At WordUp Minneapolis 2014 I gave a talk on using WordPress for project management.
In this session I talked about building a simple project management app with WordPress using the P2 theme and a handful of plugins. With this app you can create to do lists, check off those tasks, and mark posts as unresolved or resolved.
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.
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.
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.
I have been using WordPress for about six years. Different themes, plugins, and code editors have come and gone through this huge learning process as I have developed hundreds of websites, but the one constant for me has been the Firefox add-on Firebug.
It’s the only tool that I have stuck with throughout those years because I have been able to learn so much with Firebug and build projects so much faster by using it.
If you have never used a web inspector like Firebug before, what it does is allow you to bridge the gap between the source code and the rendered out page in your browser. You can look at each bit of code interactively and see how it fits into the page, adjusting the code in the inspector and seeing the updates live in your browser.