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Mixed relationship taxonomy queries in WordPress

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Earlier this year we launched a membership component for my very first project with 10up: LearningWorks for Kids. LearningWorks’s content focuses on making the most of digital content to support learning, academics, and development of critical thinking skills. Memberships come with support for multiple private child users, each of whom has a profile that includes their age, thinking skills, academic skills, and special learning needs. Each member can also indicate which digital platforms and devices are available to their child users.

The central benefit of membership, beyond access to exclusive content, is the personalized recommendations across four different content types for each child user. These recommendations take into account the child’s age and available platforms, as well as a combination of skills and needs as indicated in their profile. These are related by five custom taxonomies – platforms, age, thinking skills, academic skills, and special needs. In this instance, we need to get content matching this set of criteria: age AND one of the platforms AND one of thinking skills OR academic skills OR special needs. This is a mixed relationship taxonomy query, and I’ll show you how we pulled it off.

LearningsWorks recommendations

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Catch 10uppers at WordSesh 2 starting tonight

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In just a few short hours, three of my favorite 10uppers (myself included) will be participating in the second annual WordSesh — it’s 1 full day of live WordPress presentations from all over the world streamed live to your screen.

At 6:00 UTC, our founder, Jake Goldman, is joining prolific free-agent designer James Dalman; together they’ll be presenting “Don’t be the Unicorn” – a talk about finding your specialization within web and WordPress, and effectively collaborating with different specialists!

At 17:00 UTC, one of our always charming and extremely talented senior engineers, Eric Mann, will flex some JS muscle and help pump you up in his session aptly titled: Rock-solid JavaScript and AJAX. Having recently spoke at jQuery Russia about the HTML5 web worker API and Monkeys, this is a session you will not want to miss.

And me? At 11:00 UTC, I’ll be doing round 2 of last year’s fireside chat, where I’ll naturally be talking about BuddyPress, bbPress, 10up, and hopefully taking questions from a lively international audience (since it will be about 5am here in the U.S.). I don’t have unicorns or monkeys, but maybe Paul the Dog will make a special appearance.

This year’s lineup of speakers is practically an all-star cast of WordPress contributors. If you can’t make our sessions, try to tune in at least for a bit. It starts Saturday, December 7, 2013, at UTC 00:00, and hopefully we’ll see you (or you’ll see us) there!

Helen Hou-Sandí

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I’ll be presenting a flash talk entitled “Redefining Traditional Media Workflows in WordPress” tonight at the December Big Media WordPress Meetup in NYC. The topic is “big media editorial experiences”, and I’ll be joined by professionals from the Washington Post, WordPress.com VIP, and Parade. I’ll offer a quick look inside the editorial experience we built for Global News, serving over 1,000 contributors across 11 localized editions, along with the centralized web-to-print content management workflow we built for Variety. If you’re working in media and New York City, be sure to swing by.

Upping our commitment to the WordPress community

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Here at 10up, we strongly believe that a vibrant and active WordPress community is crucial to our success and longevity. After all, our business is built on the confidence that our favorite piece of free open source software serves as a great publishing platform. As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to expand our commitment to creating amazing publishing experiences for our clients and partners to the WordPress open source project itself.

At WordCamp Philly 2011, Jake and I finally met in person for the first time. Over dinner, we talked about our shared values in the community and the conversation led to an intriguing proposition: time each week to spend contributing to WordPress – a donation to the community by way of hours and effort. It began with 5 hours a week, and as 10up grew, it increased to become 8, then 15, then 20 hours each week. Today, I am really excited to announce that I am officially endorsed to work full-time on WordPress core as a guest committer and leader in the community.

I am officially endorsed to work full-time on WordPress core as a guest committer and leader in the community.

In practice, I have chosen to continue being active on some client projects. We are especially valuable in contributing back to the community in the areas we handle deeply in our work for clients and partners, and I feel that the best way for me to do that is to remain grounded in the world of implementation and especially custom administrative interfaces. I also regard our team as incomparable (for which we’re always hiring) and would hate to miss the opportunity to work with and learn from such an incredible group.

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WordCamps and 10up everywhere: Orlando, Denver, and Edmonton

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This coming weekend I’ll be traveling to sunny Orlando, Florida to speak at WordCamp Orlando, along with my friend and coworker, Carl Danley. Meanwhile, Grant Landram and Luke Woodward will be speaking at WordCamp Denver, led by our own Drew Jaynes, while Vasken Hauri speaks at WordCamp Edmonton.

WordCamp Orlando Denver Edmonton

Carl and I will be giving back to back talks on Saturday morning in Orlando, so make sure to wake up early and get the best seats. I’ll be opining on the joys of interactive debugging, which should be a core part of a developer’s tool set. If your go-to debugging tool starts with var and ends with dump(), this talk is for you! Senior Engineer Carl Danley will be covering sensible approaches to JavaScript. In his own words: “More often than not, as WordPress developers, we focus on PHP and often overlook the important aspects of JavaScript. In this presentation, I’ll reveal a series of steps that will help you rock your next JavaScript application by taking it the next level.” On Sunday, Carl and I will help lead the Contributor session along with Mark Jaquith, Andrew Nacin and Pippin Williamson – sure to be a good time!

