php[world]
10 - 14 Nov 2014 at Sheraton Tyson's Corner

Nacin's keynote acted as a great contrast to what representatives of so many other frameworks were saying about sacrificing backwards compatibility. He emphasized that the user comes first, their trust is absolutely vital, and reassured an audience of skeptics that WordPress takes getting automatic updates right *very* seriously.

Great, practical talk with examples that were realistic while remaining easy to follow. Pragmatic in admitting that while we'd *like* to fix everything, more often than not we have to just refactor what we can in order to make things testable.

Excellent introduction to unit testing, and drawing attention to the the WP-CLI scaffolding capabilities makes it easy for even the most novice plugin developer to grasp. Time permitting it could stand to include more involved tests (particularly those using mocking), but that could also be "Unit Testing WordPress Plugins 2: Test Harder."

Something I meant to say in-person after (but had to go check-out of the hotel): on one of the last slides, there was something like "no reason not to test" - it might be more powerful (plus, given Cal's energetic/comedic presentation style, could be funny) would be "no excuse not to test."

Was awesome to hear Taylor walk through the IoC and explain the inner functionality of Laravel. For those that haven't yet - I would recommend grabbing that copy of Taylor's book https://leanpub.com/laravel - Laravel: From Apprentice To Artisan.

As always, Mr. Cal Evens put on a great talk! I gained new insight into unit testing for WordPress plugins.

Fun content--some of those tricks looked scary, though!

Very clear explanation of an interesting pattern!

Great keynote, perfect for a general developer audience.

I found this to be a scary but not particularly useful talk. I think that it might have been better to spend a bit less time on the risks of not taking security seriously, and a bit more time on potential preventatives and remedies, aside from hiring a professional security firm.