Mike is seasoned web developer with over 14 years of experience. Currently, he works at Carleton University where he and a small team manage 250+ WordPress sites. When he’s not up to his neck in code, or banging his head against his desk, he enjoys playing music and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.
Follow @cuweb on Twitter.
Michael will be giving a talk titled 3.5 Ways to Make Your Life Easier.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
Lately, i’ve been developing in the 3.6 beta environment and I think some of the upcoming features are some of the best to date. The overall improvements to the UI of the admin panel, and the editorial workflow are very cool. The changes to the post revision and the post-locking and autosave systems will be an amazing improvement, especially for our environment at Carleton University which has hundreds of authors. 3.6 is going to be awesome!
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
Last year I was at WordCamp San Francisco last year, and I was at WordCamp Ottawa this year. Both were amazing, fun, and extremely educational experiences. They inspired me to get involved in anyway I could.
What is your talk going to be about?
I’m talking about development methods that I use to make coding easier and faster but that also increase the overall quality the sites that I develop. There are very simple things that you can add into your development process that will make all the difference.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
I think many of the things i’m discussing are things developers always wished for (variables and functions in CSS, creating fully valid and semantic markup with one line of text, etc). I’m hoping people walk away with new methods they can apply to make their development process faster and easier.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
I know this is probably a very typical answer, but the community probably inspires me the most. There’s always someone willing to lend a helping and and developers giving their time to make WordPress better.
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
Continued improvements to the admin UI are always welcome. Accessibility improvements to not only the core themes and admin panel, but also to the default HTML output would be a welcome addition. I’d also like to see more upgrades done to the media manager, adding a way to structure or organize the media would be a massive improvement especially for those that use WordPress as a CMS.
