WordPress.com First-Timer Workshop
Want to get started blogging but have no idea where to begin? We have a great workshop for you that’s a part of WordCamp NYC.
Just a note before we get started: This workshop is meant for those with no prior experience blogging with any platform. If you’re currently blogging or are looking for a refresher on best practices the workshop is not for you. This class is for the people who are totally new to blogging.
We will walk each workshop attendee through the setup of a site on WordPress.com. You’ll learn how to use themes and widgets, publish various types of content, and take advantage of some of the other really cool features available on WordPress.com.
To participate in the workshop you will need to bring a few things with you. Don’t worry, it’s easy homework. The morning of the workshop you’ll need to have:
- a title and tagline in mind for your site
- a folder of images, some of which should be large
- text written for at least two posts
- a blurb about yourself and an image for an About Me page
Since we’ll be teaching you how to use WordPress.com you’ll be able to change your posts and about page later. The posts and images you bring don’t have to be in finished, final draft form, but they should be something you’re comfortable working with for the day.
The workshop will be run by Happiness Engineers and others from WordPress.com. You’ll be hearing all the information straight for the source and get an introduction to the people who provide WordPress.com’s famous (and free!) 24/7 support. We’ll show you how you can get in touch with them after the workshop so that as you run into more questions you’ll know right where to go.
We’re really looking forward to having you join us for this workshop!
If you’re interested in an overview of how we’ll cover things the workshop schedule will look like this:
- Setting up your new site
- An introduction to the WordPress.com Dashboard
- The basics of creating content
- Themes and custom design tools
- Customizing your site with widgets and menus
- An introduction to Gravatar profiles and social features
- How to post from anywhere
- Introducing custom domains
- How to get support and some basic ground rules
- Where you can go from here and what’s next.
WordPress Debugging: Tools & Best Practices
This session will cover about strategies, best practices, and tools to help WordPress developers debug common and not-so-common issues.
Developing and Extending WordPress for Higher Education
An extension of the “Building and Supporting WordPress for Higher Education” session, this session will feature a range of presentations from CUNY folks working with WordPress around custom functionality they’ve developed in order to more effectively integrate WordPress into their environments, as well as some open brainstorming about functionality to come. Among other topics, we will discuss user management, active directory integration, custom theme development, and various BuddyPress functionality. Presenters will include Luke Waltzer, Joe Ugoretz, Michael Branson Smith, Mikhail Gershovich, Jody Rosen, Christopher Stein, Matthew K. Gold, Charlie Edwards, and Jenna Spevak.
Building and Supporting WordPress for Higher Education
The City University of New York has given rise to several WordPress Multisite installations including Blogs@Baruch, the CUNY Academic Commons, ePortfolios at Macaulay, the OpenLab at City Tech, and QWriting at Queens College. This session will feature a range of short presentations from people involved with these projects organized about launching and supporting WordPress at the university level. Topics covered will include server set up and installation maintenance, community outreach and support, and faculty development. The session will show that there’s a range of models for building at supporting WordPress at the institutional level. Presenters will include Luke Waltzer, Joe Ugoretz, Michael Branson Smith, Mikhail Gershovich, Jody Rosen, Christopher Stein, Matthew K. Gold, Charlie Edwards, and Jenna Spevak.
Customized WordPress Website for Small Business Owners
We specialize in SEO & Web Design for small business owners and would love to talk about the marketing side and why wordpress works so well whether they want a simple blog site or an ecommerce site since it’s user friendly for an average day business owner.
Why every business owners should have a call to action, killer headlines, and a blog since most Internet users still view blog as less saleslike rather than a front page of a website or a sales page.
Speeding up WordPress on Shared Hosting
We all want our WordPress sites run super fast. This becomes a challenge if you have a shared hosting account. Let’s face it not all good sites are on their own server or even a Virtual Private Server. This session will cover what you can do to make the best of your shared hosting account, without the need to code (or at least not much).
Increase pageviews and user retention in 3 minutes
You work hard to drive visitors to your site, now learn some simple ways of keeping them there. In this session, Neil Mody from nRelate, will go over some simple methods that recirculate your older content, engage readers to click, spend more time on your site, and come back more often. (and maybe make you some money as well). When you leave this session, you will have the tools you need to implement what you learned in three minutes or less, and increase your page views by as much as 8%.
State of WordPress eCommerce in 2012
WordPress is fast becoming a major player in the field of eCommerce over the past few years. Nobody even tried to use WordPress for a professional shop two years ago, today there are plenty of successful plugins available. What are the differences and how do they compare to dedicated eCommerce software like Magento? This talk covers that and much more, bringing you the State of WordPress eCommerce in 2012.
