Advance Your Skills — or Get Started — with the Developer Track

Presented by Tessa Kriesel in Developer.

Whether you are just getting started with WordPress development or you are an advanced developer, there are always things that we can do to upgrade our workflows. Creating a process for your development workflow can help you save time, better estimate projects and in turn be more profitable.

We will talk about example workflows and things to consider to help you “fall in love with your development workflow.”

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Presented by Michael Dance in Developer.

Gutenberg is great for bloggers who want better publishing tools, but what about developers who need to craft customized CMS experiences for their clients? If you use a lot of custom fields and are horrified at the idea of giving clients any design control, this session is for you. We’ll talk about:

• when to use Gutenberg, and when not to;
• what should be a block, and what should stay a custom field;
• how to limit a client’s color and text options;
• the magic of block templates and block locking;
• and how your theme development will change.

Now is the chance to create new site building best practices and drive the evolution of block editing. Let’s get excited for what’s possible!

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Presented by Sal Ferrarello in Developer.

One of the things that makes WordPress so powerful is its extensibility. While in some cases a post may consist of no more than a Title and Content, in other cases there may be a great deal of additional information associated with it. Posts can be enhanced with things like colors, external URLs, subtitles, and logos, all of which can be stored as WordPress post meta values. We’ll look at how to add these values and how to modify our theme to display them.

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Presented by Tara Claeys in Developer.

When I started learning and playing with CSS, I didn’t know how to use the browser inspector (I use Chrome). The first time someone showed me how to use the Inspector, I was hooked on “playing” with code and learning how css properties relate to each other.

In this talk, we’ll focus on debugging tools in the Inspector for non-developers. We’ll play with the Inspector to edit some CSS on “live” websites without actually editing the code. We’ll discuss ways to make the most of using the inspector to save time in development by visualizing changes on the front end before editing the code in the style sheet. This talk will also be helpful for designers who want to give developers specific edits, such as font size, padding and margins.

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Presented by Andrew Taylor in Developer.

Every site seems to have that one feature that, if it breaks, would be a catastrophe. Lost profits and angry clients are something we all want to avoid.
In this session, we will explore the fundamentals of Behat and look at some example tests covering critical features of WordPress sites.

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Presented by Nick Smith in Developer.

We’ll deep dive into testing in JavaScript. Looking at when to write a test, which type of testing approach to take, and how to be sure other developers feel comfortable adding and editing your tests in the future. We’ll start with an overview of what should be tested and then cover some of the different kinds of testing – unit, integration, and snapshot. We’ll cover when to think about mocking your functions and how to think about critical pathing future testing iterations

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Presented by Beka Rice in Developer.

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