• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

East Bay WordPress Meetup

Monthly gathering of WordPress junkies in the East San Francisco Bay

  • Home
  • About
    • What Happens at the Meetup
    • Suggesting Meetup Events
    • Sponsors
  • Next Up
  • Notes & Slides
  • Contact
13 WordPress developers interviewed for the Up and Running with WordPress book/video

October 19, 2015 by Sallie Goetsch Leave a Comment

Oct 2015: Top Developer Tips on Good WordPress Code

Things change rapidly in the WordPress world. The content in this post is more than a year old and may no longer represent best practices.

Fred Meyer from WP Shout joined us via Skype to give his presentation (also seen at WC Denver) on “What I learned about WordPress development by interviewing 15 13 of the best WordPress developers.”

Page Not Found - WPShout
Page Not Found - WPShout
WPShout WPShout

Top Takeaways

Good WordPress code is not distinguished by difficulty, innovation, or cleverness. The key to good code is clarity. Will someone who looks at your code know what you were trying to do and why? Will you know if you come back to it 6 months later? Can your code serve as a good example for people who are learning to code?

Persistence and curiosity are qualities you need in order to become a good developer. The need to understand why and how code works, it will motivate you to learn. You develop skill through continued practice. You don’t have to be a genius to be a WordPress developer. You just have to keep working at becoming better.

Don’t chase the shiny. Once you have found tools that work for you, you don’t need to try every new one that someone mentions. Just because something is new and popular doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better than what you’re already doing. Before you jump in, make sure there’s going to be an advantage over what you’re already doing.

The Codex is your friend–and so is the code. Almost everything you need to know is in the WordPress Codex, but to really understand how WordPress works, look at the core code.

Additional Notes

Fred created his slides using reveal.js. There is a free plugin called Presenter that makes use of this if you’d like to try it.

Fred is a huge fan of the CSS pre-processor SASS. We had a presentation about CSS pre-processors at the meetup a few years ago. SASS makes writing CSS more like writing PHP. There’s a free cross-platform SASS compiler called Koala if you’re not big on the command line.

Jermaine Holmes won the free copy of Up and Running: A Practical Guide to WordPress Development.

WP Shout has produced handy stickers with tips on some of the most common WordPress conditional tags. Trivia for the day: is_dynamic_sidebar does not check to see whether you are in a sidebar file, but whether there are any widgets activated in any sidebars on the site.

WordPress Hosting Resources

Prior to Fred’s presentation, the group had a discussion about site speed, performance, and hosting. The single biggest factor in your site’s performance is your hosting company. The best caching and performance tools (e.g. memcached, OPcache, APC) have to be installed on the server and are not available with most cheap shared hosting accounts.

Fortunately, there are now many hosting companies that specialize in WordPress.

The first was our sponsor (and host of this site) Pagely, which still has options for small businesses even though they have transitioned primarily into enterprise hosting. Pagely uses Amazon’s servers. They have been fantastic in terms of up-time, support, and security.

There are plenty of other options, however, including the Turbo service from our new sponsor A2 Hosting, Flywheel‘s option to stage a site for free before transferring it to a client, and GoDaddy‘s new inexpensive managed WordPress hosting plans. Each of these different providers offers something unique.

To help you decide, here are some recent comparisons of managed WordPress hosting providers:

  • WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2015
  • WordPress Hosting Performance Benchmarks 2014
  • What You Need to Know about Managed WordPress Hosting
  • WordPress Hosting Review 2014: The Results
  • The Complete Resource Guide on How to Choose a Managed WordPress Host

Filed Under: Meetup Notes, Meetup Slides Tagged With: Developer Tools, featured

Previous Post
Next Post

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

WordPress Meetups

  • East Bay WordPress Meetup
  • SF WordPress Meetup
  • WordPress Bay Area Foothills Group

WordPress Docs

  • WordPress Codex
  • WordPress.tv

What’s New

  • The Ultimate Overview to Aviator Game Rules
  • The Ultimate Overview to Tarot Pulls
  • Whatever You Required to Know About Free Online Casino Video Clip Slots
  • Does It Work? Using The New CSS Layout with Rachel Andrew
  • Speaker Training

Categories

  • Meetup Handouts
  • Meetup Members
  • Meetup News
  • Meetup Notes
  • Meetup Slides

Tags

Accessibility Akismet Audio Backups Business Child Themes Community Content Strategy CSS Custom Fields Custom Post Types Custom Taxonomies Design Developer Tools E-commerce Event Management Facebook featured Forms Forums Galleries Google Analytics Gutenberg Membership Mobile-Friendly Websites Multisite Optimization Page Builders PDF Plugins Podcasting Security SEO Shoestrap Slideshows Theme Frameworks Thesis Twitter Video Widgets WordCamp WordPress Books WordPress Hosting WP Database YouTube

Footer

Hosted by Pagely

Pagely logo

Pizza Sponsor: A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting Meetup Sponsorship

Thanks to Modern Tribe

Modern Tribe and Events Calendar Logos

O’Reilly Partner Program

O'Reilly Media Logo

Pearson Community Groups

Pearson Community Groups Program

Copyright © 2025 · Kickstart Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in