This presentation will show you how to make accessible WordPress themes while increasing user experience, usability, and search engine optimization. Not just for developers and designers, content contributors will also get valuable information about changing your thought process to be as inclusive as possible.

This talk will cover WordPress Security. Topics covered include secure plugin development, password security in the age of botnets (and crackers) and simple countermeasures to protect your WordPress install.

Weaving JavaScript Info WordPress covers the basic functions and hooks, and good practices for including JavaScript into themes and plugins. This includes when and how to include local scripts into one’s code, being aware of existing libraries that are already available, how to load non-local scripts and remove existing scripts, how to include javascript in the admin, and for the advanced user how to use localize script to make data from PHP available in javascript.

Do you develop themes for WordPress? Let’s talk about your tools. You know what works for you and what helps you develop things quickly, but are you using the best tool possible to make you a more well-rounded theme developer? I’ll cover the options that are available (child/parent theme, starter themes, frameworks) and why you might want to choose one over the other. While advanced theme developers have their workflows that work for them it’s good to challenge what they know and to see how they can improve and grow. For the beginning theme developer, knowing some of the pitfalls out of the gate can help guide them in the right direction and provide a better overall experience in developing for WordPress.

The Customizer has been around since WordPress 3.4, yet it is one of the most unknown and under appreciated features around. We will start out by learning what the Customizer is, from where users can access it, and why it is so awesome. Then we’ll proceed to theme mods, the Customizer API, how to integrate it in your themes and plugins, and dive into how you can extend existing functionality. Finally We’ll cover some tutorials and example implementations, what default themes do with it, and how [who?] encourages its use.

The Twenty Thirteen theme uses something called “Masonry” to realign footer widgets when you resize the browser window. What is Masonry? Who made it? And… well, actually these questions are irrelevant.

The fact is that Masonry is now part of the WordPress core download, and it can be activated and used in WordPress themes and plugins with just a few lines of code and some clear theme organization. I will walk theme and plugin developers through how to activate Masonry, how to make it work on a front page layout, and how to activate dazzling animation options included in the script.

Your plugin is broken; do you know why? In this session, Ben will show you some simple principles to help you integrate unit testing in your plugins that will help you find and eliminate bugs before they happen.