Write Good Plug-ins and Get Involved in WordPress Development

This is cross posted from the WordCamp NYC site. This post will show up there at some point today.

Howdy, I’m Matt Martz. The majority of you probably know me as ‘sivel’ and I will be doing two separate talks at WordCamp NYC on Saturday, one in the Advanced Plug-in Dev Track and one in Beginners Plug-in Dev Track. The two topics I will be covering are Intermediate Plug-in Development Techniques and Writing Your First Core Patch. I will also be spending as much time as I can in the ‘Hacker Room’ helping people test and write patches for the upcoming WordPress 2.9. If time permits I’ll try do spend some time at the Genius Bar as well.

Giveaways

In both of my sessions I will be doing Twitter based giveaways. I will be giving away 5 items to randomly picked people who attend my sessions. If you want to find out what I am giving away you will have to come my sessions. Winners will be picked automatically at the end of each session using a WordPress plug-in I wrote specially for the occasion.

Intermediate Plug-in Development Techniques

We all strive to write good plug-ins. Plug-ins that not only function well, but plug-ins that have sexy code and use the WordPress APIs whenever possible for tight integration into core. I’ll go over some of the techniques which I believe will help take your plug-ins to that next level. Techniques will include:

  • Splitting Plug-ins into Multiple Files
  • Tips on When to Load
  • Using Classes
  • Localization
  • Ajax
  • If time permits I will try to touch base on a few other items

Writing Your First Core Patch

There are a lot of people out there that I see every day saying they found a bug or want a feature, but in the end never do anything about it. I’ll go over testing to verify the bug, getting assistance from the community, using the WordPress provided resources, explaining Trac and ticket fields and if time permits giving a few demos for actually creating that patch.

About Matt

IF YOU REALLY want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

In any case I am employed as a Senior Linux Systems Engineer at Rackspace in San Antonio, TX.

I spent the majority of my college years as an Astrophysics major specializing in black holes. When I got to my senior year and was studying 40 hours a week to stay on track I decided to bail and pursue an easier career.

I spend the majority of my time now contributing to WordPress, developing WordPress plugins, helping out in the WordPress IRC Channel, playing football (not American!), practicing Krav Maga, and last but not least, spending time with my Wife and Son.

This entry was posted in Code, Plugins, Talks, Technology, WordCamp, WordPress. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Write Good Plug-ins and Get Involved in WordPress Development

  1. Tobias says:

    Hi,

    the section “Intermediate Plug-in Development Techniques” and the covered topics sound very interested.
    While developing my plugin, I have come across some of those problems, for which your talk might bring a solution (especially the “file split up” and “using classes”).
    So it would be great, if you could somehow have your talk recorded as a video or transcript. Maybe you could later on also publish your slides or a transcript in a blog post?

    Thanks a lot!
    Tobias

  2. arena says:

    @tobias
    video is here : http://wordpress.tv/2009/11/14/matt-martz-plugins-nyc09/

    @matt
    could you make your presentation available somewhere on your site (ppt files ?)

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