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How's everybody doing?

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Sleepy 'cause it's after noon

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and then you have lunch and you're all tired

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and not retaining any knowledge?

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This is going to be awesome!

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My name's Tracy Levesque.

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I'm from Philadelphia

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(Cheers from Philly peeps in the audience)

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Right! That's right!

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I co-own a Web design and development company

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called YIKES, Inc.

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What I do personally is Iove creating themes for WordPress

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I've been making websites since 1996

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and working with WordPress since 2006

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I would consider myself a Power User, right?

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I'm in /wp-admin/ at least several times a day

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I know pretty much everything you can do in there

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I manage some content

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I do a lot of WordPress administrative stuff

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I install plugins and activate themes

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so I would consider myself a Power User

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I also know HTML, 'cause I'm a designer

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I really love making themes for WordPress

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so I have that skill set as well

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HTML and CSS 'cause you have to know CSS

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if you know HTML

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I don't know PHP -- I really don't

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I can, like, see kinda what's going on

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and I can move things around and sorta follow it

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but if you gave me a blank file

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and said "do Hello World in PHP"

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I'd be like "sorry"

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So I imagine there's a bunch of folks in this room

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that have similar skill sets

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or maybe you've never even used WordPress yet.

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We can do cool stuff for WordPress, too.

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We can also use WordPress' more advanced functionality

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That they're talking about in the room upstairs

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and has also been mentioned down here as well

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So, what I'm gonna do

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is I'm going to go through a few key

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WordPress development terms

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that have been thrown around in this room and upstairs

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and I going to explain what they are,

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what they do and how you can take advantage of them as well

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First off...The WordPress Template Hierarchy!

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According to the Codex:

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The translation of that is

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Often times -- at least once -- on someone's slides

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during a WordCamp, this chart that shows

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exactly how this naming convention works shows up

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It looks something like this

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Oh my God, holy crap look at that!

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It's like what?

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It looks kinda complicated and overwhelming

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and when I see it come up in a slide

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people are like "woah"

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But it's really pretty simple

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You just follow along the chart

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to see exactly what you need to name your template file

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in order to have it apply to a certain kind of page

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So in this example I m going to talk about

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Category Archives, meaning that when you click on a post

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and see the categories and you click on a category

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and see that page of posts

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So first I want to talk about template files

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So when you have a theme

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Like Twenty Twelve

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Your theme is made up of all these PHP files

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And some of these PHP files are template files

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They are the files that determine how your content

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is going to look on a page or post

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It could be a part of the page

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or it could control the entire page and how it's going to look

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It's kinda like frames for your content, right?

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Here on one side we have picture on left/words on right

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That's what your template files do

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They determine how the pages are going to lay out when they load

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So these template files control the way different pages look

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For instance, the main blog page, meaning the page you go to

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When you see a list of all your posts, the default page for WordPress

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A regular, plain old content page.

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Archive pages - what an archive page is

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Is when you have a post and you have

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tags, categories or author or date

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and you click on those those different parts of a post

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and you see all posts related to that tag, category, etc.

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That's called an archive page

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And other pages as well they are all controlled

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by template files

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So going back to the WordPress Template Hierachy

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How does that work?

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Well, if I have a category called "kittens"

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I just have a file named "category-kittens.php"

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And if that file exists - when I click on that category archive

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it's going to use that file.

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If that file doesn't exist, it's going to look for "category.php"

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That is the template file used to render all category pages

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If that file doesn't exist then it's going to go to "archive.php"

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That is the page for all archives

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For tags, date, author, category...if it doesn't have

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a file that applies to it it's going to use that file

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And then, at the end of the road, is index.php

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And that is the file used to display typically all your posts

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Like your "blog" page

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That's the end of the road in the Template Hierarchy

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If no other no other file exists it's going to default to that one

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So, in this example, I have plain old Twenty Twelve

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I have some sample content in it

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And here I have this one categorized as "kittens"

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And this one I did make a "category-kittens.php"file

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It uses the category slug

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meaning if you look at your list of categories and it says "slug"

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You can use "categories-[slug]" or you can use the category ID

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So for that category I used this lovely template of awesome kittens

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And then I also took off the sidebar

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So that is my special template for that "kittens"category

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If I click on "Dogs"it just uses the default "category.php"

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Which is regular content/sidebar - everything's normal

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So WordPress Template Hierarchy, how can we all use it?

