Sessions at WordCamp Philly 2011 about WordPress Plugins on Saturday 5th November

The first part of this session is a brainstorming session. I will ask the audience for plugin ideas. I’ll come prepared with a few of my own to help seed things. I will share a few points to think of when working on a plugin idea.

Our focus in this session will be on coming up with an idea that is (a) useful to the WP community and (b) straight forward enough to code in one night. Something that can be built upon later is okay if it is immediately useful out the gate. (Minimal Viable Product)

At around the midpoint we’ll vote on the ideas and the group will choose the plugin I’ll code that night.

In the second half of the session, I will start designing the plugin. What will the file structure be? What will the main programming tasks be? What do we already know how to do? What do we need to figure out how to do?

I’ll ask if there is a business model for the plugin we selected, although that’s not a perquisite to be chosen. If there is a business model, we’ll sketch it out roughly. If down the line the plugin becomes profitable in some way, we can distribute earnings to session attendees (1 share per seat) or to a charity chosen by the group. We’ll vote on this as a group if it’s applicable to the chosen plugin.

And that’s the session. That night I will code the plugin and push it into the WordPress repository that night. The next day, we’ll present it to the conference between sessions or at lunch. If there is time available, a follow up session the next day might be fun.

As many of you know WordPress is endlessly extensible. Plugins are a main component of this flexibility. In this class we’ll cover

Plugin requirements
Dev basics
Security best practices
Examples and Resources

We’ll even create a new plugin from the ground up! Bring your laptop