I just returned from the 2nd WordCamp Switzerland in Zürich with many interesting talks about everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you and me. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. Tomorrow there will be a contributors day, which I will also curiously attend.
Here are some notes of the talks I attended.
OOP in WordPress Themes
Tom Forrer and Michael Sebel from Blogwerk were speaking about OOP (object oriented programming) in WordPress Themes. On Github you can download, clone or fork their example theme bundle . It looks much cleaner than the default WordPress themes, because in the theme root there’s only style.css, index.php and functions.php to load the stack:
- resources: fonts, images, language files, scripts, styles
- src: Namespaced business logic
- views: HTML/PHP template files
Their slides are available on Github, too.
Lessons learned publishing a digital WordPress magazine
Another interesting talk was given by Pascal Birchler, the founder of WordPress Magazin and creator of the Periodic Table of WordPress plugins which showcases the 108 most popular WordPress plugins, ranked by the number of downloads.
Pascal described various stages he went through with his magazine. WordPress Magazine 2.0 which used the Pugpig platform to create customized content apps had 3 published issues with around 10’000 app downloads. Here are his lessons learned:
- Don’t talk about it – do it!
- Make a name for yourself
- Continuity is key
- Be one step ahead
- Listen to your audience
His final conclusion was: Fail. Learn. Repeat.
Caching Small Big Things
Andrey Savchenko’s talk about caching with the WordPress Transients API caught me by surprise, because I had never before heard a single word about it.
Andrey describes himself on Twitter as inconveniently Ukrainian, cynical, sleepy and much into computers. He’s a moderator at WordPress StackExchange and is blogging at Rarst.net. The beautiful and well prepared slides of his talk have been created with the Shower Presentation Engine.
Andrey is not a fan off regular full page caching.
And we cannot deliver best possible performance on simple caching models. «Just using» full page cache almost always guarantees some users get screwed by very slow expired cache hits.
In my experience it nearly guarantees multiple issues with implementation and stability over time. Let’s look around what else is also there.
By the way, that’s how cache is pronounced correctly: ˈkæʃ or kash
It has nothing to to with a cage, although if you struggle with configuring a cache correctly it can feel like a cage.
This was my first WordCamp, but definitely not my last. I will be going to 3 more community events in May, so if you want to read more updates on Magento and WordPress related stuff, subscribe to the Openstream newsletter or the RSS feed.
You also might want to have a look at the beautiful pictures of the event taken by Claudio Schwarz or check out our Facebook or Google+ page where I uploaded some of my iPhone and Lumix shots.
If you want to read more about WordCamp Switzerland, here are some other blog posts:
- Free Reading – WordPress User Experience by Marianne Jehle
- WordCamp Switzerland 2014: Gelungenes Treffen der WordPress-Community by blogWERK
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