WordPress Security
Imagine losing all of your content including posts, pages, media, and comments. Even worse imagine spam links hiding in your content destroying your search engine ranking. Keeping your website safe from hackers and bots should be a top priority for anyone running their own website. In this presentation I’ll cover the essential WordPress Security tips that ALL WordPress administrators should use to keep your website safe and secure. If you run a WordPress website this presentation is not to be missed!
Alas, No Mind Meld: Designer-Developer Communication for a Harmonious Future
Relations between designers and developers can sometimes be rocky. In my session, we’ll learn how to minimize confusion and bad feelings between you and your developers by:
- Learning when to involve developers in your design process, and why
- Keeping track of what you need to design in a WP theme, so your developer doesn’t have to style from nothing
- Organizing and cleaning up your source files
- Orchestrating successful hand-offs with your developers
Widge-WHAT!? Demystifying WordPress and must have tips for beginners
WordPress for beginners. WordPress is a great CMS that has millions of users, but the learning curve can be steep for someone who isn’t a web developer. This session will unpack the essential vocabulary, demonstrate how to use WordPress, show where to get if you get stuck, and present many time-saving tips. a must have for any WordPress beginner.
Developing Digital Marketing into your WordPress
There are tons of ways to integrate social media and digital marketing into WordPress. Knowing how to add Facebook into your site, how to use a twitter conversation in a blog post, and why Pinterest matters is important for your clients and for your blog as well. But before adding APIs and plugins it’s important to know what the site needs to accomplish and who the audience is. This talk will address adding the right digital strategy for your site and then cover the tried and tested ways to add digital marketing to WordPress in order to boost SEO, social engagement, and to add another set of tools to your arsenal.
Basics on Managing Dashboard for New Admins
Whether getting started for the first time with WP or taking over Admin control of your website after a bad experience with a consultant, the dashboard can be intimidating, especially when it comes to maintenance. Sometimes it’s better to have a professional handle it, but sometimes you may not have a choice but to manage it yourself, even if only temporary. This session will cover basic Admin dashboard how-to’s and good practices that a beginner should know such as user roles, backups, running updates (when you should and shouldn’t), and what to do if a plugin or theme is causing a plugin after an update.
Using Commercial Plugins
Commercial plugins offer additional, and sometimes extensive & complete, enhancements for serious site operators and advanced developers beyond the free plugin world. The WordPress Plugin repository hosts a staggering number of free software plugins, but (unlike for themes) does not host or support any commercial plugins. So, how do you best navigate the web for commercial plugins in today’s environment, and what can you expect in the marketplace? We’ll talk about various payment/licensing models, expectations for quality and service, and places where you can find and browse commercial plugins.
Customizing the custom loop
We’re going to discuss how to properly implement custom loops on your WordPress site. Using Custom loops gives developers the power to work with a more complex content management system than WordPress offers out of the box.
You may want to feature boxes on your homepage with the five most recent stories from different categories. You may want to feature a cluster of stories from a certain category/tag/post type in your sidebar. You’ll have a hard time doing that if you are just using untouched/standard themes.
WordPress’ custom loops gives you the power to sprinkle content all over your site in any manner of your choosing. There are right and wrong ways to do this. We’ll go over the different ways and explore the pros and cons of each one.
Then we’ll discuss standard and creative ways to use the custom loop to make your web site come alive and stand out from more ordinary, standard sites. We’ll also discuss performance strategies such as transients and caching, so that using multiple custom loops won’t slow your site down to a crawl.
This presentation will be aimed at theme and plugin developers with an intermediate skill level, giving them a good introduction to some of the more complex query techniques. The presentation will also introduce beginners to tools, techniques and resources, so they may learn the “right way” as they build up their skills, rather than unlearning them after they become experienced.
Save Your Code: One Codebase, 9 Blogs with WordPress Multisite Using Sub-domains and Sub-directories
NorthPoint has had many years of experience with implementing WordPress sites for many of the world’s leading organizations. Most recently, NorthPoint implemented a WordPress multisite for nine blogs for a leading, global media company – three of the blogs were created using sub-domains and six of them using sub-directories. Compared to normal, single installs of WordPress, there are more considerations to take when creating such a network of blogs for a large-scale project like this. Challenges include setting up the multisites for both sub-domains and sub-directories, setting up nine different looks using one theme, and setting up different plugins and social media add-ons. This presentation will discuss the key steps we took to ensure a successful implementation, address the known issues with the configuration and installation of the code, and highlight best practices that we used to overcome these issues.