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Power Users, look for themes or theme frameworks

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that allow you to create these template files

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and apply special styles to or different layouts to

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specific categories or tags or certain pages of a site.

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There are theme frameworks that will allow you to do it without code

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all drag-n-drop

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And designers, just make them!

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You should be using a theme that's meant to be changed or

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a child theme of another theme that is not meant to be changed

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but you can actually go in and just make these files yourself

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and make your website look awesome

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Next up is The Loop!

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Codex says:

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The Loop is really just a set of instructions that lives in a template file

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that grabs content and displays in on a page

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Or The Loop's kinda like making sandwiches

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So when you assemble a sandwich you have a certain set of ingredients in a certain order in which you put them

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And then you repeat the process, repeat the process until you have as many sandwiches as you need

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It's called a "Loop" because you can repeat this loop more than once on a page

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So in a WordPress loop there's the 2 main components

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There's "Title" and "Content" for a page or post

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They're like the slices of bread in our sandwich

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And then there's additional content, aka "Metadata" which is like the ingredients in our sandwich

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You can have author, date, featured image, categories or tags for posts, etc. etc.

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There's a lot of additional information you can put in a page or post

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When you are making sandwiches for people what if somebody's vegan

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What if somebody wants wheat bread instead of white bread?

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You can do this as well with your loop, you can have specific instructions as to what information is going to show in the loop

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So you can say "only show posts from a certain category"

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Or if a post has a certain tag add this style to it

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Or if a post is tagged with a certain tag, don't show it at all

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Here is an example of a custom loop we did for this movie blog site called "Movie Fanfare"

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Instead of the usual layout we're using , for instance the featured image for every post

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We're only showing tags, we're not showing categories

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And we're using the Excerpt instead of the full content of the post

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So this is a customized loop

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So how everyone here can use it.

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Power Users, same thing, use a theme or a theme framework that will allow you to modify your post page

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And designers, just do it yourself. They WordPress Codex has a really great article called "The Loop in Action"

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It'll show you how to modify the WordPress Loop

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Custom Post Types!

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We talked about Custom Post Types a lot in this room today

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They're one of my favorite things about WordPress

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The Codex says:

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The translation is, you know how you have pages and posts, right?

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Everybody familiar with Page and Posts?

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Well you can actually make up your own

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In addition to Pages and Posts you can make up your own post types

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Page and Post are both Post Types

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They're similar in that they have their own item in the Admin area

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They have consistent input, meaning that when you when you enter a post

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you have Title, Content, Tags, Categories, Excerpt...

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You have these fields in the admin where it's consistent from one post to another

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and you can choose to use as many as you want

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And then they have, for the most part, a consistent output

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You have template files that render page and posts a similar way every time

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So you can really control how these things look and how they're entered

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The information is cleaner

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Instead of having a big content area you have these sections

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So with Custom Post Types you can do the same thing

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You can create a Custom Post Type, in addition to pages and posts, that follow the same rules

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They have their own sets of fields, they're in the admin, they have their own little icon on the left hand side -- a cute little graphic for it

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They're consistent, you can put information into fields

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And then they render on the front of the site they are consistent there as well

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You can make them look however you want with templates

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So instead of just Pages and Posts you can have stuff like

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Staff, Recipes, Products, Jobs...really anything that would benefit from having this consistent set of fields

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that's easy to enter in all the data instead of a big content area

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Also, along with Custom Posts Types, there are also Custom Taxonomies

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All a taxonomy means is it's a way to group things together

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WordPress by default has 2 taxonomies, categories and tags

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They're a way to group information together - to group posts

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With Custom Post Types you can also create these custom taxonomies

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So let's say we has a post type called "Movies"

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We could create custom taxonomies called Genre, Year, Director, Rating, etc.

