Building Better Widgets

At WordCamp Milwaukee 2014 I gave a talk on Building Better Widgets.

In this session I talked about how to design interesting and useful WordPress widgets. I covered designing for a wide range of widgets, exploring different widget designs, planning responsive widgets that scale well, thinking about animated and interactive widgets, and upgrading your widgets with plugins.

Building Your First Widget

I spoke today at WordCamp Chicago, talking about building widgets. In my session we learned how to build your first WordPress widget and went step-by-step through the best practices for building a simple widget. We discussed when a widget should be built into a theme or plugin, and when a widget should be its own plugin. You can check out the slides if you’d like to.

Speaking at WordCamp Minneapolis 2014

I’ve been so busy lately with client projects, helping organize WordCamp Minneapolis, and getting settled into my new office, that I almost forgot to write about it on my own blog!

WordCamp Minneapolis 2014 is this weekend, April 26-27th, and I’ll be speaking on Saturday. My talk is called Don’t let your site jump the shark, it’s in the design track and I’ll be talking about using animation on websites successfully.

The schedule is full of awesome talks, this is going to be the best WordCamp Minneapolis yet, so if you haven’t already, you should get a ticket!

WordCamp Milwaukee session slides and links

Here is some info to go with my WordCamp Milwaukee talk on Theme Choices, When To Have A Baby.

In this presentation I talked about developing with different types of themes including parent themes, child themes, theme frameworks, and starter themes. Some of the specific themes I talked about were TwentyEleven, Thematic, Hybrid, Genesis, and Underscores.

I also talked about splitting up design and functionality, and when to use a functionality plugin. View the presentation slides to learn more.