Official Blog

10up at WordCamp Philly

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Once again, 10up is back for WordCamp Philly! This year, co-organizer and 10upper extraordinaire Doug Stewart will be joined by John Eckman, Allen Moore, and myself as speakers.

On Saturday morning, I’ll be presenting “User-First Approaches to APIs“, which will touch on what we mean by users, what it means to be a maintainer, and the excitement of a potential fields API in WordPress.

Right after that, Allen will be presenting “A Need For Speed: Performance Driven Front End Development,” focused on how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.

Then  John will take us into lunch with “Getting outside the WordPress bubble“, a topic perfect for somebody with deep experiences with other CMS’s and their communities (including commits to Drupal 8!), as well as other communities at large.

WordCamp Philly holds a special place in 10up history, as the place where I first met Jake in 2011 and began my time as an agency-backed core contributor to WordPress. Doug even found this photo from that 2011 contributor day in the archives! We’re really excited about all of the great talks scheduled for Saturday, and what’s sure to be another fantastic contributor day on Sunday.

WordCamp Philly 2011

Sliders, Rotators, and Carousels — Oh no!

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There is evidence to indicate that sliders (or rotators or carousels) are generally ineffective. Engagement with the second slide is precipitously low and engagement with the third slide is near negligible. Assuming visitors see it at all.

As an adaptation to information overload, web users have trained themselves to divert their attention away from areas that seem unimportant or look like advertising.
—Hoa Loranger, NNGroup

Although Loranger was summarizing a study about right-rail blindness, NNGroup has done previous examinations of sliders and found a similar effect. Notre Dame university also studied sliders on their home page and found only 1% of visitors interacted with it at all.

Finally, these interfaces often have usability concerns: microscopic control buttons, odd mobile/touch behavior, and the removal of visitors’ control.

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There will be several 10uppers presenting this weekend at WordCamp Miami — Taylor Lovett will be presenting on the ins and outs of using Elasticsearch and ElasticPress to make WordPress’ search great, Chris Wiegman will be talking about securing your WordPress installs, and I will be chatting about making Vagrant a greater part of your development workflow.

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This Saturday, I will be presenting “Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch,” focused on ElasticPress, at WordCamp Nashville. 10up’er Zack Rothauser will also be in attendance.

Up in New England at WordCamp Maine, CEO John Eckman presents, “The Four Agreements and Client Services,” covering core tenets from the popular self-help book (The Four Agreements). Jason Clarke and Jason Boyle will also be attending.

Markup, CSS, and Project Structure Best Practices

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front end standards

We’re proud to announce the release of Markup, CSS, and Project Structure sections for our Engineering Best Practices.

When it comes to CSS and Markup, our industry offers a vast landscape of choices and philosophies, illustrated by the number of frameworks and preprocessors available. While our Front End Engineering team always pushes the boundaries of these platforms, our Best Practices set a standard bar for the techniques, functionality, tools, and libraries we use.

As we focus on practical business application of technology, our philosophies are guided by a mandate to ensure consistent, reliable, and predictable experiences for website visitors. Many CSS attributes and HTML5 features are amazing, but are also dependent on unreliable polyfills for compatibility with some popular web browsers. In addition to avoiding known technical pitfalls, standardizing our tools, style, and structure improves efficiency, collaboration, and overall quality of work.

Consistent with our support for an open web, our Engineering Best Practices are open and available on Github. We encourage any and all contributions!

2015 Annual Summit: Boulder

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Boulder

Every year, around this time, our distributed team gets together for a few days to focus on developing our soft and technical skills, to celebrate our past and plan for our future. The 2015 summit is next week at a beautiful hotel in downtown Boulder, Colorado. It begins Monday afternoon with an optional tour of the Celestial Tea Factory and a mouth-watering prefixed dinner catering to myriad 10up diets. Our summit ends on Thursday night, with most 10uppers traveling home on Friday.

Read More on 2015 Annual Summit: Boulder

Keynoting WordCamp Minneapolis

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wc-mnplsThis weekend I’ll be giving the (very early!) keynote at WordCamp Minneapolis,  on “Building Software, Building Community.”  I’ll be talking about the really unique opportunity WordPress presents as a platform and a community capable of changing your own career  – and potentially the world.

I’m very much looking forward to my first WordCamp in the twin cities, which has a special meaning for me since the venue is less than 10 miles from where I lived through all  of middle school, junior high, and high school.

The schedule is impressive: a full day of four tracks on Saturday plus two tracks on Sunday, plus an after party Saturday night and brunch on Sunday.

If you’re attending, and are interested in learning more about 10up or working with us (as an employee, partner, or client) I’d be happy to chat with you.

10up expertise in Net Magazine’s latest cover story

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Corey in NetMagNet Magazine’s latest cover story details 8 “dos and don’ts” for architecting WordPress themes with best practices and an eye towards maintainability. In this article, I cover the WordPress template hierarchy and the loop, foundational concepts necessary to build and understand WordPress themes. A few 10up clients, like H.M.Clause, also get shout outs.

Net Magazine is a 20-year-old publication for professional and amateur web designers and developers; having published insights and stories from 10uppers in the past, they’ve come to recognize 10up as an expert resource.

Past contributions by 10up include Eric Mann’s strategy for featuring rich graphical media in a WordPress site without sacrificing page performance, and Eric’s preview of WordPress 4.0 with contributions from Helen Hou-Sandi.

Scaling StoryCorps.me and the WP JSON API

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We had the privilege of working with StoryCorps to help them engineer a reliable, scalable WordPress implementation for their new, TED prize winning project. StoryCorps.me enables anyone to record and share powerful stories using an iOS and Android app; the app’s infrastructure is built on WordPress, and leverages the WP REST API.

We built a custom, elastic infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, provided strategic consulting and direction for the WordPress JSON API integration with the app, and comprehensive code review and auditing for the custom theme and plugins built by StoryCorps’s internal developers.

Even as the app was unveiled at TED, and picked up in subsequent press coverage from NPR, Fast Company, Recode, the Globe and Mail, Forbes, to name a few, the site and its deep app integrations have scaled and performed like a champ.

PostStatus published a detailed, insightful write up that describes the project and technical implementation, including kind words from their program manager:

Dean noted, “You have to be willing to completely submit to the process.” He says it wouldn’t have succeeded if 10up and [app developer] Maya weren’t committed as StoryCorps to the success of the project.

Be sure to check out their coverage, and try out StoryCorps.me. You can find the app that relies on their WordPress build on the iOS app store and Android Play.

10up at WordCamp London

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WordCamp London 2015

WordCamp London is happening this weekend, March 20-22, and our CEO John Eckman and I will be flying over the Atlantic to join in on what is sure to be a fantastic event. I’ll be speaking on Saturday on what it means to apply a user-first approach to metadata and fields, a topic that is near and dear to anyone who’s extended the WordPress admin, as well as on a core developer Q&A panel on Sunday.

The entire schedule looks great, in addition to Friday’s Contributor Day. We’re especially looking forward to seeing:

Between all of the great talks, networking, and delicious food (who says the British don’t have good food?), this will definitely be a memorable WordCamp. If you’re on Twitter, follow along with WordCamp London on Twitter and via the #wcldn hashtag.