The Secret Art of WordPress: Ottawa 2017

A WordCamp Ottawa 2017 talk on a dozen practical WordPress shortcuts: theme-level tricks, useful hooks and filters, and a few playful workarounds that the speaker described as "childish tricks." Light on theory, heavy on things you can copy-paste.

Where and when

• Event: WordCamp Ottawa 2017
• Date: Saturday, July 22, 2017
• Room: Parliament Room (Room 1)
• City: Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

The premise

From the published WordCamp Ottawa 2017 session listing:

"The theme of my presentation will be themes. Learn how to plugin(to) the power of WordPress with a dozen tried and true shortcuts. Hook into some powerful actions, filter out excess work, and treat yourself to some childish tricks."

Watch or read

This session was not recorded for WordPress.tv.

A representative shortcuts framework

The original twelve-shortcut list isn't recovered. The section below presents a representative framework of the kinds of shortcuts a 2017 WordPress educator with this speaker's background would teach in a session like this. Each item is flagged as "still applies in 2026" or "now superseded" so a 2026 reader can use the framework safely.

Theme-level shortcuts (the abstract called this "the theme of my presentation will be themes")

• Conditional template tags like is_front_page(), is_singular('post'), and is_tax(), for surgical layout decisions in header.php and footer.php. Still applies.
• Filtering body_class and post_class to add hooks for CSS without editing template files. Still applies.
• Template hierarchy fallthrough: naming a file single-{post-type}.php instead of branching inside single.php. Still applies; full-site editing in 2026 introduced an additional template layer but the hierarchy still resolves below it.

Hook-into-some-powerful-actions shortcuts

• Late wp_head additions for analytics, schema, or feature-flag scripts via add_action('wp_head', ..., 99). Still applies.
• init for early registrations: custom post types, taxonomies, REST routes. Still applies; REST routes are now first-class.
• save_post for derived data: slugs, meta caches, denormalized fields. Still applies.

Filter-out-excess-work shortcuts

• Disabling emoji injection via remove_action('wp_head', 'print_emoji_detection_script', 7) on sites that don't need it. Still applies.
• Stripping the WordPress generator meta tag for security-conscious clients. Still applies; this is the entire premise of one of the speaker's shipped plugins, This Is My URL Shadow.
• Filtering excerpt_length and excerpt_more at the theme level instead of editing every excerpt by hand. Still applies.
• Conditional asset loading via wp_enqueue_scripts with is_singular() guards, so calculator-only JavaScript doesn't ship to the homepage. Still applies; the 2026 block-editor world adds block.json for per-block asset loading on top of this.

"Childish tricks": the playful end of the spectrum

• Easter-egg hooks: comments and admin notices that show up only on a specific date or for a specific user. Still applies; in 2017 these were charming, in 2026 they should be opt-in.
• Custom Howdy in the admin bar. Still applies: a small touch that signals craft.
• Dashboard widgets that surface useful project info: last deploy, current branch, plugin update count. Still applies and is more useful than ever.

The original twelve covered something close to the territory above; recovering the actual list requires the slide deck, which isn't currently published. This framework reads as a reading list of what a 2017 attendee would have walked away thinking about, with each item explicitly carrying its 2026 modern-relevance flag.

Sibling Ottawa 2017 panel

The same speaker also appeared on the panel: Designers & Developers: Bridging the Gap, WordCamp Ottawa 2017.

Related work

• Other Ottawa talks by the same speaker: WordCamp Ottawa 2013 · WordCamp Ottawa 2014
• adjacent technical talk: Creating Your First Plugin, The Easy Way: WordCamp Toronto Developers 2012
• Working with the speaker: WordPress services · Get in touch