Speaker Spotlight: Shawn Hooper

Shawn Hooper has been a web developer for almost 20 years, creating applications for both the public and the private sectors.  He is a GIAC certified secure software programmer. At Fivesense Technologies, his current projects include work in e-commerce, 3rd party API integration and custom plugin development.

Shawn is presenting: Time Code: Scheduling Automated Tasks Using WP_Cron

1) Why do you like using WordPress?
I find WordPress both easy to use and extremely flexible. It also has an amazing community of developers supporting it.

2) Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Ottawa?
I’ve been looking for a way to contribute back to the WordPress community, and starting with a talk in my home town seemed like a natural fit.

3) What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?
If they don’t already, I hope that people will start to see how WordPress can be used as a platform for more complex web-based applications, and not just as a publishing platform.

4) What is your favourite WordPress plugin or theme? Why?
I think I’m going to have to go with Jeff Farthing’s “Theme My Login” plugin. Why? It allows you to quickly make many of the default WordPress forms look like the rest of your site / application, and less like “every other WordPress site”.