Traffic building for beginning bloggers
with Elizabeth Urello, Automattic
@eurello
1. Find your people. Readers who share your interests or need the information you have. Readers who share your voice, your perspective, your sense of humor.
How do you find them? Browse, read explore, search for keywords you think people would use to search for you. The wordpress.com reader topics pages helps you find a network of people.
The daily post at wordpress.com is a place to build community and a network.
2. Introduce Yourself. Comment, interact, reblog and respond. Intrigue people where they are already reading. Traffic building is a little like dating.
3. Prepare for company. Give people more of what they like. Blog about others are talking about. Reply to comments with substantial comments. Capitalize on a traffic spike.
4. Spread the love. Know how your social networks differ. Don’t exhaust your followers with irrelevant information. Write original material for each service. Publicize sharing buttons.
There’s a filter for that
by Drew Haynes, 10up
A filter takes a function, applies it and spits it out on the other side. It’s like the telephone game. 1300 or so filters in WordPress core now.
More Than one filter can be applied to a filter hook, based on a priority system. Filters can also be removed.
Content filters. Can write filters to polish titles, post info or other messages you normally see. Filters can repurpose featured image meta box.
Workflow can be customized with filters. Can filter the appearance of the post content editor.
Most well-known filter in WordPress is the_content. It’s often abused. Ask yourself if something really is content before you use it. Can create filters for post_class, excerpt_length, show_admin_bar. There’s a filter that disables captions (why?).
Development filters let you filter plugin or theme installer pages.
Making the leap from designer to developer
by Ray Gulick, Evo @evoweb
Ray calls himself a designer/ developer or developer-like.
Design is not just how it looks. Design is how it works. -Steve Jobs
Coding is part of the design.
Know a good developer when you begin the journey from designer to developer so you can get help.
Basics skills before you can move on are HTML and CSS. For WP you need to know are PHP and WP tags, custom fields and putting them on templates, custom post types, WP_Query to manage listings.
Using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin allows you to create more user friendly meta info and titles so that it makes more sense to the users who are trying to add content to the fields. It also gives you control over what pages, templates or users even see the field types.
Custom post types. Standard are pages and posts. You can define custom post types with particular custom fields. You can create custom templates, too. Display on a single template. The php for it is in a wp_query.
evowebdev.com will have slide deck.
Other Interesting Stuff
