Shawn is a partner at Fivesense Technologies in Ottawa, Canada. A lifelong computer geek, Shawn wrote his first database application at the age of 12, and ran a bulletin board system while in high school. He has been a web developer since 1995, and a WordPress developer since 2011. He has experience building applications for clients in government, non-profit and the private sector in both Canada and the United States.

Follow @shawnhooper on Twitter

Shawn will be giving a talk titled “WP-CLI: Save Time by Managing WordPress from the Command Line“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

From a developer’s point of the view: The updates to WP_Query. The improvements made in the last year have allowed you to perform much more complicated queries against the database.

From a user’s perspective: The updates to the plugin management screens. They’ve made finding, and updating, your plugins so much more pleasant.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Montreal is full of active members of the WordPress community, who have been really supportive of the community in Ottawa. It’s nice to give back.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about using the WP-CLI tools to manage your sites from the command line. I’ll be teaching you how to install it, and then going through my favourite features. I don’t want to give too much away, but you can do a lot with it.

This talk isn’t only for developers, but also for theme designers, and those who implement sites using existing themes and plugins.

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

I want everyone to come away with the tricks that will help save them hours of time when designing, developing and managing their sites.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Everyone who spends time to give back to the WordPress project. Whether you’re writing code, testing patches, updating documentation, running local meetups or helping others in the support forums, you’re the ones who make WordPress so great.

Who do I follow? That’s a long list. My WordPress people list on Twitter has over 400 people in it.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I’m really looking forward to the WordPress REST API to be integrated into core. I think that’s really going to solidify WordPress as an application framework, leading our favourite open source project to be used in ways we haven’t yet dreamed of.