From Kim Goodwin:
- What is the user trying to accomplish?
- What does the user need to know to accomplish their goal?
- How should the user feel as they accomplish it?
- How does the current design (or alternative) currently make them feel?
- What did they do to accomplish it?
WordPress › Taking WordPress to War.
Powerful video – recorded at San Francisco Wordcamp 2011 - of a photo journalist working in Afghanistan, and how he used WordPress to connect a particular group of soldiers to their families back home and to the rest of the world.
“It’s my firm belief that one of the keys to success is avoiding the artificial, uniform face that most companies present. Success means being an accessible collection of genuine people that incidentally comprise a company.”
- Bill DeRouchey [source]
Child (Daughter) themes
Make changes to existing themes without modifying them directly
Child themes:
Allow you to brand themes for clients in admin area
To build:
Parent themes don’t have template tag in comment header
First line in your child theme imports (parent’s) stylesheet
Eg. Copy footer.php into daughter theme folder to change copyright footer
Exception function.php – both parent and daughter are loaded (daughter first, parent second)
Functions.php
Don’t hack framework code 
Prefer extension-plugin mechanisms, Apis
WordPress alternatives:
Plugins:
Wp-content/plugins
Create a dir (eg. akismet)
Create a file (eg. a.php – no filename restrictions)
Can create a header in the plugin’s php file that provides info to admin backend
Note: Plugins load before themes
Theme development best practices
Documentation standard: phpdoc
Use child themes
Stylesheets & scripts
Gravity forms?
add_*_page to insert admin pages into we backend
Multisite
Multi-tenant wp installation
Make.wordpress.org
Buddypress.org
Multisite examples:
Pm101 – project management for small business
Think on time, on budget… but much more to it
Flexible but firm
Deadlines are important but inherently arbitrary
3 stages of a project: starting, work, finishing
Starting
Define 4 things:
Scope
Budget
Timeline
Objectives – kpi
(may need discovery step – who, where and why. Identify project roles: who has go, no-go decision, who’s the Pm. Business model, overall objectives, marketing strategy)
Best projects have fixed and flexible characteristics. Eg. scope and budget are fuzzy but have to be ready for demo next Tuesday
Interesting/revealing questions:
What browser do you use daily?
“I don’t know, whatever’s on my computer?”
Gauge tech savvy
Work
Communicate what you need and when
Feedback
Follow up
Set expectations as you go
Browser limitations
Unknowns…
Wordpress.com/.org
More important to keep things moving than to be right
Read Dan Pink’s drive
Finishing
Launch party (do something to acknowledges effort of team)
Maintenance
Evolve/enhance
Josh Bloch’s Effective Java is easily one of the earliest deeply technical books I can remember that really help nudge me along the road to becoming a more conscientious programmer. Language mastery, he says, is a play in 3 parts:
#1 and #2 are fairly narrow in scope – usually taking no more than 2-3 weeks – and are what I consider to be every language’s cover charge. The bare minimum you simply must know to get in the door. #3 on the other hand is a bit more nebulous and often takes anywhere from months to years.
The good news is picking up a good sense of common usage has never been easier thanks to the likes of github, bitbucket et. al. Start reading somebody else’s code! Many somebody else’s actually.
Just this morning I had an hour free before rolling into work – the perfect opportunity to start poking around in WordPress’s codebase. 