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It’s not you, it’s… just time: How to break up well with Advanced Custom Fields
This talk covered how you can start building custom blocks instead of using ACF for custom fields. In this talk, I go over: Link to UW IT Professional Conference Slides here
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How to build custom blocks for the new UW Theme 2.0
At talk Andrea Roenning and I gave about building custom block for our UW Theme 2.0. In this session, we covered: Link to UW IT Professionals Conference Slides here
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How WiscWeb and StratComm combined forces to bring us the UW Theme 2.0
This was a talk our combined teams gave about our experience working together to build the new UW Theme 2.0 theme and suite of plugins. See more below at the link, but we talked about: See more at the UW IT Professionals Conference Slides here
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Thinking in Decades: Career longevity for IT/Developers
My current job at UW–Madison is not one I plan on leaving. Or at least, I don’t plan on leaving the organization. This is pretty counter to the “job hop” advice most tech workers get, change jobs every 2-3 years (or sooner) so you can: Of course I would like to make more money, but…
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Decoupling your CMS with NextJS
We explored how to decouple a traditional content management system (CMS) using Next.js to build a modern, lightning-fast front-end application. We will dive into the technical implementations of: PHP/JSTek Site Slides here
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Make confident changes across your application with Playwright
Also known as “How NOT to blow up your legacy app!… with Playwright! We explored how end-to-end testing can give developers the safety net they need to refactor, redesign, or update features without fear of breaking things. You’ll see practical examples of how to write stable, maintainable Playwright tests, integrate them into your CI pipeline,…
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Building custom blocks for a branded WordPress theme
Andrea Roenning and I gave this talk online for the 2026 DigiCol Dev Summit. We talked about: Slides here
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Serverless Services for Serverful CMSes
As static and headless WordPress sites become more common and mainstream, it’s important to know how to build solutions for dynamic actions these sites make. Common examples are form submissions, site search, real-time updates, etc. How can you build dynamic solutions for static sites? Enter serverless functions and services! If you’ve built custom plugins or…
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A Hike Through the WordPress Database
Have you ever wondered where the content on your WordPress lives? What about the settings of your WordPress. Or have you ever wondered how taxonomies related to posts? Or… maybe you’ve never wondered any of this… 😂 🤓
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Wait, wuuut? Where did my CMS go?!
Static, headless, decoupled, Jamstack, serverless (geez, are there any more names for this stuff?!) sites have already made their way into the mainstream of WordPress and other CMS development. While these sites offer speed, scalability, and security, there are also inherent pitfalls and “gotchas” to be aware of when building in this ways for WordPress…