Troy is a WordPress designer, developer and enthusiast who enjoys pushing the envelop with each new project. With over 10 years of experience in a creative environment, he has dedicated his professional life to working with WordPress on several levels.
When he is not doing contract work or building a theme for fun, his main job is helping a small team at Carleton University enhance their web presence and providing content editors around the university with intuitive tools to help promote their activities and initiatives.
Follow @troychaplin on Twitter.
Troy will be giving a talk titled An Introduction to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
I like the changes made to the media library, cleaner overall look and is more intuitive to the average person. That being said, I still feel there’s a whole lot more that can be done, and I’m sure will be done to improve the media library.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
I felt like the topic that I’m speaking about (An Introduction to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies) is something that all users of WordPress should be aware of, whether they are beginners, or experienced users. Both types of functionality can open new doors and knowing more about them as you plan the future of a site can be a big help.
What is your talk going to be about?
I’m speaking about Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, what they are, and how you can use them to your advantage by thinking outside of the box when planning a website. My talk will provide lots of great examples of how I’ve used them in a variety of ways across multiple sites to achieve specific goals of a project.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Ideas. If people walk away from my talk with new ideas on handling their various content sections then I feel that I’ve done what I’ve set out to do. I always like to believe that nothing is impossible if you allow yourself to think outside the box, and I hope to help others think the same.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
I could easily name several core developers as I do draw inspiration from their hard work and dedication, but the community as a whole inspires me to do more. Especially those who give up their own free time to help others in the community through the WordPress forums, or contributing to core through trac, or making cool plugins and giving them out with no monetary gain. WordPress has the best community around, and the dedication and involvement inspires me to use my skills to give back however I can.
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
Improved media library would be at the top of my list. With WordPress moving more and more towards a powerful CMS, I believe a folder-like structure for organizing files by type would be a benefit.
One other area that I would love to see in core relates to the internal page linking tool. Currently it links pages using an absolute path, so when a user changes the page hierarchy, those links break. If the link were created using the page or post ID, and then the permalink would be rewritten on the front end, that would make a big difference.
