WordCamp NYC jQuery Slides
This weekend, @zgordon and I decended on Baruch College in New York City with 740+ other WordPress peeps for two very full days of WordPress. I gave an introductory jQuery talk to a receptive crowd on Saturday afternoon.
I covered:
- A look at the current state of jQuery
- A look at DOM manipulation and some popular aspects of jQuery
- An overview of some handy plugins, including browser fixes, gallery tools, AJAX/JSON, etc.
- Adding jQuery to WordPress themes
At long last…
My slides are here. Enjoy. If you were there, please let me know what you thought!
I was asked to give an ignite style 5 minute talk the next day. I was really tired and I don’t think it worked very well as a short talk. Five minutes just wasn’t enough!
I came away with a lot, more of which will appear here in the future. It was great to catch up with Jeremy Clarke and Rebekah (I’ve downloaded net beans), hang out with Jim Groom and to meet Baltimore’s own John Bintz of Comic Press. Andrea_r and Ron, pillars of the MU community, we even nicer in person. I loved Noel Jackson’s talk on P2/Monotone. I had a great conversation with Dan Milward as we walked to Baruch on Day 2.
Thank you to everyone who attended my talk! What a great weekend!
P.S. Thank Zac for the photos and helping me out so much!
November 16th, 2009 at 11:27 am
Thanks for sharing. Is it really better to avoid using wp_enqueue_script? What about plugins that try to add jquery into the mix? You might have multiple versions!
November 16th, 2009 at 11:36 am
Bill: It depends. My thinking is that if you are planning on releasing your theme into the wild, it’s best to have your own library available. WP will always have the latest version of jQuery and Prototype, and if one of your jQuery plugins or your theme uses something that’s been deprecated, it could cause trouble.
The majority of the themes I’ve looked at from WordPress.org (the most popular ones) have their own version of jQuery. As I mentioned in the talk, you can always do a conditional check to see if a jQuery object already exists.
November 16th, 2009 at 12:35 pm
Jim,
it was awesome to finally hang out this weekend, I just wish I had more time to do it. But luckily we are pretty cose to one another in terms of Georgraphy, so I’ll have to invite you down, or you invite me up so we can actually have some sustained time to talk about a range of things from skateboarding to WordPress to Tom Woodward :)
Congrats on the talk, and look forward to much more soon.
November 16th, 2009 at 1:25 pm
Jim,
Thanks a lot – it was great to see you again, too. Absolutely, we’ll hang out in the near-ish future. Perhaps after little Groom #3 comes, I’ll make the trek down there.
November 17th, 2009 at 6:40 am
It was great to see you too! You make jquery sound so easy. ;)
November 19th, 2009 at 12:02 pm
[...] Doran ran through a series of neat effects that can be achieved with the jQuery library, including: rounding corners, writing scripts to the header and rotating images. For more see Jim Doran.net. [...]
December 9th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Your lightning talk is nevertheless captured for posterity.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXgYwFTgbyY
June 26th, 2010 at 8:49 am
I run into a lot of compatibility issues with using the WordPress included version. Why is WordPress so against using my own.
June 26th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Gordon:
If a theme maker is contributing themes to WordPress.org, it would be ideal if they use the latest version of jQuery, and it’s king of assumed that the contributor will keep their code tested and updated. If EVERYONE did this, it would cut down on collisions with theme and plugins.
Since I’ve given this talk, I’ve come to think using wp enqueue is the best method. You just need to test and see if jQuery is already loaded by something else.