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Category: Development
A New Plugin Boilerplate for a New Era
WordPress is planning to raise its minimum PHP version requirement and if all goes according to plan, we will have a required minimum of PHP 7+ for December 2019.
Few plugin developers currently know how to make the best use of the language features that PHP 7.2+ provides. That’s why I worked on a new plugin boilerplate that provides you with a robust, strictly typed OOP framework and incorporates a lot of applied best practices.
In this session I will introduce this new boilerplate and go into the details of how this will improve your plugin code and reduce its maintenance cost in the long run.
WordPress or Laravel – Why Not Both?
In this session, I will introduce using WordPress as a backend application through a combination of using the WP REST API and a shared database with a Laravel application as a use case. I will explain how developers can harness the advantages of using a modern PHP framework based on MVC principles, coupled with the ‘wp-admin’ interface and database structure of the WordPress CMS for a more rapid and satisfying development experience.
With use cases from a real example of a recent project to illustrate the focus of my talk, I will explain these concepts which settled a debate in my development team between using a CMS or framework for a specific project by combining the best of both worlds in a way that worked best for the project and the development team’s methodology. I will show through my real-world example, how the WP REST API was so important to the evolution of WordPress into more than just a CMS and how it makes the use of WordPress as a headless CMS so advantageous.
WordPress is a rapidly evolving CMS to the point where it is no longer simply a CMS but has serious potential uses as an application framework, data source and/or headless CMS for a PHP or JavaScript framework for increased performance and yet unrealised potential uses. Laravel is just one framework that PHP can be used with and in this talk I will give a brief introduction to the concepts of Laravel being used with WordPress in building complex web applications to show that there is no need to firmly choose between the two and that the strong advantages of both options can be fully realised in our development projects no matter the purpose.
Introduction to Web Components
If you have worked with JavaScript over the years, chances are high you have used some kind of component system before to define how a larger piece of content renders in HTML and how it can be interacted with.
Popular frameworks such as React and Vue both rely on such concepts. Unfortunately frameworks have typically invented their own mechanisms for that purpose, which work in different ways.
Web Components is a set of features that introduces similar mechanisms natively to the browser. Having a standardised layer for these so-called leaf components can aid interoperability between different paradigms significantly – imagine a future where you can just reuse a leaf component you wrote for a simple native JavaScript application in a React application, or vice-versa.
In this session we will learn how the different features that Web Components encompass work. We will also dive into how they can be used by example, taking a look under the hood of the AMP framework which relies on them and diving into their usage within Gutenberg.
Syndicating Content with WordPress
Have you ever had a situation where you needed the same content on multiple websites, with just one place to edit it? Maybe in a network of WordPress sites?
In this talk I will outline how we built a content syndication system for a network of WordPress sites, meaning that content required on all sites could be edited once and deployed out to one or all of the thousands of sites in the network.
I will talk about the technologies we used to accomplish the task, the development challenges that were involved and how we overcame them.
These systems are great for businesses which have lots of divisions, regions or franchises which need the same default content on each site.