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I’m excited to be the lead-off speaker at the 3rd annual WP Summit today. This one-day online conference brings together some of the most talented presenters covering various aspects of WordPress. My talk will focus on the nuts and bolts of putting together a WordPress theme. If you have ever wanted to start building your own themes then this talk will get you started.
Catch PushUp and 10up at WordCamp Chicago 2014
Aaron Holbrook10up will be brewing up a storm in the Windy City this upcoming weekend at WordCamp Chicago, with wall to wall speakers supported by a John Hancock Sponsorship under the PushUp Notifications product brand.
Our rundown of speakers starts with Dustin Filippini presenting a Comprehensive Dashboard Walkthrough on Foundation Friday. On Saturday, Kelly Dwan kicks things off with A Walk Around the Loop, a study of the post loop from an advanced developer’s perspective. Alison Barrett takes the stage for a lightning talk at noon with Knowing What You Don’t Know followed by James Barrett on Wireframing Essentials.
On Sunday I’ll pause from organizer duties for an Introduction to IDEs and Debugging, which makes the case for IDEs by showing off the amazing powers they bestow. John James Jacoby will dive into Multisite and Multi-network, emphasizing the lesser used multi-network feature. Wrapping up the day on Sunday, Rachel Baker demonstrates how developers can Put Your Content to REST With WP-API, a look at the exciting new JSON REST API (WP API).
In addition to our speakers, you’ll also find 10uppers Kara Buffardi and Gus Gerhardt at our PushUp sponsor table, showing off our website push notifications product. We’ll be on hand to demo the product, answer questions, and provision new customers as they sign up – and we’re offering a 99¢ sign up code (discounted from $14.99) for anyone who registers on the spot!
I’ll also be leading the Networking lunch activity at noon on Saturday; stop by and say hello!
Design visionary Louis Dorman joins 10up as Senior Designer
Taylor Aldridge
At 10up, we think that a truly outstanding web publishing experience happens at the intersection of great design, strategy, and engineering. We also know that the modern web requires talent that understands that great design is not just how a website looks, but how it feels across input interfaces and screen sizes. As we continue to grow our design team, we’re very excited to welcome a designer that embodies our vision of client-centered design, as innovative in its aesthetics as its interactions.
Louis Dorman has been designing for the web since the days of dial-up. After graduating from the Art Institute of Phoenix in 2001, he went on to be responsible for the design and manufacturing of millions of products around the world. Louis was one of the first employees at Mashable, one of the most popular WordPress-powered websites. As Art Director, he managed all areas of design, from the web presentation and UX to marketing collateral, as the company scaled to 30 million+ monthly unique visitors.
Louis was also a founder of AdCamo, which would become a pioneer in the development of background ad units under his direction. In addition to steering vision and project development, Louis hired and mentored creative and engineering teams, managed communication between sales and engineering, and created campaigns for clients like ABC, Comcast, Craftsman, MGM, Sony, and WWE, to name a few.
Read More on Design visionary Louis Dorman joins 10up as Senior Designer
Keynoting WordCamp Philly 2014
Helen Hou-SandiI’m really excited to debut my first WordCamp keynote this coming weekend at the illustrious WordCamp Philly! I’m presenting a remix of a my WordCamp Connecticut talk, “How I convinced my boss to let me work on WordPress full-time”, arguing for personal and company investment in open source. I’ll look at how and why teams like 10up donate back to the community, and offer ways that attendees can give back, too.
10uppers will also be quite well represented: Dave Ross will be speaking on “Easier, More Secure Deploys with Docker and Dokku“, Doug Stewart pulls double duty as co-organizer and “working from home” panel moderator, and Cindy Kendrick and Spencer Hansen will be in attendance. Hope to see you there, whether in a session, Sunday’s contributor day, or in the hallways.
I have the pleasure of speaking about Designing a Theme in the Browser next week at WordCamp Orange County. With In Browser Design gaining popularity on the web and here at 10up, we began to ask ourselves, “What is the best way to present a design to a client?” We use WordPress, of course! In my talk I’ll be showing how you can use the most basic of templates and functions to move your design out of it’s initial creative phase and into the browser where pixel perfection lives and where responsive layouts and interactions really come to life.
WordCamps in Miami and Connecticut
10up has the east coast covered top-to-bottom this weekend at both WordCamp Connecticut and WordCamp Miami.
In the north Jake Goldman will teach you how to leverage WordPress’s native media player, based on MediaElement.js, Taylor Lovett will show you how to save time with WP-CLI, and Helen Hou-Sandi will make the business case for contributing to WordPress core full-time. CEO John Eckman and Engineer Kelly Dwan will also be participating.
