Web Designer, Developer, Blogger and Mentor for the past 15 years. My loyalty shifted from HTML pages to CMS like WordPress and Joomla as I developed 5 of my own and more than 2 dozen WordPress primarily installations. With the intro of WordPress 3.0 I began to work exclusively with it for Web designs requiring a CMS.

Speaker Session

WP Front-End Editors in the User/Admin track.

Drag and drop Visual Designers have a checkered history in software development: too proprietary, too complex to learn, generate low-performance spam code, etc. Now in the past 3-5 years WordPress has seen the emergence of frontend Visual Theme Designers.

This presentation will examine 2 questions:

1. Is there a rock solid WordPress Visual Designer?
2. Can these tools replace the bulk of WordPress theme development using PHP and the WordPress Codex?

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

All attendees will benefit from the general review and demo of WordPress Visual Design tools. WordPress designers and developers will get specific insights on the features and methods used by the major tools for drag and drop Theme Design:

• The top 4 WordPress Visual Design tools
• The common features provided by all the tools.
• The unique features and component/widgets provided by each tool.
• Each tools support for mobile and responsive designs.
• Each tools support of popular eCommerce plugins and server-side connections
• An assessment of the costs and trade-offs of each tool
• Futures including Automattic designating one tool as preferred interface creation tool.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Toronto?

First, as a mentor and presenter, I enjoy doing presentations very much. But also the topic of using drag and drop Visual Designers is quite relevant.

Can the performance of Visual Designers match the the features and speed of WP API developed themes? I will provide some insights.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was an early adopter of WordPress starting with my TheOpenSourcery.com site. Plugins and themes were the original attraction. But with the extension of automatic updates to the overall new-version WP installation, the die was cast in WordPress favor.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

Since I use well over 2 dozen plugins and themes, this is a very hard choice. Bavotsan’s Magazine Basic theme I use quite often because of its responsive, mobile ready features plus magazine magazine layout.

On the plugin side I will choose WPIDE and CSS & JavaScript Toolbox. These 2 plugins allow some nifty hacks plus WP API work.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Finding out more about how WordPress is being used on the Toronto Scene. Here in Eastern Ontario WP is used less often than expected with Single Page Designs using Bootstrap.JS and Foundation.JS appearing to dominate the new site scene.