WordPress as Custom CMS
Every client site has different needs. I keep getting better at tailoring WordPress to meet the unique CMS needs of clients. I would like to lead a discussion to talk about some of the things I’ve learned and hear how other developers are working with WordPress as a base for a CMS. The thinking being that a site you give to a client should be customized acutely to what their business goals are and how they will best manage their site.
Responsive Design for WordPress
The advent of smart phones has brought about a revolution in the web as we know it. Everyone is looking for the best way to get their website to be viewable on tablets, smart phones, and the common PC. But what is the best way to accomplish this? Do we have a separate mobile application for a site? Do we have a separate portal that people can access and get redirected to automatically? Or, is there a way to have one website that will work on any platform?
Mitch Canter brings you the basics of a responsive design, and looks at already established methodology to make starting or retrofitting an existing site easy. Mitch will discuss frameworks, WordPress themes, and other resources that will help lay the foundation for a responsive web design. We’ll also go over why not every responsive site has to be a fluid layout, and how we can take the principles that designers learn from fixed websites and apply them to a responsive design.
Lessons From Making Millions of Websites More Accessible
Making the internet a good experience for everyone is hard, but there are some additional challenges you face when users don’t fit the usual stereotypes. Accessibility is the term used to describe making the web usable for those with disabilities. After my session you’ll be able to answer the following questions:
- What is accessibility?
- What are the standards you need to care about?
- How does it matter to your business?
- How do you get organization buy-in for prioritizing it?
- How do you institutionalize accessibility?
At AddThis we’ve been able to make some simple changes to our workflow that have enabled us to make millions of sites more accessible. Learn from what we’ve learned so that you can build a more usable internet.
Practical, reliable video content management for a global audience with WordPress
This presentation gives an inside look into how I built a video-centric websites with wordpress that serves over 300 hours of full episode television content to network buyers around the world for one of the premiere television content distributors in the U.S. (http://www.cableready.net/).
The presentation addresses issues of:
- How do I used a CDN to ensure my video content streams reliably to clients in different parts of the globe?
- How do I use the cloud to encode my videos in multiple formats for multiple devices?
- iOS compatibility and me: How do I use some simple PHP functions to detect a viewers environment and serve proper video file that will work on their device?
- How do I create a private client area for business-to-business content to ensure only registered viewers are seeing this content?
- How do I track what people are watching and for how long?
The Secret of Hyperlocal Success
3 years ago, we started CaryCitizen on a laptop. It now has a circulation of more than 74,000 a month, all in one town. We’re bigger than the local newspaper, run our own ad space, are accredited by Google News and the winner of a 2011 Knight Foundation Fellowship. The big secret to our success: reject everything you hear from professional journalists.
Welcome to WordPress.Com The Beginners Bootcamp
What you can do with WordPress.com.
When do you need to go to WordPress.org
WP.com – (The Basics) Under the Hood
WordPress.com
Where are we going – future considerations
- The future for wordpress.com
- Migrating to wordpress.org
Getting Started with WordPress , SEO, Analytics and related Tools
From good information architecture to metrics driven design, this presentation will help you to choose the appropriate WordPress plugins and understand the basics of how to use them along with related Google Webmaster tools.
How Guest Blogging Can Make You Popular
This presentation details the importance of sharing fresh unique content within the blogging community. Attendees will learn the basics of what a backlink is and how it correlates to improved search results. The presentation will also provide a step-by-step guide on how to find the right blogger for your content and make sure your backlink stays on their site.
WordPress on AWS from Start to Finish
So everyone’s been to some WordCamp talk in the past about the benefits of using Amazon Web Services with your WordPress Install but few speakers have ever actually shown how to set it all up within the 30 minute talk window. My goal is simple, get you from having no EC2 account to having a running server using your domain name all the way to the WordPress Install screen. Simple but I feel important if we are to ever get more people using WordPress on cloud based services…
Scaling WordPress – Cloud, Cache, and Configs
How to run WordPress with High Availability across many environments (Dev, QA, Prod) on many servers, regionalized, on multiple server configurations… and how to make it fast! Also, some tricks of the trade when managing and sharing content across sites when running WordPress in network mode (multisite).
