Notes From “Extending WordPress Themes Without Plugins”
Cameron advises agains adding pluggins for everything, why?
- Take ownership of your code, know what your site is really doing
- Build your own library of code and techniques for future projects
- “Make WordPress fo crazy things nobody else has thought of yet” — Sometimes there isn’t a plugin that does exactly what you want.
- Makes a great topic for a WordCamp talk (haha)
Benefits of taking control of your code
- Less bloat better performance
- Cleaner and simpler HTML/CSS/JS
- Plugins can confuse your visitors
Some benefits of using plugins
- Not always worth custom coding one-offs
- Some pluggins fo offer great functionality out-of-the-box
- Budget / Time constraints
- Standardization
- Upgrade compatibility — Some plugins are ver well maintained and are compatible with newer versions of WP
Examples & Interesting Ideas
- Extend WordPress’s image handling, galleries — This section can be improved a lot. It’s not intuitive.
- AJAX-ify parts of your theme and functions — Using AJAX to load sections of your site, instead of loading everything at the same time.
- Integrate a WP site with web services APIs — Integrating WordPress with external services, i.e.: Interacting with a CRM API
The (Image) Slider
Cameron showed a sample of a slider that he created for one of his clients. Not sure what was his point in showing all his code and the examples. It’s simple to
The map
He showed a 3 cool examples of custom made map applications that he’d developed in the past. He promised to post links to the examples. (Will update when he does)
The AJAX
He ran out of time to talk about AJAX-ify, but he showed some cool examples of posts that load on-the-fly with a modal window.
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