Description
Each of our sessions are digitally broadcast live and feature 3 separate presenters focusing on a specific aspect of some WordPress topic. Each presentation will have roughly 30-40 minutes allotted for instruction and 15 minutes allotted for Q&A at the end. This means that each session runs approximately three hours start-to-finish.
About This Session
This month our focus is on writing cleaner, more responsive WordPress-based applications by using Backbone.js. If that sounds intimidating to you, then perhaps I should introduce our speakers. Our expert presenters for this month are K.Adam White, Carl Danley, and Zack Tollman. These three guys are hands-down the best presenters I’ve met who can take a complex idea and explain it in simple, easy-to-follow terms.
This session is actually an introduction to Backbone, a primer to help us all get going on the right foot. K.Adam will take us through the basics of Backbone – what it is, how it works, how it is similar/different to other libraries like jQuery – and then Carl and Zack will demonstrate ways you can start putting it to work immediately in your themes and plugins. By the time the session is over you should know how to take an existing project (or start a new one) and integrate Backbone.js to either reduce code, improve performance, or both!
Session Schedule
This session will be broadcast live on January 25, 2014 starting at 1pm ET.
All recordings will become available for replay at 4pm ET.
Topics Covered
- What is Backbone?
- How does Backbone differ from jQuery?
- Making Views and Models work together
- Getting data to your models (bootstrapped vs AJAX)
- Utilizing Backbone for a Theme
- Utilizing Backbone for a Plugin
About the Speakers

K.Adam White
K.Adam has a deep-seated love for JavaScript. He has spoken at a number of WordCamps now on the topics of JavaScript and themes, JS and Plugins, Backbone + WordPress. He’s also very out-spoken about working with Grunt.js and several other JavaScript-based tools. If you write JS in any capacity, it’s likely that K.Adam’s name is one you’ve already heard.
Follow K.Adam on Twitter

Carl Danley
Carl is a Senior Web Engineer for 10up, LLC. He specializes in writing advanced JavaScript and get paid to write WordPress themes & Plugins for awesome clients. His focus is in developing scalable and maintainable application architectures by invoking industry best practices, design patterns, and creativity.
Follow Carl on Twitter

Zack Tollman
Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his fiancée and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code as a developer at The Theme Foundry.
Follow Zack on Twitter