UPDATE: The talk wasn’t accepted by the organizers of the event.
I’m proposing a talk for WordCamp Victoria 2012, “Bending WordPress to your exact needs” is what we’ll call it for now. In the spirit of open source, I’d like to leave the topic somewhat up to you, the attendees (or members of the WordPress community as a whole – even if you’re not attending).
I’m leaning towards a catch-all topic of “how to make all areas of your website editable”. I build all my sites with the end-goal of my clients being able to manage all aspects of their website, not just blog posts and pages. I’d love to show you how I do that. This talk could lean one of many ways. I could talk about widgets, custom content types (I don’t like calling them custom post types), custom taxonomies, option pages, security concerns and clients, making the admin more user-friendly, etc… This is where you come in, just let me know what topics you think I should cover.
So, please pitch in. Comment below if you have any suggestions for topics/areas I should incorporate (even if isn’t anything I’ve mentioned above), or email me directly at info@jkudish.com.
What qualifies me to talk:
I’m a PHP & WordPress developer. As an independent freelancer, I use and live WordPress daily for 99% of my client work. I am an active member of the open-source WordPress community. I participate in the WordPress forums, the WordPress trac, and build free plugins. I talked at WordCamp Montreal in summer 2011, and led a round-table discussion at WordCamp Portland in fall 2011. I’m looking forward to sharing with you at WordCamp Victoria. Read up about what I do with WordPress »
Joey Kudish 
Seeing a case study would be really interesting. I would love to hear how you approached a complex problem and what decisions you had to make. I also try to give my clients the easiest way to maintain all of their sites and I love CPTs, but I’m never sure how best to structure them or if I’m using them correctly. I know that there are many ways to build sites, but seeing some examples of how sites were implemented would be fantastic.
It would be great to see this at a meetup too, because I won’t be able to go to Victoria. 😦
Sounds like a really great talk. I only ever got praise and thanks for my ‘Widgetize Everything’ talk, so there is definitely a market for blowing people’s minds about customizeable content areas.
I like your talk because it sounds like a advanced version of mine, where instead of going into embarassing detail about widgets (what’s a widget, what are text widgets for etc.) you instead go into other similar ways of making things awesome.
I especially like the idea of trying to explain CPT+Taxonomies and how to really integrate them into themes in useful ways. Despite the simplicity of creating CPT, I find actually using them to be a huge pain. Try to reduce the cognitive dissonance around these tools.
Also, FWIW if this is part of your application process then I +1 you as a speaker for sure! You were one of our best speakers this year at WordCamp Montréal and it would be a tragedy if they didn’t give you a speaking slot in your new city. Come back next year for WCMTL 2012!
Thanks for the awesome feedback Jeremy! That’s pretty much the direction I am headed at with the talk 🙂
Thanks for the great reference for WCMTL. I’ll definitely do my best to come back for 2012 🙂
They didn’t accept the talk. Seems they decided to go the blogger/user/power user route and ignore developers completely. It’s a shame. I am not sure I’ll be attending either considering their lack of developer love.
That’s a bummer.
I recall meeting you at the Genesis theme hooha at WordCamp SF in August, and I’ve been poking around here and looking at your github plugin updater. Good stuff.
I like the notion of widgetizing everything. I’m also looking into how to do a totally hands-off deployment from localhost such that all menus, widgets, everything else just works without needing to do anything at all on the hosted site. Git post-receive hook is a very good friend of mine.
You’ll be in high demand soon enough given the quality of both your design and your code. I’m sure of it.
Various dev environments and the ultimate deployment strategy are both topics I research a lot and ultimately try to find the best solution for. Still haven’t found THE solution for porting a database to a production environment without having too many steps; but we’ll (we as in the WP community) get there eventually I’m sure 🙂
Cheers for the comment Dave.