Optimizing WordPress for Speed and Scale
This talk will encompass ways to optimize your website to make it fast, and then how to make that speed scalable. It starts at the beginner level with basic ways to get the most from WordPress, and will go all the way to the uber-technical level and include specific example of tweaking servers and caching to scale millions of visitors to a site and not suffer slow loading times. Compiled from the experience of Ben Metcalfe, WordPress innovator, the talk will give perspective of WordPress since its inception.
jQuery The WordPress Way
Learn how to add jQuery to a theme or plugin the WordPress way and use it correctly.
This presentation is for beginner and intermediate users who want to learn the best way to use jQuery and jQuery plugins in their WordPress projects with very little knowledge of JavaScript or jQuery.
Creating Killer Designs
We will cover everything from identifying and selecting a suitable WordPress theme for your site, customizing free and premium themes, working with a designer to create a custom theme from scratch and finally, bridging the gap between designers and developers which includes insights into processes and tools.
Catering to Local
Most of our WordPress sites feature some type of local content – but not many are optimized to really interact with their readers based on geography.
I’ll go through some tips and techniques – editorially, visually and technically – to ensure you’re really tapping the potential of your local demographic. I’ll also discuss how you can identify local traffic, measure effectiveness, and monetize this segment of your traffic.
Getting over the hump and pressing Publish
A look at some ways that we can enhance, encourage and inspire content creation and push users to publish their content.
DRY CSS – Theries, methods and tools for efficient and scalable Stylesheets
The value of keeping all code D.R.Y (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is universally accepted and demanded in the world of programming, but when it comes to CSS we’ve all learned to compromise and live in a wet mess. We don’t have to! This talk will go over how you can use thematic and structural CSS definitions to cut down on wasted code, simplify maintenance and unify your site styles just by DRYing out your standard CSS. I’ll explain how tools like Firebug enable a whole new way of understanding complex style interrelationships and give examples of the particular patterns that let me cut one stylesheet from ~4200 to ~2400 lines without losing anything but wasted code! We’ll also cover how preprocessors like LESS and SASS can take your DRY CSS even farther by actually programming your styles as if they were made of PHP.
Building Powerful Websites and Web Applications with Piklist
Piklist is not your standard plugin… it’s a system for adding power to your website. Turn WordPress into a full-featured Contact Manager, Order Management system, customer portal and anything else you can think of. Piklist provides all the pieces you need to build a customized, tailored system for your business that’s infinitely expandable. This session will demonstrate the power of Piklist and how easy it is for your to build front-end forms, meta boxes (and conditional meta boxes), settings pages, Post Type relationships, and more. There are plenty of online tools to manage your business, but none can compare to the flexibility of Piklist.
WordPress for Teaching and Learning – Best Practices
At Vassar College, we use WordPress as a digital publishing platform for classes interested in sharing and publishing multimedia as part of their class discourse. I have consulted with dozens of faculty in order to incorporate WordPress into their instructional design. I will be presenting best practices that I have developed over the last three years that we have been using WP at our institution. I am very interested in hosting or being part of a conversation sharing how other institutions have been using WordPress as a supplement or an alternative to their learning management system.
I am eager to catch up with my CUNY colleagues and to see what they have been up to of late.
WebMatrix: uber geek in designer clothes
Rarely do you find a developer tool that the fashion-conscious would envy: a tool that functions and inspires. It is capability bundled with simplicity, a web tooling environment that gets you started with apps like WordPress and combines five products in one, letting you install, develop, optimize, deploy and manage your sites and databases. With support for the latest web standards like HTML5 & CSS3, multiple frameworks like PHP, Node, or ASP.NET, and multiple database engines, you can’t go wrong. Of course, need we mention, all free.
Google Adwords and WordPress
A start to finish presentation of how to integrate Google Adwords (or any digital advertising) into your marketing strategy. We’ll go through creating a campaign and discover some keyword tools. We’ll touch on the things google considers when setting your price and visibility. We’ll go over some optimizations like permalinks, categories, tags and h tags to bring more visitors to your with site with less cost.
WordPress for Nonprofits: Using CiviCRM
WordPress is the most pervasive and fastest growing open source CMS. Many non-profits, charities and educational institutions use WordPress to power their websites. However, finding a way to connect a Constituent Resource Manager (CRM) has been difficult. You could add a few plugins and build out these features, but then the data would have to be exported into another database to be able to query data. Often proprietary software is used to accomplish this which is very expensive and you give away control of your data. As of January 2012 CiviCRM, an open source software geared toward meeting the needs of non-profit and other civic-sector organizations can now be used with WordPress. CiviCRM provides a robust feature set, which includes contact management, fundraising, event management, member management, mass e-mail marketing, peer-to-peer campaigns, case management, and much more. This integration makes your website more powerful combining a CMS + CRM.