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The advantage to that is if you had a movie post you could then click on Genre, Year, Director, whatever

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And see all of the posts related to that director, all with that rating

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And then you could browse all of them in a list

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An example of custom post types is we make a site for Static Guard

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and we made them a site with 3 Custom Post Types: Products, Tips and Stylists

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For the people who have to manage the site going forward, it's really easy

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Instead of having to put everything into a big content area and hope that they format it correctly

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We just made them a custom post type to enter in all the information in the back end

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We made them a template that renders all the information in the way they want it to look

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And then another nice thing about the custom taxonomies is that you can browse by the different taxonomies

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We have Occasions and Seasons

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And they can create these, add these and manage the navigation on the left-hand side

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It's a really great way to make content management easy for site owners

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How can you take advantage of Custom Post Types?

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Power Users - There is a plugin made by Brad (WebDev Studios). He made a plugin that allows you to create Custom Post Types without code

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You can just do everything visually in the admin and there are similar plugins

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And themes that have Custom Post Types built into them where you can create them yourself

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And designers, code your own - really! Really, you can code your own.

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I have another talk all about custom post types for designers it's on wordpress.tv and you can check it out

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With no PHP skills, well, very little, you can make Custom Post Types yourself

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And it's really empowering and fun

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I always say that WordPress makes me fancier than I really am

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Here's the big one - Hooks, Actions and Filters

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The Codex has a lot to say about Hooks, Actions and filters. I'm not going to read it all to your now.

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But pretty much it says Hooks, Actions and Filters allow you to change WordPress functionality without breaking it

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The #1 rule of WordPress development is never, ever, EVER change Core code ever!

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Just don't do it

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The great thing about WordPress is it allows you to tap in to it's existing functionality through hooks and then modify it

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A hook is just a point at which WordPress allows you to tap into existing functionality and safely modify it

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Some examples - WordPress does a lot of things, right?

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It shows excerpts, you admin menus, custom post types, sidebars...

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You have all these things, all these functions that happen when WordPress does its thing

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Hooks are points at which WordPress allows you to make a function that hooks into that and changes it

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There's two ways that you can change it

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An Action is a hook that makes something new happen when it's triggered

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For instance, let's say you want to add a little bit of content or a sharing button after every post

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You can make a little function that says "when you show a post add this content after it"

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That's an Action - something new is happening when WordPress functionality is triggered

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Filters - a hook that modifies a WordPress function when it's triggered

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Instead of making something new happen it modifies an existing function

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For instance "excerpts" in WordPress are by default 55 words long

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You can make a filter that says "instead of using 55 words I want you to show 75 words" or "I want you to show 30 words"

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That's a filter, because you're changing functionality instead of making something new happen

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This is now when I'm going to ask my friend Courtney to come up

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I'm going to show you a visual illustration of Hooks, Actions and Filters

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This is Courtney

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Courtney: Hi

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Ok, Courtney, so wave to everybody

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Alright, so, waving is a typical function that human beings do, right?

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Most people wave

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Well, what if we put hook on her waving functionality?

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So I wrote a little function that says "When you wave say Hello"

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This is an Action - something new is happening in addition to the regular waving

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Let's try it out, let's run this function

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Courtney "Hello, Hello, Hello"

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Awesome, my code worked

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Alright this is an example of a filter - I am going to change her default wave

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it says "When you wave wiggle your fingers"

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Let's try it

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Alright - yay! Thank you

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Do you understand? Is it making sense?

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Good, awesome - Hooks / Actions / Filters

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Thank you, Courtney

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What do Hooks, Actions and Filters do? They make WordPress awesome

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They're the reason that WordPress is a fantastic way to build a website

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Really, the sky's the limit with what you can do with WordPress because of Hooks, Actions and Filters

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Power User, if you've ever used a plugin you're already using Hooks, Actions and Filters

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Plugins hook into WordPress to do new things, additional things

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Designers, you can just add functionality to your themes

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There's a great article in the WordPress Codex on theme development

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But really, if you do things like add sidebars, add menus, add post types you'll be taking advantage of Hooks, Actions and Filters

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I have some resources: The WordPress Codex, I'm in there 50 times a day it feels

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It has the best information on using this functionality and what it is and how to do it

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There's also articles on more WordPress terminology than just the 4 I covered today

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And then there's this really handy Custom Post Type Generator

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It's web-based and you put all the information and then you hit a buttons and it creates all the code for you

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And then there's a great article on WordPress theme frameworks for all you Power Users out there

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To find different frameworks, what they can do and what they allow you to do without knowing code

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And, that's the end

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(Applause) Thank you!

