The WordPress REST API is one of the most exciting new features of WordPress, but it is more than just the default routes and endpoints that it adds automatically to your site. It is also an awesome tool for creating your own RESTful API. We will look at how powerful this tool is, look at some practical examples of extending the REST API and learn how to create custom routes and endpoints. When you leave this talk, you’ll be prepared to create your own custom APIs, the WordPress way.

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WP-CLI is a set of command line tools for managing your WordPress site. It allows you to perform many tasks much quicker than you would be able to by other means. In this session, I will teach you how to get WP-CLI running, and show some of my favorite time saving features. Once you’ve started using WP-CLI, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! This talk is appropriate for developers, designers and server administrators of all skill levels.

Link to Slides

Agency work is hard for developers. If there is an opportunity or new technology available to you that can make your life easier and make your company more money you should be investigating whether or not the new technology can work for your own agency.

Over the past 6 months we have migrated all of our self hosted WordPress sites and developed all of our new WP sites on Pantheons agency platform, Pantheon One for Agencies. By moving to Pantheon we were able to cut our development time in half on new sites and have been able to reduce labor spent on maintenance by 40%. I want to teach you all how you can use Pantheon’s free agency platform to cut your costs and raise developer moral with little to no onboarding involved.

We will be discussing some advanced workflows that revolve around a Git Flow workflow. We will discuss how to set up and maintain a custom Git upstream that you can use as a common codebase to give your projects a head start. This leads into how you will never have to update 20 separate sites again whenever there is a new WordPress update or any of your favorite plugins. We will talk about a cloud based multienvironment workflow that allows you to develop locally or on a dev server in the cloud. All of the environments are under version control and even when you aren’t using Git, all of your changes are still being recorded to version control. Finally we will discuss how Continuous Integration can bring all of this together in an automated fashion.

Never again will you deploy a new feature branch into a production environment without first testing those changes on a test server. Did I mention that’s automated. This session is geared towards agencies, but anyone who handles more than a few WordPress sites can benefit from this.

Links from Presentation:
https://pantheon.io/resources/pantheon-development-cycle
https://pantheon.io/docs/guides/create-a-wordpress-site-from-the-commandline-with-terminus-and-wp-cli
https://pantheon.io/docs/guides/ssl-with-cloudflare/
https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/wordpress/clone-a-wordpress-site-with-duplicator-plugin/
https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/wordpress/configuring-phpstorm-on-pantheon-for-wordpress/
https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/sites/code/developing-directly-with-sftp-mode/
https://pantheon.io/docs/articles/

This talk will review getting information from the WordPress tables using the WP_Query class. We’ll discuss the various options for getting different types of data, properly escaping input and output, resetting the loop, and possibly storing the results in transients.

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Complex queries as opposed to transients

When posts, pages, categories and tags don’t cut it any more, custom post types, taxonomies and metadata are your saving grace. These tools really open up your ability to expand the core capabilities of WordPress to build whatever your imagination can dream up. With some very easy tools, you can quickly and easily build fairly complex and useful web applications for all sorts of projects, which really opens you up to work on a bigger variety of projects than just simple websites.

Link to Slides

WordPress themes are a painless and powerful way to change your website’s design, but a pre-made theme will never be a perfect fit. In his presentation, Taylor shows you WHY and HOW to create a child theme, empowering you to Be Different, Be Independent, and Be Yourself! Creating a child theme doesn’t have to be scary or overly complicated. With his direct and easy to understand approach, Taylor shows how to create a child theme from scratch and the tools to effortlessly make changes to the theme’s design.

*** See more at: http://taylormadewebpresence.com/create-a-child-theme/