php[world] 2018 to Feature Full-Day Gutenberg Development Workshop

The fourth annual php[world] conference is just two weeks away. The event is dedicated to uniting the PHP community and will be held November 14-15, 2018, in Washington, D.C.

This year the organizing team created a “Content Advisory Board” to ensure the event included sessions that will appeal to everyone. The board includes two WordPress Developers, two Drupal developers, and two more more general PHP developers. They reviewed all incoming talk submissions and gave organizers ideas on what they thought would be of greatest interest to each community.

php[world] has traditionally included several topics and speakers from the WordPress world. This year the program features a full-day training workshop on Gutenberg development led by Josh Pollock and Zac Gordon. The workshop is called The Future of WordPress Development and is available through a separate day ticket.

“We’ve always tried to focus php[world] on being the PHP conference that appeals to WordPress and Drupal developers as well,” conference co-chair Eli White said. “We all write PHP (and JavaScript) code, and the DC area is full of WordPress and Drupal development shops. In fact, the majority of people in the local PHP user groups are doing WordPress development anyway. So we should all just be learning from each other.

“For WordPress, that was obviously Gutenberg. Currently the release date for WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg is November 19th, just a few days after php[world], and so it’s a really important topic for any developer who works with WordPress to be familiar with.”

Workshop attendees can expect to become better acquainted with extending Gutenberg. The instructors plan to cover the basics of block creation as well as more advanced topics like making blocks dynamic and creating advanced blocks with the WordPress REST API and Redux.

“For the workshop, our goal is to get folks comfortable with what they could do with Gutenberg,” Josh Pollock said. “We’ll cover the anatomy of a block, and different patterns for creating simple and complex blocks. We’ll go over each of the types of block types you can create and have hands-on time to play with these new skills and ask real time questions.

“Developers should leave with an understanding of the different types of blocks they can build and why. They’ll also get plenty of example code, links, and advice they can use when it’s time to build blocks for their own WordPress projects.”

The event includes a few other sessions geared towards WordPress developers: David Wolfpaw is giving a workshop called “Building WordPress Themes: A Primer” and Mo Jangda from Automattic is giving a talk on “How to Handle a Site Outage.” There is another full-day training on modern PHP security that happens the day before the Gutenberg workshop that White said the WordPress Developers on the content board urged them to include.

The main conference is also hosting many sessions that would benefit WordPress developers who want to sharpen their PHP skills. A few highlights include:

Steve Grunwell is giving a “Crash-Course in PHP Namespaces.”

Sara Goleman, a core PHP contributor, will be talking about “PHP: Now and Tomorrow,” discussing the PHP roadmap for 7.4 and 8.0.

Brandon Savage is giving a two-hour workshop on “Object-Oriented Design Principles,” designed to be a an introduction or refresher on OOP best practices.

Check out the full schedule on the php[world] website.