I attended most of the developer track presentations at Boston’s Wordcamp 2012. I learned about some interesting tools and techniques that I’d like to document for myself and others.

Talk Optimizing for Speed by Ben Metcalfe

1. YouGetSignal’s Reverse IP Lookup – Shows you how many other hosts live on the same IP Address. This can be helpful for anyone using shared hosting or maybe VPS.
2. Debug Bar – Get debugging information from each page WordPress page load.
3. Google XML Sitemaps – Delete this plugin if you have it. (I had it.)
4. YSlow – Get load times and optimization tips of a page request.

WordPress as a Web Framework by Sam Hotchkiss

1. MVC frameworks for WordPress
   1. WP MVC – Provides a singleton object and eliminates the metadata bottleneck by providing tables indexed by post IDs.
   2. Tina MVC
2. _s Theme – Use Automattic’s Blank Theme as a good starting point.

Automating frontend workflow by Aaron Jorbin (blog post, slides)

1. Autojump – Jump to frequently used directories
2. Commander.js (nodejs) – Script working with CLI
3. watch (nodejs) – Watch files/dirs
4. mockjax – Fake your ajax calls (good for protyping or testing un-related, yet dependent functionality)
5. Travis CI – continuous integration service (wordpress plugin tests)
6. Glue – generate css sprites

Microdata for SEO by Dave Ross

1. Add itemprop, itemscope, etc to any identifiable schema
2. Google Rich Snippets Tool – Test your microdata
3. Examples: SiteNavigation element for navigation, Blog element for blog posts, etc
4. Some quick tidbits: Bing rates sites with microdata higher than sites without, and Google uses the microdata in search results

Enterprise WordPress by Jake Goldman (1up)

1. Sites to show clients: showcase, WordPress VIP
2. Maintaining a beautiful WordPress admin

Shortcodes by Jon Bishop

1. Use oembed rather than plugins to support embedding media from sites like youtube, facebook, etc

Codex by Erick Hitler

1. Use santize_* functions to save to db: santize_text_field(), sanitize_title()
2. Use esc_* functions to show data to user (esc_url_raw() is the exception, it is the opposite of esc_url())

Javascript hooks by Luke Gedeon (1up)

1. Javascript custom events are coming, they will provide functionality similar to WordPress’ action and filter hooks (list of hooks)