June 13-14, 2015
Spring Hill Suites - Auraria
Jeremy Duvall
Creativity not limited to art realm
Four habits to creativity:
Live outside the box
- "You are the sum of your influences" -Austin Kleon
- Read same thing, have same experiences, leads to same ideas
Practice generating ideas
10 ideas per day for a year
- 10 x 365 = 3,650 ideas
- Spend 5 minutes on ideas
- Braindump
Create a creativity routine
1. start small
2. emphasize consistency
3. show up
- Commit for one week
Set constraints
- Most of us work best under a time limit / deadline
Ryan Kanner
Love your process.
Everyone needs to be on board.
Every team works differently.
Ryan Kanner
Process for everything
- Tasks
- Bugs
- Where, how development is done
- QA
- Deployments
- Ongoing maintenance
Ryan Kanner
Code should not be owned by the person who wrote it
- Consistency is key
- Use a style guide / kitchen sink
- Document everything
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live" - Martin Golding
Ryan Kanner
Plugins
- Curated list of pre-approved plugins for your team to refer to when in need of special functionality
- Build your own plugins for internal use
- Leave plugins outside of repo
Ryan Kanner
QA
- Requires fresh eyes
- Checklists make life easier
- Identify common problem areas with previous projects and make sure to check them moving forward
- Decide on browser support before starting a project
Ryan Kanner
Have a boilerplate theme
Ryan Kanner
Internal plugins
- micro-plugins
- adds functionality without bloat
- more control over codebase
- allows you to globally update code on all websites
- tools to help manage:
- TGM plugin activation
- GitHub updater
Ryan Kanner
Automation
- Automating mundane tasks
- Gulp, Grunt
Keep sites up to date (audit?)
Things change at scale
Paul Davidson
Paul Davidson
Alternatives
- roots
- bones
- starkers
Genesis = template tags via hooks?
Eric M. Suzanne
A DIY grid system system
Gives us the math via an API to create a flexible grid system or to style on the fly
Eric M. Suzanne
@import "susy"
/* Changing Susy default global settings */
$susy: (
/* Tells Susy to use 12 columns */
columns: 12,
/* Tells Susy that the container has a max-width of 1120px */
container: 1120px,
/* Tells Susy to use border-box */
global-box-sizing: border-box
);
/* Makes border-box properties */
@include border-box-sizing;Eric M. Suzanne
.wrap {
@include container;
}
/* Tells Susy there's 8 columns in the content */
.content {
@include span(8);
}
/* Tells Susy there's 4 columns in the sidebar, and its the last item on the row. */
.sidebar {
@include span(4 last);
}Eric M. Suzanne
.wrap {
@include container;
}
.content {
@include breakpoint($medium) {
@include span(6);
}
@include breakpoint($large) {
@include span(8);
}
}
.sidebar {
@include breakpoint($medium) {
@include span(6 last);
}
@include breakpoint($large) {
@include span(4 last);
}
}Eric M. Suzanne
- Block local IP from analytics
- Need a mobile website - will not appear in top results
- Content is mobile ready, most relevant
- Avoid influencing your own site, your competitors site
- Keywords, key phrases - not paid as much attention to
- Company name not what people are searching for, don't make a keyword
- Domain is easy to type, easy to remember
- Relevant links
- Credible sources
- Inbound and outbound
- Create personas for website
- Funnel people by persona
- Use Analytics, Webmaster Tools
- Create Sitemap
- gmail "not okay"
- Tell a good story
- Label picture properly
Functional Programming:
Style of building the structure and elements of computer programs -- that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions and avoids changing-state and mutable data.
Backbone - functional
- pluck
- map
MV*
Underscore.js
Benefits:
- Comes with WordPress / Backbone
Cons:
- Mind-bending
- Small utility library, not framework
Brian Richards
You must make time to learn. Every day
Brian Richards
“Knowledge without application leads to atrophy” - @rzen
Deep practice leads to skill retention.
"Mastery through myelin."
- Talent Code
Brian Richards
Make time for rest
In the music world, the term “rest" is better understood as preparing for the next thing.
Takeaways:
- CMB2 - got a lot of good reviews
- Code standards: PHP, JavaScript, CSS/Sass
- CSS - CSS Guidelines
- PHP - WordPress
- Git Flow / Feature branches when developing new features on a site
- PRs for everything, code reviews to check against code standards
- Commit to Slack, ditch Google Chat
- great for documenting ongoing project discussion
- great for remote team members
- Repo structure
- wp/ directory for non-wp sites
- don’t include wp in repo so it can’t be updated from production admin
- theme essential plugins included in repo as submodules
- if included, include via theme repo or mu-plugins if possible
- non-theme essential plugins excluded from repo so they may be upgraded?
- Fix Grunt
- .map files are driving me crazy
- turn off source mapping?
- “dev” mode
- ES6
- Bower or NPM for managing external dependencies
- Susy + Compass
- uncss + csscss + cssstats
- montage (sprite generation)
- yslow + pagespeed
- QA
- Acceptance testing
- Unit testing
- Webpagetest
- Need to document QA checklist
- Project/theme READMEs to document everything
- Wiki for internal references?
- Comments!
- PHPDocs?
- Launch checklist
- Accessibility audit/checklist
- WAI-ARIA
- 508
- Cross-browser audit
- Graceful degradation audit
- InVision for interactive comps
- "A prototype is worth a thousand meetings"
- Keep sites up to date
- When a new version of WP is released, update WP, update plugins, test locally and push to production
- Worry about licensure
- Curated go-to plugins
- Starter theme
- Underscores theme
August 6-7th, 2015
Galvanize Platte St., Denver
"Develop Denver is built on the idea that by bringing the community of designers, developers, and those involved in creating together, we can learn, share, and create better things.
The conference is completely community driven, from panelists submitting talks, and registered attendees voting on which ones they want to see and learn about. "