Wow!

What a flurry of learning it has been meeting with all of the amazing advisors for the JavaScript for WordPress Master Course (and then following up on all the resources they have shared)!

I’d like to share a few cool things I’ve learned from them in the last few weeks:

Scott Bolinger

Scott is an AngularJS and Ionic guy, well known for his work with AppPresser.  He talked to me about the upcoming changes with Angular 2 (some details) and ES6, the importance of learning JS concepts like Scope and Binding (I recommend reading this), and why he likes the tool Webpackover Grunt or Gulp.

He has some great articles on his blog that I recommend reading.  Also, follow Scott on Twitter.

 

Kevin Stover

Kevin StoverKevin works as lead dev on the wonderful Ninja Forms plugin and recently rebuilt the entire thing using Backbone, Underscore, Marionette and some jQuery.  He very graciously walked me through the code, architecture decisions and some of the weird things he learned along the way (like working with RequireJS and WordPress).  I didn’t completely understand 100% of everything he showed me, but it was a very educational and I took lots of notes 😉

He shared this about it all:  “We’ve always wanted Ninja Forms to be as extensible as possible. Backbone, along with Underscore templating, takes customization to a whole new level; you can create HTML templates to replace any form element. The possibilities are really exciting. Of course, it also means we have a more stable and maintainable code base.”  Thanks Kevin! Follow Kevin on Twitter.

Adam Silverstein

Several advisors suggested I talk with Adam, who worked on the Revisions update in Core using Backbone.js.  Next time you’re in WordPress check out the interface for Revisions on a post or page then watch his WordCamp talk on how they did this. He also has some more great WordCamp talks on Backbone.

We talked as well about other examples of Backbone in Core, like the Media Grid, Theme Browser and Customizer.  He emphasized the move away from using AJAX and shared a really great WP API JavaScript library built in Backbone on Github.  Follow Adam on Twitter.

See what I mean?!!

That’s just three of the 20+ advisors we have helping with the course!!!  I’ll be coming to you again next week with some more great tips from my discussions.

I hope that we can all benefit from the wisdom they have shared. If you have specific questions for any of the advisors listed on the site, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do 🙂

Enjoy the links in your spare time and until next time,
Keep on Learning and Happy WordPressing!!!

Cheers,
Zac

PS – I have a blog post coming this week on “Where I Have Been (Re)Learning JavaScript”.  Follow me on Twitter and on my WordPress Blog to see the post.  It has tons of articles, videos and online courses 🙂