Justin will be presenting Custom Meta and Settings with CMB2. You can join us for free for the live broadcast on Friday, May 29, 2015 at 3pm EST. You can also purchase the recording to watch at any time for just $9.
During this session, Justin is going to talk about how you can leverage the incredible work that has gone into the CMB2 library to quickly and easily create custom meta inputs for all of your different post types. What’s more, CMB2 can also be used for creating settings pages, managing user meta, and even for creating visitor-facing forms on the front-end of sites. It takes care a of a lot of tedious work, leaving you time to take care of the important things.
There aren’t enough nice things I can say about how great and genuine Justin is as a person. He’s the perfect person to have at the helm of the CMB2 project as he takes a very pragmatic approach to problem solving. I’ve had the privilege of knowing him for a number of years now and it is my absolute pleasure to host him here on WPSessions. I can only hope you’ll someday get an opportunity to know him as well as I do!
Without any further ado, here are Justin’s answers to my interview questions.
Where can we find you on the internet?
http://dsgnwrks.pro
http://jtsternberg.com
https://twitter.com/jtsternberg
https://www.facebook.com/Jtsternberg
When and how did you get started with WordPress?
I began working with WordPress around 2009 as I was looking for a cheap CMS solution to use for our church’s website.
What resources do you turn to when you want to learn something new?
Usually I keep a log of things I want to learn and as resources float in front of me (via things like Twitter, or JavaScript Weekly, etc), I bookmark them so that when I get a chunk of time to research and learn a new thing, I have a backlog of resources to pull from.
Also, when it comes to getting some advice about WordPress-related questions, having a crowd on Twitter to poll is immensely valuable. Other than that, it’s the usual: google, stack-overflow, digging into the source code, etc.
What is your favorite WordPress feature/aspect?
How flexible it is. There are so many awesome nuggets you can find just digging through core. My appreciation for that in core has been the driving philosophy behind the development of CMB2.
How did you inherit the codebase for CMB2?
I began using the original, Custom Metaboxes and Fields for WordPress by Jared Atchison, Bill Erickson, and Andrew Norcross. I loved the utility-belt nature of the library, but found there were just a few things I thought would make it really killer… I started submitting pull requests, and after a few of those Jared offered to give me commit access.
After taking over and driving development of that library for over a year, we (WebDevStudios) approached Jared about transferring the project over to us. It wasn’t much longer after that we decided to completely revamp the library, and CMB2 was born.
What is the most interesting thing you’ve made using CMB2?
I think the story|ftw plugin is a pretty cool example of what you can do with it.
What does the future hold for CMB2?
The road map is long and arduous… We have many goals like allowing wysiwyg fields to be repeatable, making repeatable groups more robust, Adding a tabbed UI, Adding customizer and widget support, etc, etc. The list gets longer every day. 🙂 My overriding goal is to continue to refine CMB2 and sand down the rough edges. There’s only so much time in a day, so contributions are welcomed and encouraged!
What advice do you have for others looking to become WordPress experts?
Practice, practice, practice. Just start building plugins and releasing them. Who cares if there’s already one out there.. if yours does something just a little bit better or different, release it. You’ll be surprised by A) how many people will appreciate it, B) How many bugs can exist in software 🙂 and C) how much you can learn by releasing code publicly. Also, It’s never too early to try and start contributing to WordPress core. You’ll never have a higher-caliber group of people looking over your code than when contributing to an open source project, especially one as established and popular as WordPress. Oh, and did I mention practice?
What is one interesting non-WordPress-related fact about yourself?
I am a licensed minister, so I could marry you or bury you. 😀
Thanks Justin!
If you want to learn more about how you can use CMB2 in your own projects to save yourself both time and hassle, make sure you tune in for Custom Meta and Settings with CMB2