When it comes to WordPress the community is vast. From designers who focus and have a heart for theme design, business owners that need security and peace of mind, general enthusiasts that love to blog and share their knowledge, to the developers who are looking to create the optimal workflow or some new innovative plugin.
WordCamp Toronto 2017 was an excellent weekend full of great information and conversation. Here are just a few topics which were covered. A full list can be found at 2017.toronto.wordcamp.org as well as video presentations at wordpress.tv.
Drew Wilde from Blue Host provided great insight on why optimisation and experimentation through A/B testing is important touching on topics such as agile management, best practices and ideas for experimentation, and testing tools.
Paul Bearne spoke about Meta Boxes, their importance and the different options available for those who may just be starting out to the guru developers. The list included ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), MetaBox.io, CMB2, and Field Manager.
We had the pleasure of learning the importance of WordPress, UX Design, and You from Jem Rosario. Providing a list of important steps when it comes to being a successful UX designer:
- Strategy
- Scope
- Structure
- Skeleton
- Surface
We can all agree when it comes to designing and developing a good website “It’s The Little Things That Make A Difference”. Michelle Ames made sure to give us a thorough run down regarding standard practices for a modern website and we loved every minute.
Rodrigo Donini a WordPress developer and programming enthusiast all the way from Brazil shared his tips for shielding your WordPress site. Information from proper configuration to proper development WordPress security is good practice for anyone using the platform.
There were also some great presentations on new and innovative solutions when developing WordPress sites. Matt Graham provided the idea of using MVC (model view controller) for plugin and theme development. Avoiding the use of HTML in the Controller and Models while limiting the use of PHP in views. Very forward thinking.
We work with high traffic client sites on a daily basis and completely understand how important WordPress optimisation is. Ian Forrest dove deep into why performance matters and we couldn’t agree more. Tips like updating to PHP, caching, and performance monitoring are just a few mentioned and we highly suggest doing.
With JS frameworks like Vue, React, and Angular at our fingers the options for front end development keep growing. Ben Moore gave us a little taste of how using WordPress, JavaScript, and the Rest API can open our world to Headless and “Brainless” WP.
Alan Lock is passionate about containers, specifically Docker and how it can be used for local development and staging deployment. He spoke about WordPress and Containers and how simple it is to start working locally.
Trew Knowledge is proud to be a sponsor of such a passionate community of WordPress enthusiasts. Thank you to all of the organisers, speakers, and volunteers who took time out of their lives and putting together such an awesome event.
