Speaker Feature: Daryl Koopersmith

Have you seen the new style update for the upcoming WordPress 3.2 release? If you haven’t, here’s a little preview. Most of the code behind the update can be attributed to Daryl Koopersmith, a JavaScript, CSS, and front-end development core contributor for WordPress core. You might remember Koop from his work during the Google Summer of Code on the Elastic Theme Editor.

At this year’s WordCamp, Daryl will be giving us a primer on the Basics and Best Practices for using JavaScript in WordPress:

Many WordPress developers are skilled in the art of PHP, but freeze when confronted with a screen full of JavaScript. I’d like to change that.

I’ll discuss JavaScript’s numerous differences from PHP, how to use JavaScript in WordPress, and a handful of best practices. Are you using jQuery’s ‘ready’ event properly? Why does JavaScript’s ‘this’ keyword cause so much grief? What the heck is prototypal inheritance? I’ll answer each of these questions (and more) through simple examples.

As developers, it’s important to understand the tools we use. Learn to write better JavaScript.