Last night, WordPress DC (which, if you live in/near Washington, D.C. and love WordPress, you really must join) held a round of lightning talks covering a range of WordPress and WordPress-related topics.
I gave a quick five-minute talk on some stupid Sass tricks you can do, including changing the entire color scheme on a page just using one hex color and a whole bunch of Sass color functions. Then I demoed how you can create odd grid systems by again, modifying only a handful of variables.
As I was creating the grid demo, I started to realize that easily creating an infinitely-customizable fluid grid system might not be so stupid at all, so I turned the whole lot into an SCSS file you can include in your projects and posted it to GitHub Gists. So I present to you: griddr. I’ve documented as well as possible for now, but I’ll certainly be refining it in coming weeks.
Back to the talks: the specific topics ranged from responsive web design to what makes a good plugin and SalesForce/WordPress integration. There was also a great mix of novice and experienced speakers as well as self-employed developers, employees of non-profits, and employees of one of the premiere distributed WordPress development shops. Two of my favorite talks came in towards the end of the evening: Victoria Pickering gave some very useful development and debugging tips when building WordPress sites and Russell Heimlich demoed a new plugin he developed at the Pew Research called WP Gizmos which allows specific widgets on a per-page and per-post basis. Awesome!
A lot of information got packed into five minute chunks, and I’d certainly love to see some of these topics expanded upon for full talks in later meetups and WordCamps.
I thought Victoria’s talk was awesome. I wish there were more beginner talks.