Two Talks @ WordCamp Kent 2019

WordCamp Kent has grown to be one of my favorite, must-attend WordCamps, and they keep accepting me to speak. This year, I’m fortunate enough to again be giving two talks at WordCamp Kent 2019!

A Crash-Course in PHP Namespaces for WordPress Developers

This talk is getting a lot of attention this year, especially with WordPress 5.2 finally dropping support for PHP < 5.6. If you’re new to PHP namespaces and don’t want to get left behind, this is a must-attend session (unless you chose to read the blog post of the same name, which is also perfectly valid 😉).

Way back in 2009, PHP 5.3 was released to the world and with it brought support for PHP namespaces — a way of easily separating your code from other developers’ code, which has since become the de facto way of encapsulating functionality across the PHP ecosystem.

With namespaces, multiple packages could use the same class and function names without conflict, because each one would operate in their own PHP namespaces. Unfortunately, many PHP developers who focus on WordPress development may be in the dark on this extremely useful language feature.

This talk aims to shed light on PHP namespaces, especially targeted at WordPress developers who haven’t yet encountered them. Attendees will leave the talk with a firm grasp on PHP namespaces, how they work, and how they can be implemented in plugins and themes.

Confidently Testing WordPress

This talk premiered at WordCamp Dayton 2019, and is a WordPress-focused spin-off of my popular testing talk.

WordPress is a tightly-coupled system, representing over a decade and a half of ideas, decisions, technological shifts, and ideological struggles. There’s a lot of history to be parsed and often the simplest task can have unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, automated testing is one of the best ways to ensure software can be released regularly with high confidence and low risk of regressions. Sadly, the leap from “building WordPress plugins” to “building WordPress plugins with tests” is often viewed as a challenging hurdle. Luckily, there are tools to set up a test harness within an existing codebase with ease.

This talk introduces the fundamentals of automated testing, especially within the context of WordPress. After developing an understanding why automated testing is so critical, attendees will learn how to begin testing their plugins and themes, using features found both in PHPUnit and the WordPress core testing framework, to build and release quality software.

I hope you can come join us for another great WordCamp Kent this year!