How to Speak “Conversational Developer”

Many of us here aren’t developers. We might have a fuzzy notion of what they do and why they’re important. When we run into an issue while using WordPress, we might know that it’s a developer who can fix the problem, but do we know how to explain the issue to them? More importantly, do we understand the answer they’re giving?

There’s a lot of technical jargon that many developers assume as common knowledge to anyone using WordPress: How is your backend configured? What theme are you running, and is it based on a framework? Is it a Genesis-based theme? A child-theme? Are you working with vanilla CSS3 or Sass? What version of PHP is your server running? Are you on a shared host, a dedicated VPS, or a managed solution? Are you seeing a server error or a PHP error?

The avalanche of questions and terminology can be completely overwhelming.

In this talk, I’ll break down some basic terminology, explain the foundational concept of how a WordPress site works, and in the end, try to help you bridge the language gap between you and your developer.

Speaker