Speaker Spotlight: Yannick Lefebvre!

WordCamp Montreal is only a few weeks away! We’re as excited as ever about this event. We’ve prepared a speaker spotlight series that will show off some of our speakers at this years event!

Our first spotlight is on local plugin developer, Yannick Lefebvre!

A tech enthusiast working in the modeling and simulation software industry, Yannick has been blogging since 2003, started using WordPress in 2004 and published his first plugin, Link Library, in March 2005. Since then, he’s released six other plugins, all hosted on the official WordPress.org site. He absolutely love using WordPress to develop web sites and find PHP to be a most liberating language compared to more traditional languages such as C/C++.

Yannick will be giving talk on Plugin Development Demystified.

Why WordPress?

Yannick Lefebvre

After briefly trying out the Blogger platform in 2003, I turned to WordPress in 2004 to get more control on the way my content was published and gain access to a lot more functionality. As a programmer, I was stunned by the platform’s reliability and openness. I quickly started developing my first plugin, Link Library, to fulfill a need that a plain vanilla WordPress install did not offer and never looked back. With each new release, I am always amazed to see all of the new features that are put into WordPress along with the thought and care that goes into the developer APIs to allow us to be even more creative in our extensions.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Ever since I first started using WordPress, I have always thought about how I could give back to the community that provides me with such a rich platform. The seven open source plugins that I have published to the WordPress official site are part of that effort, but I also felt a need to connect with local WordPress users. After finding the WordPress Montreal Community Facebook page, I found out about last year’s Wordcamp and immediately decided to share my knowledge of plugin development with this group. With the great reception that I had with my first presentation, coming back for seconds was a no brainer.

What is your talk going to be about?

I will be explaining to WordPress developers how easy developing a plugin for the WordPress platform can be. The topics that I will cover will include everything from the first few lines of a plugin file to registering action and filter hooks to creating shortcodes and putting together admin panels for your plugin. This talk is primarily focused towards WordPress developers but users might also appreciate learning a bit more about how all of the plugins that they use are built.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Montreal?

Connecting with other WordPress users and developers during breaks, lunches and evenings. I had a great time talking with other members of the community last year and learned a lot from these conversations and some of these contacts became good friends beyond the event. If anything, I hope that breaks between talks will be slightly longer than last year if the schedule allows for it 😉

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

To appreciate both the ease of use and power of the WordPress development API.

What is your favourite WordPress plugin, and why?

I am obviously biased as a WordPress plugin developer. I will have to go with my most popular plugin, Link Library. It powers two sections of my personal site and has become a cornerstone of many of my users’ sites.