Do you commit plugin or theme files into your main WordPress project repository to then have to deal with large diffs and manual updates? Do you have multiple development areas in your project that need builds? Do you want to script more of your build and deploy process? Then this talk is for you. You’ll learn how to:
What is accessibility and how does it affect you? Not just a legal issue, web accessibility affects conversion rates, search engines, and basic usability. This talk will be about how to talk to your clients and your coworkers about ADA compliance on websites, why it’s important, what WordPress is already doing to support accessibility online, and how to improve your code, graphics and content. We’re also going to address some myths, such as “my customers aren’t disabled, so it doesn’t matter” or “web accessibility is too complicated to bother with.” We will cover development and the ADA, but this is also a fantastic subject for graphic designers, SEO technicians, and content writers.
Using WordPress as a Headless CMS could be the future for WordPress development. In this presentation, I want to go over what a headless setup might look like, what would be the advantages to it, and what might be some downfalls/gotchas. I plan to cover the technologies that might work in this type of system such as: – WordPress – GraphQL – The REST API – React – Gatsby – etc.
As web sites and web applications get bigger and more complex, we end up investing more and more time to test all its features while developing or updating our production environment. These tasks may be repetitive and a bit boring, particularly if you need to test a large site, such as an online store or a big custom development. End to end (or browser based) automated tests are not something new, but sometimes they are hard to include in our development process, due to the possible need of new tools, new languages and even the infrastructure to run them, plus the extra burden of keeping your tests updated and healthy. Enter Cypress, a Javascript based tool that will help you write solid tests faster and with less code, so you can focus more time on implementing new feature on your site than maintaining your tests. Why Cypress? – Javascript based tool. You only need Node to run it, so no extra tools to worry about. – Easy to set up in common tools, like Webstorm or Visual Studio Code. – Cross platform: will run on Mac, Windows and Linux – Easy to run locally – Has out-of-the-box handling of page load, ajax loading and other things that could cause flakiness in other automated test platforms – Includes a lot of extra goodies, like screenshots, video recording and even a dashboard that you can plug into your Continuous Integration pipeline (free package available!) – Easy to plug into CI/CD vendors like CircleCI or Jenkins By using tools like Cypress, you can be confident that every code change you perform will leave your site stable and it will help you catch bugs before your client notifies you.
We’ve seen this story over and over. Your client’s marketing agency wants you to do something… or you need to talk to them about a problem they are causing, and there is this gap where you don’t know how to get through to them. I’ve been on both sides of this fence. I’d like to help you close the gap with your clients or internally within your organization. We’ll discuss how to build trust, communicate effectively, and follow-through in a way that closes the gap of understanding between marketing and development. Don’t get stuck in games of politics when solid, clear, concise communication will do! Improve your marketing know-how and impress your clients and higher-ups too.
This presentation will discuss how we use Docker to improve our development and deployment of WordPress sites. The presentation describes how themes and plugins can be developed locally and then packaged into a Docker container. A Jenkins pipeline is used with Git to automatically run a build and deploy the new WordPress container onto a test server where automated Selenium scripts are executed. Based on the results of the tests the container is tagged as a production candidate. A deployment pipeline is then used to execute a Blue-Green deployment on the latest update to production. Once the deployment is proven to work through automated testing the router is switched to the new deployment. The overall process helps reduce the risk of production updates to WordPress, themes, and plugins as well as reduce security concerns caused by randomly installing plugins by users. The presentation will also discuss strategies for running a WordPress database both outside and inside of a Docker container. It will discuss the pros and cons of each approach.