Kirk Wight
WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!
Our next spotlight is Kirk Wight!
Kirk builds WordPress websites for fun and a living in Montreal, Quebec. He is a former IT Manager, and also volunteers for the WordPress Theme Review Team.
Follow @kwightca on Twitter.
Kirk will be giving a talk titled Getting Started With Theme Development.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
I haven’t played with them much yet, but I would have to say the header images and theme customization improvements of 3.4. But I’m biased 🙂
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
I wanted to help people get off on the right foot when beginning theme development.There’s a lot involved, so hopefully some tips in the right direction can maximize a new dev’s fun heading in to the learning curve. And as they say, the best way to learn is to teach others.
What is your talk going to be about?
Getting Started in Theme Development will take us through the tools, skills and process for building solid themes based on WordPress best practices. Hopefully I can convince a few people to not make some mistakes I’ve made myself 🙂
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
I’d like people to see how exciting developing good themes can be. It’s seriously cool stuff.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
Ian Stewart (@iandstewart) has been super supportive and very helpful to me, for which I’ll always be grateful; I started out working with his Thematic framework. I also follow some Core devs (eg. @otto42, @nacin, @markjaquith), various Automatticians (eg. @jkudish, @viper007bond, @kovshenin, @mattwiebe), other theme reviewers (eg. @chipbennett, @emiluzelac, @sabreuse) and Matt‘s never-ending mealstream.
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
There’s got to be a better way of handling multilingual sites. I’m fairly certain that doing it well would involve big changes to Core, rather than just another gargantuan plugin, so I’m not holding my breath. Oh, and better portability. I know databases are involved but jeez, moving a site or restoring backups just shouldn’t be this painful.
