Columbia Lightning Talks

How to clean up the WordPress Database, David Greenwald

Is your website running slowly? If you’ve had a WordPress site for a few years, it could be the MySQL database—the silent killer of WordPress performance. For many of us, the database is the most intimidating optimization challenge, leaving it to make sites bloated, expensive, and ready to crash under high traffic. But it’s actually not that scary. Using WordPress plugins and phpMyAdmin, we’ll build the skills to diagnose database issues, go over some common problems and weird edge cases, and learn how to safely fix and maintain the database for top performance.

Holy Blockamole: Tips On Learning Block Development, Andrew Taylor

New development workflows can be scary. Want to create your first custom block but don’t know where to start? This talk will help you get started on your journey to modern JavaScript WordPress development by sharing resources, tips, and lessons learned from developing custom WordPress blocks.

Gutenberg and WordCamp.org’s Shortcodes, Corey McKrill

One of the exciting things about Gutenberg blocks is that they can serve a similar purpose to many shortcodes that generate a “block” of content, but with more flexibility and a much more user-friendly interface. Creating Gutenberg versions of your shortcodes is also a good step in future-proofing your plugins and sites. This talk shows how some of the custom shortcodes from WordCamp.org have been adapted into Gutenberg blocks.

Speakers