After a year of coding, this past weekend, we finally unveiled Piklist at WordCamp NYC… and the reaction was more than we could have hoped for. Developers were awed by the power of Piklist, and beginners were amazed by how simple it is to use.  We were one of 78 sessions on Saturday, and one of 14 sessions that were repeated on Sunday because of their popularity.

Steve Bruner and Kevin Miller presenting at WordCamp NYC

On Saturday we opened with a demo of an Order Management system we’ve been building for a client. This particular project has been great for Piklist because of it’s complexity,  which has allowed us to work out all the kinks. The demo put us in the shoes of two different users, a Customer and an Employee, and showed the fields each saw during the order process. We showed off conditional fields, conditional meta boxes, hide/show fields, hide/show field values and of course custom post statuses. The audience was definitely impressed, but their jaws dropped when Kevin showed them the code used to create a custom order system.  They couldn’t believe it.  Just a few simple lines of code is used to create fields… and a few more lines add the conditionals.  Creating custom post statuses is as easy as creating custom post types.

The feedback we received on Saturday was really overwhelming, which lead us to present again on Sunday. After a quick show of hands, we realized there were mostly beginners in the room, so we decided to show off some cool features they would love: easily creating a custom meta box, custom field or WordPress widget.

First we showed them how to build a simple text field in Piklist:

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piklist('field', array(
 'type' => 'text'
 ,'scope' => 'post_meta'
 ,'field' => 'wcnyc_example'
 ,'label' => __('A field')
));

Then we showed them how to build a Date Picker field in Piklist (notice, we just changed the type to “datepicker”)

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piklist('field', array(
 'type' => 'datepicker'
 ,'scope' => 'post_meta'
 ,'field' => 'wcnyc_example'
 ,'label' => __('A field')
));

And then we changed it to a Color Picker field in Piklist (notice, we just changed the type to “colorpicker”)

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piklist('field', array(
 'type' => 'colorpicker'
 ,'scope' => 'post_meta'
 ,'field' => 'wcnyc_example'
 ,'label' => __('A field')
));

That’s when we saw the smiles in the audience. We just demonstrated to a group of beginners how easy it is to create advanced fields with Piklist. Whether in your Post, Settings or even a widget.  I can truly say they were floored.

Next we used the same format to build a widget. Add some simple HTML markup and a little PHP and you can display any widget. No need for Object Oriented Programming (OOP)… no need to learn about “instances”. Just mark it up, and let Piklist take over!

So, we fired on all cylinders except one… Piklist is not ready for primetime yet. We managed to get tons of people excited about Piklist, but we can’t let them use it yet. Not good.

We’re working hard to get Piklist ready for beta before the end of the month. Sign up for our mailing list and we’ll email you when it’s available.