests takes time to really sink in. When you start, you’ll find that, to make your code testable, you’ll have to completely rethink your approach to programming. You’ll become acutely aware of the problems of global variables. You’ll have to learn to write smaller functions and methods that do one — and only one — thing, since anything more becomes too hard to test. You’ll have to learn when a thing is a unit, a discrete component that does one thing, and when a thing becomes an integration, where you string a bunch of units together to make your code masterpiece work.

My session, Yes, Your Code Will Change, will walk you through what it’s like to unit test code that’s destined to be run on WordPress. It’s an introduction to the ideas of unit & regression testing, why these types of test are beneficial to you, and what it’s like to go through a simple testing situation by showing how you can use PHPUnit and MockPress to prove that your code works, even when — especially when — it has to change. If you write anything even remotely complex for WordPress, this is the session for you. Hope to see you there!

We’re shocked. Really, we thought people would be crawling out of the woodwork to have Matt Mullenweg, Mark Jaquith and Brian Gardner review their plugin and theme submissions. We thought people would be trying really hard to be in the top three to get a chance to present their work onstage in front of the entire WordCamp NYC audience. And we really thought people would enter b/c the winners will be announced on the WordPress.org development blog, which gets millions of views.

But there was only 1 theme submission and a couple of plugins. Come on, where’s your competitive spirit?

In the interest of making the theme/plugin judging portion of the Sunday program more interesting, we’re extending the deadline for submissions to November 11. You have three more days to finish a theme or plugin per the contest rules.

Have the mad coding skills, but no ideas? Fine, here are a few ideas you are free to borrow:
Theme Ideas

• Travelogue theme. Use custom fields for things like where you stayed, who you met, where you ate, photo galleries, etc.
• Resume theme. Create a nice resume theme that fits an overview on one page and links to different templates for personal profile, educational experience, specific job descriptions, portfolio.
• BuddyPress theme for a regular membership-based group site. Make it look like a regular web site, not like a social network, while still making it clear that the members of the group can use use these features to communicate with each other. Examples: a church site with blogs for various interest groups, a company employee site, an alumni network, a neighborhood site, a babysitting club.
• Videoblog theme. Display one video per day with author intro post and video transcript, with separate directory section to browse all videos by date, title, tag, category, etc.
• Gallery theme. Work some magic for displaying groups of photos or images.

Plugin Ideas

• Update the QuickPress module on dashboard to be configurable so user can choose which elements to include (title, post, tag, category, media files, sticky post status, etc.)
• Change the way the results are displayed when searching for plugins from the admin, so that the name of the plugin does not link to an external site, but instead brings in the information about that plugin from the repo.
• Create a customizable twitter widget that can display @name and #topic updates mingled in one thread.
• Anything you can think of around comments, stats, etc.

Okay, so, creative juices flowing? If we don’t get at least 3 eligible entries for themes and 3 for plugins, we’ll pick the top 2 themes and top 2 plugins for judging instead.

Get cracking, only 3 days left to enter!

Noel Jackson

Want to build a theme that acts more like a web application? Need to analyze image width, height, and color? On Saturday, I’ll be talking about advanced theme building techniques. Using the popular P2 and the about-to-be-released Duotone as case studies, I’ll take you through the code and explain how these ideas flourished into something tangible. Your mind will be flooded with talk of ajax, filters, actions, and color analysis. It’s going to be a blast!

However, if you’re one that just wants to get that content published, you’ll be pleased to know that I’m also going to have a separate session in the Blogger track about blogging with media. Images, video, sound – I’m going to cover it all. We’ll browse through my favorite media-centric themes, plugins, and you’ll get a quick tour of Duotone. By the end you’ll know all their is about getting that rich media onto your site.

This is going to be an amazing WordCamp. It will be a pleasure to meet all of you and share a little bit of my world with you.