WordCamp 2015: Five things I took home with me
After the dust has settled on what was a great WordCamp experience, all the free goodies have now been put to good use and the WordPress world once again exists between me and my monitor, there are some important points that I took away with me from this year’s event.
Customise function
WordPress is really pushing the customise function that it recently released into the core. It plans on making this the point of call for all editable functionality that relates to any theme. Moving forward, themes that want to be listed on the WordPress repository will need to have editable functions run through here and not in the fancy themes menu that we’ve been getting used to.
“WordPress can’t do everything, but it could do anything”
Something said by one of the speakers, Leo Gopal, which I noted as a very good point. In itself, WordPress cannot do everything out of the box but its power lies within its extendibility and the way the backend has grown into a fully-fledged CMS (it wasn’t long ago that WordPress was purely a blogging platform). So if you have an idea, WordPress could potentially be extended to achieve it.
Always use a child
This point was raised in one of the talks and in short, yes you should always use a child theme. It’s important to handle updates without losing any customisations and it also reduces the risk of breaking a theme if author updates are made available.
Ecommerce is growing
With the advent of third party gateways such as Payfast, it is now even easier to iterate through the tech that could potentially bring your business online. Payfast itself seems to be playing ball with the open source community and integrates for free with Woocommerce.
Psychology plays a big roll
Good brokers understand that trades have variables and trends. Great brokers understand that trades are driven by emotion and greed. In the same breath, as the internet matures, no longer will the flashy banners and psychedelic colours on websites attract visitors or customers. We’re becoming immune to that kind of advertising – people want value for their click and website owners and marketers need to figure out how to give this to users.
Feature image courtesy of WordCamp 2015.