Trevor Mills
Trevor Mills is the owner of Top Quark, a WordPress development shop specializing in plugins and apps for conferences and festivals. He is a creative and intuitive developer and an open-minded and eager mentor. He holds a degree in Nuclear Physics from the University of Toronto and recently relocated to Barrie with his family. He also plays bass in the Juno award winning band, Digging Roots.
Why WordPress?
Because it’s a joy to make it jump through hoops. There’s nothing that can’t be done with WordPress. The architecture is poetry and possibilities are endless.
What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?
Speaking about building mobile apps within WordPress; meeting Dale from Brave New Code; seeing and meeting the Toronto area WordPress community; hanging out and watching Toronto establish itself as a Canadian WordPress centre, particularly in the area of plugin and app development. Go Canada!
Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Toronto?
Because I’m personally excited by the work that I’m doing bringing apps to the WordPress platform. I want to meet other developers with similar interests and find ways to collaborate. Plus, I kinda love getting up in front of a crowd.
What is your talk going to be about?
My talk is going to be about building native-feeling apps within WordPress. The idea is to use WordPress as the content management for the apps, but render the apps outside of the WordPress theme framework. I’m building apps using a Javascript framework called Sencha Touch which requires the whole page from theto the. So, data is managed from the dashboard and the app is rendered using Sencha Touch. It’s an interesting marriage with a lot of possibilities.
A lot of my talk is going to be focused on a new plugin about to be released that builds an offline-capable native feeling app (using Sencha Touch) out of any WordPress post_type.
What is one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
Excitement and inspiration for building cross-device, native-feeling apps using WordPress to manage the information.
What is your favourite WordPress plugin or theme? Why?
Mine: The Conference App – because it’s fun to see information about an event managed within WordPress show up as a native-feeling app. It’s also fun and simple to customize in a wide open manner to make it do whatever the event needs it to do.
Others: Widget Logic – because it’s an elegant way to be able to say which pages a particular widget will appear on; W3 Total Cache – the best caching plugin; WPTouch – making WordPress mobile; Event Calendar Pro – awesome for creating posts that are events.
