I was very fortunate to attend the 2013 WordPress VIP Developer conference in Napa Valley this year. It was great to meet all of the people who use WordPress at scale across the media space and the lovely people behind it all at Automattic. Also crazy to see that the average development team size for someone on WordPress VIP is 2-3, considering many of these sites are serving millions of uniques a day that is incredibly lean.
I was asked to give a lightening talk (less than 5 minutes) on a subject and I decided I would give a quick overview of how we have approached building Swipe into metro.co.uk. This seemed to go down quite well though qz.com were on after me and what they have done with their front end is even more impressive. I thought it would be a nice idea to put my slide deck up somewhere for viewing.
UPDATE: Metro have decided to remove swipe from Metro.co.uk for these reasons.
One of the other talks the previous day was by Yuri Victor on why the Washington Post uses WordPress and if you haven’t already seem it then it is definitely worth the visit even for the typography alone.
Other great notes from the few days were to use the following for WordPress debugging.
Also use Grunt to automate the use of these two libraries for image optimisation.
Generating fonts to help reduce images/sprites can be a good idea or just use Genericons which have been done for you. Also I found out that script tags on a page are completely blocking.
Great presentation. And good to see/chat with you again last week!