This coming month we have two three great meetups scheduled.

The Power of WordPress’ Roles and Capabilities

Date & Time: Monday, April 15th at 6:30 pm

WordPress’ roles seem simple enough on the surface, but behind the Administrator, Editor, and the other default roles is a powerful system that can be customized extensively. For April’s PDXWP Developer’s meetup, Erick Hitter, Lead of Team Custom at Automattic, is joining us to talk about WordPress roles and capabilities.

While some have said that other CMS’ have an advantage when it comes to security and customizing capabilities, Erick will demonstrate that that isn’t true. Starting with a walkthrough of how to modify existing roles and create new ones, he will then cover how to leverage custom roles in WordPress code. Finally, he will wrap up with a discussion of some powerful filters that will prove WordPress has a roles and capabilities system that is as flexible as the popular competitors often touted as having superior implementations.

Hack With Me: Unit and Behavioral Tests

Date & Time: Saturday, April 27th from 1 to 5 pm

Who’s up for spending an afternoon learning more about unit and behavioral tests, and writing some for core or their favorite plugin? We are!

Mike Bijon and Max Cutler will kick off the afternoon introducing unit tests, why they’re valuable, and how to write them. We’ll then spend a few hours writing our own, either for core or a plugin we admire. Our goal is for everyone attending to successfully finish at least one unit test.

A week or so prior to the 27th, Zack will post notes on how you’ll need to preconfigure your development environment with PHPUnit, etc.

What’s Coming in WordPress 3.6

Date & Time: Monday, April 29th at 6:30 pm

Version 3.6 of WordPress is slated for release on April 29th, 2013.

What changes have been made? What great new features are included? How will my site be affected? These are great questions! We will answer all of these and more in this month’s user meetup.

Michael Fields will walk us through some of the new features:

1. New bundled theme Twenty Thirteen.
2. A complete rewrite of the post format interface.
3. Enhancements to the Custom Menu interface.

If you’ve got a fever and the only cure is WordPress this is a presentation you will not want to miss.

RSVP for all of these our Meetup page. Hope to see you there!