WordCamp Europe 2014 notes - 1.5: Postmodern Wordpress


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”