I’m at WordCamp Europe in Sofia - taking rough notes on some of the talks
Andrew Nacin: http://2014.europe.wordcamp.org/session/andrew-nacin/
- WP enables non-devs to do dev
- Low barrier to entry
- gateway drug
- WP is increasing in complexity
- Part of it is about migrating functionality into js
- The world of web dev is getting more complicated: html5, css3 - (Raises barrier to entry??)
- “We’re really good at managing backwards compatibility”
- Dev focus is on improving the UX: source of complexity
- Improving docs for devs is important - experienced devs forget that it’s an issue.
- Complexity needs to not come at the cost of the philosophies: trivial setup etc.
- …balanced against drawing the experienced
- “you know what? I’ll build this site in WP, because WP doesn’t make me want to tear my hair out any more”
- WP needs to be more consistent: decrease the time spent searching through docs/trying to work out what an argument means
- inconsistencies trip people up
- struggle - can’t break backwards-compatability
- Objects should (/will have?) implementations of http://php.net/manual/en/class.jsonserializable.php
- A lot of people don’t actually know they’re writing php (!)
- “ I really can’t wait to have [these features] because it’s, like, Sanity and that’s a good thing to have”
- WP uses objects but in a functional way - actually going OO wouldn’t make sense (?)
- http://backpress.org/
- WP should only load the necessary files - not 120.
- Also you should be able to pull individual files out and use them in non-wp projects.
- The way you do that is by decoupling -> this also makes debugging easier
-
You shouldn’t need to understand what’s going on under the hood in WP in order to build stuff which works.
-
Audience observation - Automattic - preferred to use REST API to WP function calls (?) because the api is more consistent
- Audience qu - I’m missing a debugger
- Use an IDE. We could be doing more to make debugging easier, but there are a bunch of tools out there which help.
- Posts might end up with relationships. Terms will probably end up with metadata
- Post relationships now (via a plugin): https://wordpress.org/plugins/posts-to-posts/
- “It’s not a matter of doing it, it’s a matter of planning it out so that we don’t have to Re-do it in a year”