Category Archives: Speaker Post

Gaurav Pareek on “Better WordPress Development with Vagrant”

Better WordPress Development with Vagrant

Hi WordPressers!! My name is Gaurav, and I’m a WordPress developer. Generally I make themes but I also dabble in plugins and stuff. I’ve been using and developing custom solutions with WordPress for nearly 6 years, and have seen a lot of unusual, weird and bad development practices throughout the whole web development community.

Most of these “bad practices” don’t turn into big problems if a single freelance developer is involved, but if two or more people are there, it quickly grows into a nightmare. If these people are distributed, it’s a whole new story. If you’ve ever worked in such a scenario, you might have heard about the following

  • Works on my machine
  • Your server config isn’t right.
  • It worked when I tried it on localhost.

Enter Vagrant

Vagrant aims to solve all of these by providing an easy way of creating, maintaining, and reproducing portable development environments. All this information is stored in simple text files. This whole thing can be put under version control, and tracked across projects.

What will I speak about

In my talk, I’m going to give a brief introduction to Vagrant, and share some problem scenarios which make Vagrant a must have for every WordPress developer, designer, or theme tester. Then I’ll be giving a live demo showing how easy it is to get started with a pre-configured environment.

I really believe that this session will really help both beginners and experienced developers/designers in some way.

WordPress Settings API by Vishal Kothari

Wordpress Settings API by Vishal Kothari

I am the founder of Tyche Softwares & the CTO at PreK12 Plaza. At Tyche, our team focuses on developing WooCommerce plugins. We’ve had the privilege of being the first to release a Booking plugin that’s fully integrated with WooCommerce. Apart from that, we maintain a very sharp & limited focus on the plugins that we have.

At Tyche, I am not actively involved in coding, apart from for a WordPress plugin that’s in development. My typical day is occupied with ensuring top quality customer support by our team. It also includes prioritizing features for plugin updates, improving the quality of existing plugins & affiliate management, sales & marketing.

Doing things the right way

It’s widely known that WordPress is now used on about 23% of the websites on Internet. What is not known is that only 22% of WordPress sites are up to date. Yes, only 22%!

This is worrying. Because this suggests that the websites that are not up to date, have not been designed / coded in the right way so as to allow them to update to the latest version of WordPress.

What I will cover

The take away from this session would be one step in the direction of doing things the right way with WordPress.

The session will cover on how to use the WordPress Settings API to add sections & setting fields on existing settings pages as well as on new pages.

It will also cover data validation & sanitisation as they play an important role.

Although it is not possible to cover a lot within 20-25 minutes on this topic, but the idea is to cover enough so that all theme & plugin developers who are not already using the Settings API can start checking it out & using it.

You shall be able to find code resources on Github as well as notes. I shall be updating that soon & posting the links here.

Mahangu Weerasinghe on “Teaching Happiness”

Hello, Mumbai! My name is Mahangu Weerasinghe and I’m a Happiness Engineer at Automattic. I work on the team that provides live chat support to WordPress.com users, so there’s a chance that some of you may have already spoken to me online. 🙂

WordPress is currently used by 23.4% of all websites. That’s a lot of sites.

The question then, is this: in an age where everyone is developing WordPress solutions, how do you make sure that your offering stands out from the crowd?

Support

In an increasingly saturated WordPress products and services market, providing quality support is one of the factors that separates good WordPress solutions from the great ones.

My session at WC Mumbai 2015 is titled Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From the Classroom.

I realise the topic is a little unusual, but it comes from a very personal place. Prior to joining Automattic, I was a high school English teacher, and as I made the jump from teacher to Happiness Engineer, I realised that there was a lot of overlap between the two roles.

What I Will Cover

In this session, I will explore how we, as providers of WordPress support, can see ourselves as teachers instead of fixers, and in the process completely alter the dynamic of the support space, creating a more holistic experience for both our users and ourselves.

I will show how some of the tools that teachers use to Plan, Manage and Follow-up on their lessons can also be used in WordPress support interactions, and how these methods can help our users become more and more independent.

I strongly believe that support will play a pivotal role in helping us reach the next 23.4% of the web, and encourage you to bring all your support-related questions and comments to this session. I look forward to hearing what you have to say!

Session Link: Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From the Classroom