WordCamp Orlando is also sponsored by seoslides, a WordPress presentation creation and sharing solution built and partly owned by 10up.

Westward in Denver, local Web Engineer Drew Jaynes is leading WordCamp Denver, where he’ll also lead a session on WordPress contribution. Senior Strategist Grant Landram is dropping in to take part in a panel exploring the importance of user experience. Senior Strategic Engineer Luke Woodward continues the quest to kill classic MAMP / WAMP developer environments in favor of the popular Varying Vagrants project seeded by 10up.

Finally, up north in Edmonton, our Vice President of Strategic Engineering, Vasken Hauri, will cover both theory and practical tools for automating code scanning and maintaining code quality. As a former adjunct Computer Science professor, Vasken is no stranger to tackling complex subjects.

Helen Hou-Sandí

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This Saturday I’m hosting a WordPress core hack day here in Jersey City, right outside Manhattan. I’ll be joined by a handful of WordPress developers in the NYC metro area, including lead developers from some of the largest publications, as well as some East Coast 10uppers. Since this particular get-together will be at my home, it’s an intimate group, though I plan to facilitate future hack days at larger venues as we advance our mission to make WordPress a better publishing experience for all.

10up and jQuery go to Russia

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This has been a year of firsts, from first releases on 10up’s GitHub account to our first internal dev summit.  This year also saw 10up’s first appearance at jQuery Russia – coincidentally also the first jQuery conference in Russia!

A little over a week ago, I had the opportunity to visit Moscow for an incredible day of development talks at Digital October.  The conference was sponsored by ITmozg in Russia, and headlined by the president of the jQuery Foundation, Dave Methvin.

The snacks were as impressive as the talks!

The snacks were as impressive as the talks!

jQuery Russia covered topics from JavaScript performance to the use of $.Deferred.  I was able to present an overview of the HTML5 web worker API along with a live demonstration of the million monkey problem – implemented entirely in JavaScript.

jQuery Russia was an amazing experience for everyone involved, and it showed me just how well different parts of the international development community can work together.  I don’t speak Russian and presented my talk with the help of an interpreter.  Many of the attendees didn’t speak English, but were able to ask me questions about code after the talk and throughout the conference – again, with the aid of an interpreter.

All of the conference speakers were invited back to the main stage at the end of the day for an interactive Q&A session. Questions ranged from browser standards to what we’d like to see added to JavaScript to where we see jQuery in 5-10 years. The range of opinions was impressive, but the expertise that backed each was even more so.

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5 speakers, 1 organizer, and a Platinum Sponsorship: 10up loves WordCamp Boston

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WordCamp Boston 2013WordCamp Boston has a special place in team 10up’s heart, going all the way back to Boston’s first camp, which I helped organize in 2010, before there was a 10up. In 2011, not 6 months after founding 10up, we reached into our pocket to offer a Silver sponsorship, and I spoke about WordPress as a CMS. In 2012, we again extended a Silver sponsorship; I debuted a talk on Enterprise, and was joined by fellow 10up speakers Jess Jurick and Luke Gedeon (who runs the neighboring Providence WordCamp). Today, two 10uppers live in the Boston metro area: Senior Engineer Dave Ross, and Engineer Kelly Dwan, who also organizes the monthly meet up and helped organize this weekend’s event. Three of our senior staff – Jess Jurick, John Jacoby, and I – all lived within ~100 miles of Boston at some point since 10up’s inception.

So it goes without saying that, above and beyond Kelly’s co-organizing, we were going to make a meaningful contribution to WordCamp Boston 2013. With more resources in hand, we’ve provided a top-tier, Platinum Sponsorship; we’re sponsoring Saturday’s lunch! You’ll find 7 of us at the conference, 5 of us speaking:

You’ll find more 10uppers roaming the halls and manning the 10up table (did someone say free swag?): local Senior Engineer Dave Ross and prolific core contributor (find her face on your credits screen) Helen Hou-Sandi.

Check out my guest blog post on the WordCamp Boston website for more reminiscing about 10up and Boston connections, like our work for Boston Magazine. If you’ll be in town, find a 10upper, visit our table, be sure to see our talks, and enjoy lunch – it’s on us!

What happens when 10up is in Las Vegas…gets shared with the community!

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Nearly all thirty-nine 10uppers are descending on Las Vegas tomorrow, from as close as Los Angeles and as far as Germany, for our company Annual Meeting, running through Saturday morning. In addition to many first time face to face meetings, we’ll be reflecting on the last year, talking strategy for next year and beyond, relaxing around the sky-high pool, sharing contributions and best practices, and even venturing out on a city-wide scavenger hunt. Rumor has it there are even a few team building exercises, including a symbolic game of team bumper cars.

We’ll be taking photographs aplenty for a post-meeting round-up, as we did for our Developer Summit back in April. In the mean time, follow all the action via the team10up Twitter list, and if you want to be a part of future 10up meet ups, be in touch!

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Tomorrow, Saturday the 12th of October I will be speaking at WordCamp Louisville!

I will be giving a talk on WordPress and the Command Line, which I’ve polished and refined since WordCamp Birmingham back in August. If you’re just starting out building themes and want to learn how command line tools can help improve your process, my talk is for you!