WordCamp Ventura County 2014

This is a true story of a group of websites picked to be in an analysis who stop being polite and start getting real about their performance metrics. Watch as the sites stop lying about how “fast” they are and start baring their true abilities. As we follow these brave websites, we will start to learn about the true nature of web performance and stop caring about the little things that don’t matter.

Guided by analysis of these websites’ performance data, we will discuss the most common WordPress performance problems; the problems that we, the WordPress community, seem to be ignoring and need to start caring about. We will explore optimizations that you can address immediately, ponder improvements to WordPress core, and discuss the messages we need to spread to the wider community. It’s time to start focusing on real problems, rather than occupying ourselves with irrelevant micro-optimizations.

It’s really easy for JavaScript files in a theme or plugin to quickly become a big, hairy mess. So let’s take a look at how to structure JavaScript code in a way that makes it easier to read and understand, easier to maintain, and prevents pollution of the global namespace. We’ll cover modular JavaScript structure and writing plugins.

Build tools have come a long way in a short time, most notably with Grunt. Well, Grunt has a younger, fresher, cousin known as Gulp! We’ll be using Gulpjs to examine and demonstrate some of the key tasks you can run to actually speed up your theme development like a verifiable boss! Jaquio from Ninja Gaiden would eat his heart out!

One of the most exciting changes coming in WordPress is the addition of a JSON REST API. Rachel Baker will be presenting on WP-API, the current plugin-based version of the JSON REST API. Through the use of the plugin, developers and users can begin using the API today with backwards compatibility assured in the future.  This talk will introduce the JSON REST API, demonstrate how to interact with it, and showcase some of the ways the JSON REST API is already being used.

We’ll talk about some convenient choices browsers, PHP, and WordPress make that make writing secure code harder, and what we as developers can do to make our lives easier.  Hint: it’s not writing “better” code.

An overview of the WordPress universe that everyone from the new user, budding contributor, to the conspiracy theorist will love! I’ll walk through the connections of the movers and shakers in the WordPress Community—including Core, News, and Services, in a fun, yet accurate way—and help attendees learn about both how the WordPress project functions and what up-and-comers they should be paying attention to.

You wrote the most awesome plugin in the entire universe and you want to share it with the world. So why did those mean plugin reviewers turf it? The ten most common reasons may surprise you, and they’re not ALL because you had an error in your code. The little pitfalls can be easily avoided, and get your code out there to the universe, one download at a time.