Michael McNeill is a WordPress developer, consultant, and service provider who has worked with numerous companies ranging from the smallest startups to large corporations. He currently is a developer and support engineer in ITS Web Services at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, helping to manage two large WordPress Multisite networks that power thousands of websites across campus. Michael also provides consulting services to many different clients across the Triangle through his consulting company MRMcDev. Between all that, Michael is a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a co-curator of the TEDxUNC Conference, helping to bring Ideas Worth Spreading to Carolina.
Follow Michael on Twitter: @michaelrmcneill
WordCamp Session:
Things you should know about WordPress (but were always afraid to ask)
Session Description:
This talk will cover a few key “Aha” moments that you should have about the way WordPress works. We’ll talk about things like the template hierarchy, what’s going on in wp-config, where WordPress content is stored (the database vs file system), how posts and pages and custom post types are represented in the database, what folks are talking about when they talk about hooks and filters, and just generally review the “behind the scenes” mechanics of how WordPress works. We’ll also touch on a few “tricks of the trade” that you might not realize are out there (version control, staging sites, caching, Vagrant, and other fun tools to make development easier).
This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still don’t really see how all of this stuff comes together. If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. If that’s you and you come to this talk, you should be familar and comfortable with most of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of WordPress by the time we’re done.
Track:
Power Users