Making WordPress Fly: Optimizing Your Servers for Performance
WordPress isn’t exactly the speediest app out of the box, although the community has done a commendable job in boosting application-level performance via clever caching plugins and patches.
Optimization of WordPress at the server level can yield the greatest performance gains of all, ensuring that the next time you’re retweeted like crazy, your WordPress instance can handle the traffic without a hiccup. And as the famous Yahoo! statistic goes, “”400 ms of extra load time caused a 5 to 9% increase in the number of people that clicked ‘back’ before the page even loaded.””
This tech-oriented talk will walk through the fine-tuning of Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and different strategies to decrease stress on your server that will more-than-likely double or triple your server throughput. Page loads will be snappier, assets will load faster, and the end-reader will get a much better experience.
If you’re not a tech guru — no worries. We’ll provide plenty of tips that you can implement yourself, and other that you can pass on to your tech guy.
bbPress – Simply Advanced Everything
An advanced developer session where the inner workings of bbPress 2.1 are unravelled. Post types, taxonomies, rewrite rules, theme compatibility, sub-hooks, and more will be explained in detail, with practical examples on how they are used to provide the simplest experience for users and developers alike.
Adding Video to Your WordPress Blog
The presentation will cover the following topics:
- WordPress as a video platform
- What video can offer to your blog
- The features of the JW Player
- Adding video to your blog using the JW Player WordPress plugin
Breaking Through With Your Story
Have you noticed what’s going on with all your social media streams and online lately? Your friends and family tell you to check out this website or you have to read that blog, you may be doing the same thing, everyone these days is trying to get everybody else’s attention, why? Why should anybody care what you have to say? Why do you want to be noticed? Why should anybody listen to you? Why should they check out or even buy anything you’re selling?
That’s where your story comes into play. People are tired of the spam, they want to really connect with you and the best way for them to connect is through your story. This session will teach you the power your story has to connect with your audience through a WordPress site and how social media can help spread your message. Do you want to build a platform, do you want to start a thriving business, you have to give people a reason to listen to you, and it starts with your story!
Object Oriented Programming for WordPress Plugin Development
Just as important as *how* to do object oriented programming in the WordPress plugin environment is the question of *why.* In this talk Mike Toppa will use straightforward code examples to explain how to approach OO design for WordPress plugins, and the advantages it provides for maintaining, extending, and testing your code. Mike will give an introduction to 2 foundational principals of good OO design: the Single Responsibility Principle, and the Dependency Inversion Principle.
Rewrites Review
Rewrites can be a tricky thing to deal with in WordPress, however they’re key to organized URLs and SEO optimization. I’ll review some of the basics of rewrites in WP, the Apache rewrite module, and implementing custom rewrite rules. If time permits perhaps a look at BuddyPress’ implementation of custom rewrites.
WordPress on the Comand Line – It’s Not So Scary!
WordPress on the Command Line – It’s not so scary!
Like many environments, WordPress can be a bit cumbersome to work with when you’re locked into using the GUI that is provided, when there is so much more that can be done on via a Command Line Interface (CLI.) To truly unlock the full power of the WordPress API, having a sense for how to work with it via CLI is the key to success.
WordPress Shell is just the start. I will provide guidance on how to create CLI scripts in PHP and in Perl to interface with the WordPress API, as well as demonstrate some higher-level issues with working with WordPress on the command line. I’ll cover how you can explore and experiment with the WordPress API through ctags and the WordPress shell, show how to work with giant data files, and discuss the caveats of importing and exporting large data sets.
Moving Beyond the Codex: Learning WordPress from Itself
The WordPress Codex is a great resource for new developers, but as many have noted, it is far from complete and isn’t necessarily always accurate. While there are myriad web-based alternatives that can serve as a guide to WordPress’ inner workings, there is no better aid than Core itself.
Intimidated by all of those files? Don’t be. They’re actually rather well organized, and with a bit of guidance, one can easily locate the appropriate function for a given task. As you’ll find, there are even many useful functions that don’t appear in the Codex.
I’ll provide an overview of how Core is organized, discuss why certain functions exist only in wp-admin, and highlight some of the exceptions to the organizational rule that lead to frustration when first exploring Core. With this understanding, not only can one more efficiently identify the proper function for a given situation, but also give back to the community by updating the Codex; it’s just a Wiki after all.
DIY SEO (using WordPress)
SEO can be a big scary topic. You’ve heard or read a bit about it. Everyone tells you need it — you think you need it, too. But admit it: you have no idea what it really means.
