Yannick Lefebvre is an author and plugin developer who has released eight projects to the official WordPress repository to this day. His book, WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook, is available from Packt Publishing. His first creation, Link Library, has been used on WordPress sites around the world. With a background in Computer Science, he started writing plugins for his own WordPress site in 2004 and quickly started sharing his creations with the community. You can find out more about him and his plugins on his blog, Yannick’s Corner.
Follow @ylefebvre on Twitter.
Yannick will be giving a talk titled “So, you want to be a plugin developer?“.
What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?
As a plugin developer, I am always looking for features that will help me improve my plugins. My favorite improvement was actually introduced by the latest Jetpack version, and that’s the new admin styling with the tab layout. Very styling and looks great with the new admin style.
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?
As a long-time WordPress user and plugin developer, I always look for ways to give back to the WordPress community, and I feel that sharing my knowledge around plugin development is a great way to do this. Many have expressed curiosity to me over time about making some of their work public and I hope to encourage them to do so.
What is your talk going to be about?
My talk will cover everything you should consider when thinking about making a plugin and releasing it to the WordPress community. This includes finding an idea for a plugin, an overview of coding standards and design decision, promoting your work and monetization strategies, as well as post-release concerns like support, testing and update strategies.
While my talk is addressed at developers, the topics that I will be covering are all around high-level organizational and business-related aspects of plugin development.
What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
That creating plugins involves a lot of work but is very rewarding and can become quite approachable once you understand all tasks involved.
Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?
Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) for his vision and leadership, Chris Bavota (@bavotasan) for his great theme and sharing an understanding of user support, all of the Montreal Automatticians
What new feature would you like to see in the future?
WordPress always feel very full-featured to me. That being said, I feel that they could do better at incorporating tiny features that small plugins add. This way, users and integrators won’t have to worry about constantly re-installing and updating certain plugins on each site they work on. This includes things like display item and category IDs in the editor, or enabling shortcodes in text widgets. These are simple things that could be addressed in the core of the tool.
