March WordPress St. Louis Developers Meetup

This month, I presented on the WordPress database and discussed the tables, how to use the wpdb class and how to create your own custom tables. You can view the presentation here:

Other Things Mentioned

  • I mentioned that everyone interested should try taking the WordPress quiz from Code Poet.
  • People want a re-poll for the best Monday of the month
  • Next month’s topic will be Enterprise Deployment and Setup (a round table discussion about our experiences)
  • An interesting idea that I hadn’t though of was instead of storing serialized data in the database, store it as JSON instead. I’m going to do some research on this.

February WordPress St. Louis Developers Meetup Notes

The second every St. Louis WordPress developers meetup has come to a conclusion. Here are some notes that I took during the meetup.

Security Best Practices Discussion

Basics

  • Don’t use admin as your default username
  • Change the default table prefix to something unique
  • Consider moving your wp-config.php outside of your website root folder
  • In code, check user permissions before running actions or even displaying the page
  • Sanitize database inputs

Security Plugins to Check Out

Other Security-related Discussion

I can see this turning into a total flame war, but choosing another cms because it isn’t used as much for added security. For example, choosing Drupal over WordPress since WordPress is targeted for attacks more because it is more widely used. Again, I’m not trying to start a flame war, just adding this to the list since someone mentioned it. Side note: this is totally how I feel about the Windows vs. Mac debate for security. Windows has more vulnerabilities because there are more people to harm by looking for vulnerabilities on Windows. You can affect a larger percentage of people by going with the big dog.

Group Project

We talked last month about possibly working on a group project together for the hell of it. Some ideas were thrown out for plugins:

  • Forums
  • Wiki
  • Project management system
  • Picking up an abandoned plugin
  • Writing blog content about WordPress development

March Meetup Topic

WordPress Database/Table Management Best Practices

Here is a list of the things I would like to see Paul and myself cover:

  • Dive into the WordPress tables and see what they actually hold
  • Talk about some of the functions available in $wpdb
  • Talk about integrating with the posts table
  • How to create your own database tables for your plugins.

WordPress St. Louis Developers Meetup Notes

Tonight marks the first night of a meetup in St. Louis for WordPress developers! I know, exciting times right? Tonight’s meeting was more of a planning meeting for the future of the group.

When and where will we meet in the future?

It was suggested that we meet at 6:30 instead of 6 pm. We are going to post another poll for the group to figure out the optimal week for the meetup. Apparently the STL Ruby group meets on the 2nd & 4th Monday of the month. And the regular WordPress meetup group meets the 3rd Wednesday of the month. I think the consensus is to stay with Mondays, just figure out the best week for it. The location will stay as Integrity Corporation for the time being.

Suggested Topics for Group Discussion/Presentation

  • Theme review
  • Code review
  • Enterprise deployment and setup
  • How to create a plugin from scratch
  • Security best practices
  • Speed optimization for WordPress
  • Discuss your development environment (how do you make your WordPress magic happen)
    • What tools do we use? (IDE and other useful tools)
    • Testing environment (PHPUnit, etc)
  • Actions and filters
  • Rewrite Endpoints
  • Using WordPress as a service (REST, XML-RPC)
  • Advanced Custom Fields
  • Database/table management best practices
  • Exploring the WordPress database (talk about the tables and how they tie together)

Other Stuff

We also talked about working on plugins/themes together as a group. And we talked about creating an organization on GitHub to host the code. I’m really excited to see what we come up with as a group! Please leave comments below for anything that I left off, or other topics to discuss.

St. Louis WordPress Users Group

Lately I’ve been thinking it would be good to start a St. Louis WordPress users group. I’d love to attend some of these and meet some other WordPress people in the St. Louis area. The idea of having a St. Louis WordCamp is also appealing, but I think it would be beneficial to find out how many people are interested in WordPress before investing the time for a WordCamp.

So who out there has a place to host such an event and would want to put it on? I’d be happy to help, but I’m not sure I’d be able to make it to every meeting. I wouldn’t want to be the point person, I’m just trying to get the ball rolling.

EDIT: I did come across a group on Facebook, the St. Louis and St. Charles WordPress Users Group. I signed up, but it doesn’t seem very active.

EDIT x2: I just found a meetup group for STL WordPress: http://www.meetup.com/stlwordpress/