This is the slideshow for my presentation at WordCamp Seattle, Nov. 5, 2017
Enjoy! Please feel free to add constructive comments, corrections, alternative solutions, and your own advice for empowering web admins and improving maintainability.

Talk Description

“I never want my site to change.” – Said No Client Ever

Healthy websites change over time just like healthy businesses do. As developers, it is our job to empower website admins, and make our sites more maintainable.

This talk shares design patterns and best practices you will find invaluable when creating custom themes for clients, and demonstrates how to implement them using Advanced Custom Fields (ACF).

ACF is a powerful development tool used to easily manage custom fields and data.

Since the possibilities are endless, we will explore a handful of specific examples. These will include…

Providing simple options for clients:

  • Editable content fields for specific sections, such as changing the image and copy overlay for hero images
  • Single, repeatable call-to-action blocks
  • Choose between several kinds of content blocks
  • Choose a custom post type “product” to be the featured product

Providing options for advanced users:

  • Add a field for custom CSS classes
  • Automatically apply ids so admins can apply custom CSS
  • Expose specific styling elements, such as tweaking the position of background images
  • Apply icons to menu items
  • Optionally add a sidebar to single content blocks
  • Force a content block to be full width

And many more!