Mike is a WordPress Architect and serial startup entrepreneur whose guilty pleasure is developing software to empower himself and others to be more productive when building WordPress sites.
In 2010 Mike co-hosted The Business of WordPress Conference, in 2015 co-founded The Atlanta WordPress Coder’s Guild meetup and from 2009 on has spoken at multiple WordCamps in the Southeast as well as LoopConf 2015 in Las Vegas.
Mike has architected and co-developed a marketing intranet for a global soft drink leader, a content marketing website for a leading Texas-based computer vendor, a law firm CMS product for a New York specialty agency focusing on the top 200 global law firms and tens of other complex sites and applications, all based on WordPress.
Today Mike’s primary focus is on WPLib — a foundation library for complex WordPress applications — and helping agencies architect and build complex WordPress sites for their clients.
Oh and when he was a teenager he raced motocross, too.
WordCamp Session
Develop Complex WordPress Apps Without Fear of Failure
Session Description
“WordPress is great for blogs, but try to do more with it and it fails under it’s own weight.”
Or at least that is what many of WordPress’ critics will have you believe, in part because it is often true. When developers use for complex sites the unstructured approaches common with smaller WordPress sites, those large projects can quickly turn into a house of cards. The projects have bugs that are hard to contain, they go way over budget and they have a high risk of failure.
But that need not be the case. If you can write PHP is is far easier to build complex sites without fear than you might imagine.
The approach we have used very effectively for several years is to leverage “Model” objects for “business rules” such as running a WP_Query(), “View” objects to manage output escaping, and then small theme templates that only contain minimal PHP with the rest being focused on the HTML+CSS+JS needed to produce a stunning visual presentation. And we do is in very WordPress-ish ways because we do not try to replace WordPress conventions, we only augment them.
Once developers are exposed to this approach, they never almost want to develop in a haphazard manner again.
So this session will introduce PHP developers to a battle-tested set of conventions they will likely be very happy to use as well a lightweight PHP foundation library containing a handful of base-level code to support these conventions.
Or thought of another way, consider this a session a prerequisite to becoming a significantly better and more capable WordPress developer.
Track
Developers
