WordPress 3.5 is just around the corner. It’s going to be released on December 5th, and while anyone can check out the current beta (look out for beta 3 soon), we’ve got a special treat for you. Daryl Koopersmith, a WordPress Core Developer, is going to talk about WordPress 3.5’s media manager and how he built it.

The killer feature in 3.5 is a a completely redone media experience. It’s fast, it handles galleries intelligently, it looks beautiful, and it’s a joy to use. As you can imagine, it bears almost no resemblance to the current media experience. Behind the scenes is a new JavaScript library in WordPress core, Backbone.js. Backbone is a JavaScript MVC framework that we’re using to juggle the data and the state behind the redesigned media UI. Koop will walk through why we’re using Backbone, what it does in 3.5, and how you can extend it to do your bidding.

If you want to see the future of WordPress media or learn about some serious JavaScript magic, you won’t be disappointed.

Koop has been contributing to WordPress since version 3.0 and has been the lead developer on several of its recent user-facing features: menus, distraction-free writing, the theme customizer, and the media overhaul. Basically, if something makes WordPress cooler, there’s a good chance he built it.

When Koop has a question about jQuery, he reads the minified version of its source. True story.