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Moderator: Very Cool, we've got time for some questions

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You know everything you need to know now, right?

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Audience member: Hi, I've always been puzzled about tags and categories. When would you use a tag, when would you use a category - when would you use one over the other

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I guess there is some personal preference to it, but I use categories for major groupings of posts

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I had a blog about a Green Building project that we did

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And I had major categories like "building"or "insulation" -- major groupings of information

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Tags I think more of keywords - terms that would bring your posts up in a search

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Like "red" not something that is a major grouping of information, but more like keywords

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If people were searching by keywords your posts would pop up

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Does that make sense? Cool

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Moderator: Anybody else?

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Audience member: When you're setting up custom post types, say, like you had your example "recipes"

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So you'd have name, ingredients, something like that

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What's the next mechanism to get that to output? You have to make a template for that?

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Tracy: You have to make a template, yes

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Audience member: So you create a template just for that and then link those together

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Tracy: Right, and if you even know just HTML it's not hard.

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You can make little "if there is content in this field then show it"

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And you can put all your nice html tags around it and style it all pretty and now you have a recipes page

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And it uses the WordPress Template Hierarchy - that first thing we looked at

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To show your Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies

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That's in the mix as well

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Audience Member: Hi thank you for giving us hope that you can do all this without knowing PHP number one

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And number two you keep mentioning there's a plugin for this, there's a plugin for that, but you're not mentioning any plugins. Can you mention a few?

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Tracy: Yes, well, all the slides are up on Slideshare and there I have a lot more words in the slides and I have lots of links to the different plugins

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The one plugin by Brad, who's here, is called "Custom Post Types UI"

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and that's how you can make a Custom Post Type in the WordPress admin

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Without code

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Audience member: I went through the learning curve of doing a website for the first time

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and then I purchased some plugins and then I found out that in doing so

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they can make your website less secure coud you speak to that?

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Sure, just like Kathryn talked about earlier, you really have to vet the plugins that you're using

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You look at the ratings, you see how often it's updated, how often support tickets are resolved, how many people have downloaded it...

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That's a good way to vet a plugin

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But still, even plugins that are well supported can still have security vaunerabilites

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At that point you have to look to your hosting.

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WPEngine are here today and they have really great security measures in place

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They have plugins that they just don't allow you to use

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So you can feel better that your site's going to be fast and it wont get hacked

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Because they have a firewall in place for your website

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You shouldn't load your website down with plugins, that could be true or not, the plugins could be great

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You have to make sure you have a good hosting solution that provides an extra layer of safety

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And then just keep on top of things

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You can sign up for different WordPress twitter accounts, blogs or RSS feeds -

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and the news gets out pretty quickly if there's a security vulnerability found in a plugin

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So that's a good way to keep on top of those things

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Moderator: One last question if anybody has one

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Audience Member: Great talk. So the part I struggle with with Custom Post Types

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Is in the admin section, how to make custom fields so my client for example has say a custom post type called "Testimonials"

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And every time they have to add just like the author, or not like a big content piece but almost the size of an excerpt

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Where do I begin to dabble in that so I can manipulate the admin area

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Tracy: If you don't want to do it at the code level, or even if you do

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there's really great tutorials out there that show you exactly how to style meta data in the admin for Custom Post Types

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There's also a really great plugin called Advanced Custom Fields - it was mentioned earlier in the day

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But that's a great plugin. So if you don't want to mess around with code and figure out how to render your metadata in your Custom Post types, use that plugin

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It has awesome things like date pickers - it has a really nice interface

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And it allows you to pretty much drag-and-drop add these meta data fields - that's a good way to go

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Audience Member: Great talk, thank you very much I appreciate it

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Other than Brad's plugin which I am familiar with which is great

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There's a fantastic set or package of plugins which you don't have to fool with PHP

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Called WP Type and Views including forms and everything

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They're even working on Hooks and Filters without having to mess with any PHP whatsoever

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It's pretty cool you can build listing sites with them

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Your own themes using it without knowing any PHP

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I just wanted to put that out there

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It's called Types and Views and they're doing a fabulous job on the development of it

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It's pretty cool

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It's a plugin

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Moderator: Another huge round of applause. Thank you very much, Tracy