{"id":4638,"date":"2019-06-12T13:48:06","date_gmt":"2019-06-12T18:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2019.kansascity.wordcamp.org\/?post_type=wcb_session&p=4638"},"modified":"2019-08-04T16:21:30","modified_gmt":"2019-08-04T21:21:30","slug":"wordpress-customization-101-avoiding-plugin-overload-and-using-wordpress-hooks-to-your-advantage-with-ryan-wells","status":"publish","type":"wcb_session","link":"https:\/\/kansascity.wordcamp.org\/2019\/session\/wordpress-customization-101-avoiding-plugin-overload-and-using-wordpress-hooks-to-your-advantage-with-ryan-wells\/","title":{"rendered":"WordPress Customization 101 – Avoiding Plugin Overload and using WordPress Hooks to your Advantage with Ryan Wells"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Ryan<\/h4>\n

Saturday, June 29th, 1pm – Capitol Federal Conference Center (RC 101)<\/a><\/h4>\n

I recently took over a website for a client. It was a simple Ecommerce site with about 2,000 visitors a month. Only one problem though:<\/span> It had 122 plugins<\/b>.<\/span> Features as little as adding pictures of payment methods to the footer <\/span>were powered by a plugin! <\/i><\/b> This was incredibly bad for the site for many reasons, the main one being 63 of them needed an update and these updates would crash the site half the time.<\/span> There are some very good plugin developers out there who build very useful additions to WordPress sites that make your website better. They maintain their code and send out regular updates to account for a constantly changing WordPress core.<\/span> Then there are those who don\u2019t maintain their code. They build a plugin because it sounds cool, then get bored or busy and stop updating it and here you are having built an entire system around this piece of software that flat out doesn\u2019t work anymore.<\/span> In my experience, a lot of the customizations you want to do can be done with some simple additions to the code. In this session I\u2019m going to teach you how to make functions.php your best friend.<\/span><\/p>\n