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Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin

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Maintaining a Beautiful WordPress Admin UI SlideI taught a two-hour section of WP401 (Advanced WordPress Development) at WordCamp Phoenix’s classroom day this past Friday, speaking on the UI of the WordPress admin and giving some examples and best practices for integration of custom content types and post meta. At 10up, we strive to create seamless and usable interfaces for our clients, reducing the amount of training needed to get editors up and running and keeping the WordPress side of content management easy and enjoyable.

The slides, which are built on Google’s HTML5 Slides, can be found at http://slides.helenhousandi.com/wcphx2012.html. In it, you’ll find resources, examples, and best practice code examples.

Next Generation Web: What HTML5 and CSS3 Are All About

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Here are the slides from my talk at WordCamp Phoenix 2012. Presented in the “Think Tank” track, it explores some ideas and concepts that underlie change in web development medium, and introduces coding techniques for the last HTML5 / CSS3 capabilities. Here’s the description from the WordCamp schedule:

We’ve all probably heard of HTML5, CSS3, Responsive Design, and other “future of the web” buzzwords. Maybe you’ve even dabbled in HTML5 doctype declarations and “header” tags, or used CSS3 rounded corners or gradients. But most of us have only scratched the surface of these technologies, and for good reason – not everyone is using Chrome 16 or Firefox 9 yet, and even they haven’t settled on uniform implementations. We’ll look at how Responsive Design is already beginning to change the way we approach building sites for different screen sizes, and peak into potentially transformative HTML5 techniques that are only beginning to appear around the web.

 

What Would Core Do?

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WWCD? Or, What Would Core Do? Yesterday, at WordCamp Miami, I finally debuted a talk that I had been thinking about for some time. I see WWCD as the third and capstone talk in my “extending WordPress administration” series, and it’s my favorite of the set.

The series began in 2010 at Chicago with “Hijacking WordPress Admin” – one of the first talks to focus on hooks and techniques to generally tailor the administrative panel to individual clients. You can only fit so much into a talk, so rather than focus on good user interface, I focused on sometimes over the top examples to illustrate the idea that the admin panel is actually remarkably flexible. After a few repeats at different WordCamps, I used WordCamp Chicago 2011 to debut the second in the series: “Editing the Visual Editor.” This time, the focus was solely on methods to customize the visual editor and refine the writing experience – the place where publishers spend most of their time.

The capstone talk is the lightest on code (two quick slides at the end). Rather, it gets back to the philosophy of extending WordPress administration, and challenges plug-in and theme authors to “do better.” It’s a fun look at some terrible plug-in practices, with a serious underlying point: when you build on WordPress, do you think about how the core development team would approach the problem?

We’ll hopefully have the video from WordPress.tv soon, as well.

Building Communities Around Your Content

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How do you build an audience and inspire them to actively engage with your content? That was the subject of my talk at WordCamp Miami 2012.

Start learning our secrets by checking out the slides. Hopefully the video will be published on WordPress.tv within a month or two; we’ll be sure to post that when it’s up.

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I had a blast guest co-hosting episode 3 of the WP Late Night podcast with WPCandy’s Ryan Imel and WebDevStudios’ Brad Williams. Hear my thoughts on default WordPress themes, BuddyPress growing up, whether the “widgets” concept is broken, how we build themes at 10up, and more. Or just enjoy the banter as Brad and I joke about friendly competition in the WordPress community.

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Going to WordCamp Miami? Catch Jake and Jess! Jake will be debuting “What Would Core Do?” – a guide to building theme and plug-in administration that feels native – in the developer’s track. Meanwhile, Jess – a former Miami native and an organizer of WordCamp Miami 2010 – will offer insight into building communities around your online content. Hope we see you there!

Editing WordPress’s Visual Editor

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These are the slides from a talk I gave at the 2011 WordCamps (WordPress conferences) in Chicago, Philly, and Orlando. I consider this a “sequel” to a broader talk on editing the WordPress administrative experience that I like to think I pioneered in 2010 at a few WordCamps, including Chicago and Mid-Alantic, which several new speakers now seem to be running with.

WordPress’s visual content editor (TinyMCE) is, in many ways, at the heart of WordPress’s content management experience. It’s where editors spend most of their time, and where content is crafted to appear on the front end of your site. Like most of WordPress, the editor can be customized to be both more powerful and more specific to the needs of an individual site or client. This presentation covers topics including custom editor stylesheets based on post type, modifying and removing buttons from the editor, and even creating your own custom buttons for the TinyMCE toolbar. It even covers brand new WordPress 3.3 techniques introduced with the new wp_editor function.

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The Perks of Contributing

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Behold this glorious little section of the WordPress 3.3 credits page.

I’m never in anything for the recognition or glory, but I have to admit: this is pretty exciting. As of this writing, WordPress powers 15.7% of the top million websites and at least 22% of all new active websites in the US. That is a mind-blowing number of times that the faces and names on the credits page might be seen, even given that it’s buried a little in the admin.

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