We’re also a Gold Sponsor of WordCamp Connecticut, under the PushUp brand, our website push notifications product. We’ll be on hand to demo the product and provision new customers on the spot – and we’re offering a 99¢ sign up code (discounted from $14.99) for new customers who sign up on the spot!
In the south, I’m (John James Jacoby) talking about contributing to WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress, and reviewing what’s new in BuddyPress 2.0.
If you happen to see us at either event, stop by our table in Connecticut or find me in Miami!
Team Collaboration: Tweet by Category
Eric Mann on
When I first joined 10up, one of my first challenges was building a Twitter plugin for a client who wanted to automatically tweet based on category. Luckily, I work with an amazing team. I lamented in our team IRC room, and to my surprise, discovered that we already had a plugin that did exactly what I needed. Well, almost exactly.
The existing module, built for another client, was all but abandoned before it was fully polished for non-specific use cases. It also used Twitter’s deprecated v1 API, so I had to swap out the communication layer. Still, I had a starting point thanks to the inventiveness of the team, and our consistent application of coding standards.
A few weeks later, we had a solid, polished release using the v1.1 API ready for a new client. We released the project (it was still not fully abstracted, but complete enough for their purposes) and pushed it to the back burner (read: all but abandoned it again). Last month, yet another client requested the same feature. I dusted off our Git repository and started smoothing out the still rough edges so we could launch an even more refined version for a third client.
That’s when it hit me: this plugin only exists as a result of the way our team collaborates. It has been gradually improved and iterated over time across multiple developers and disparate project requirements. Yet we had never released the source outside of our company.
A couple of emails and about 10 minutes later, Publish to Twitter went public on both GitHub and WordPress.org. I’d personally like to invite you to join the growing team of collaborators on this project to help make it even more flexible and useful for our entire community.
10up conferencing across the continent
Christine GarrisonOver the next few days, WordCamps and conferences all across North America, are featuring 10uppers as guest speakers.
John James Jacoby, Director of Web Engineering, will be hosting a Q&A session on BuddyPress and bbPress at WordCamp North Canton, on Saturday May 3rd, as part of the Beginner track.
WordCamp Ottawa will feature two 10uppers: Senior Engineers Taylor Lovett and Alison Barrett. Taylor will present Saving Time with WP-CLI, a walk through of WordPress in the command line, focusing on scalable practices and eye-opening use cases. Alison will be speaking on Developing Plugins Like A Pro, covering the basics of plugin development; her tips will have attendees writing plugins like a pro in no time.
Finally, Web Engineer Drew Jaynes is speaking at “Write the Docs” in Portland, Oregon on Tuesday, May 6th. Drew’s talk, Putting the (docs) Cart Before the (standards) Horse, is about how WordPress core developed documentation standards using 10 years of documentation, putting the cart before the proverbial horse.
See you around the continent!
Staying on top: 10up Learning Summit 2014
Jake Goldman on
Around this time in 2013 we held a Developer Summit – an in person gathering of our team focused on skill building. We covered everything from PHP unit testing to JavaScript performance optimization, and even rolled out Varying Vagrant Vagrants. From SASS to duck punching, that summit influences how I write code today, when I still have the occasion to do so.
10up has grown since April 2013, not just in raw numbers (we’ve tripled), but in scope. Add a talented design team and nearly a dozen web strategists and project managers and our second annual “developer” summit already needs a rebranding: let’s call it a Learning Summit.
This time, we’re taking over a resort in beautiful Scottsdale, Arizona. We’re kicking off on the afternoon of Tuesday, May 13, with practical activities focusing on the art of effective, consistent, and thoughtful client engagement. Wednesday we have three tracks filled with incredible workshops: design, engineering, and project management.
10uppers Alison Barrett and Jim Barrett will be joining me (John James Jacoby) in presenting at WordCamp Minneapolis this Saturday, April 25, at the University of St. Thomas in downtown Minneapolis. Alison’s talk, Avoid Breaking All the Things: How to Develop Safely, offers mitigation techniques for the worst case WordPress maintenance scenarios. Jim is presenting IA Eessentials: How to Prioritize, Design, and Present Your Client’s Content, which explains how to identify a client’s most important content, and present it in the best possible light. I’ll be presenting WPRBACOMGBBQ, covering WordPress’s Role-Based Access Control (citing bbPress as an example), and shedding light on an otherwise invisible (and very powerful) API that you accidentally use everyday. Hope to see you this weekend!