This presentation aims to help the small business owner, non-profit webmaster, or personal blogger understand some basic principles and best practices around SEO.
DIY, or at least know the right questions to ask when someone comes selling you SEO services.
What you’ll learn:
- Basic SEO concepts
- Keyword research and implementation
- Onsite SEO (using the Yoast plugin)
- Things to consider when hiring an SEO company
WordPress Responsive Design Bootcamp
As the title implies, this is an entry-point for all those new or fairly new to Responsive Design. With all the buzz about it, you probably can’t wait to get your hands dirty and make your themes respond to different devices and screen sizes.
After a brief intro about what RD is, we will dive right in and make a standard WordPress Theme responsive.
Integrating with WordPress via XML-RPC
Learn how to integrate external systems with WordPress, from mobile blogging to cross-CMS publishing and more. Explore the public XML-RPC API capabilities in WordPress, including highlights of the new enhancements in WordPress 3.4. Get inspired by integration case studies, and learn how to expose your plugin’s functionality to the world.
WordPress Multisite Overview & Case Study at The College of New Jersey
The College of New Jersey adopted WordPress Multisite in 2009 to manage over 300 Web sites for academic departments, offices, conferences, magazines, journals, and faculty/student blogs. The administrative functions in WordPress make it possible to manage hundreds of sites and thousands of users in this active learning community. This presentation will provide an overview of the Multisite Network Admin dashboard and present a case study on how WordPress can be deployed as an enterprise level content management system.
Creating Custom Child Themes for WordPress
In my presentation I cover the concept of Child Themes (what they are and why to use them) and go through the process of creating one.
I include CSS modification, template modification, include tags, conditional tags, creating your own page templates and modifying functions.php.
I switch between slides and demos and provide links to resources and time for questions. My slides can be viewed on Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/thetracyl
Making Custom Content Management Disappear into the WordPress Admin
One of the best things about WordPress is its beautiful admin UI. As developers, we should take advantage of what is built-in and also strive to have our additions look as though they are native, erasing the line between where WordPress Core and our custom content management interfaces meet. Our development is streamlined by reducing developer-driven design and our users and clients are able to start creating and managing their content effectively with minimal training. This presentation will focus on the integration of custom content types and post meta into the WordPress admin.
Accomplish More With Core
Presentation for theme designers and plugin developers on how to leverage custom post types taxonomies and thumbnails to achieve elegant functionality for common elements like photo galleries, slideshows, press releases, downloads, pulling related posts/content and more.
How to implement simple core WordPress functionality within a theme functions.php OR plugin that leverages the same server compatibility, performance and security as core WordPress.
Eliminate hacking multiple plugins together and save time and overhead when building themes/plugins for your clients common features.
The Power of Custom Post Types
Custom post types (CPTs), and custom taxonomies are very powerful features WordPress has had since version 2.9. However, many people are still doing things in a convoluted and unmaintainable manner. This presentation aims to inspire members of the audience to use CPTs in their next project. Topics covered include: CPT and taxonomy basics, CPT related tips and tricks, and a showcase of select plugins that utilize CTPs.
15 WordPress Optimizations of the Top Media Companies
I present conversion rate optimization, search engine optimization and social media optimization tips to developers, designers and bloggers have practical tips for making sites successful.
Membership Sites with WordPress Paid Memberships Pro
“We will build and launch a complete WordPress site during the session. Using WordPress, Paid Memberships Pro, the Member Lite Theme, and other free plugins we will setup a site that is ready to market and sell and digital product.
I will come with a real membership site idea that I plan to monetize and launch the site during the session. We will cover: (* are the focus)
* Installing Paid Memberships Pro*
* Integrating with the Stripe payment gateway*
* Creating a landing page for inbound marketing (Giving away a free product in exchange for someone’s email address.)*
* Integrating with Mail Chimp and setting up autoresponders.
* Creating a paid membership level and locking down content on the site.*
And save some time for technical or business-related questions.”
WordPress ABC’s and 123’s: Steps on how to start using WP, the right way!
Topics ranging from where to get the best WP themes online, installations, the 10 plugins to add, social sharing, as well as basic posting and paging placements. Once all the secrets are revealed, you will be good to go, sharing the world your words, thoughts, and/or products!
Faster WordPress multisite
I recently wrote a blog post on my current WordPress server setup, which uses nginx and Batcache with WordPress multisite (http://evansolomon.me/notes/faster-wordpress-multisite-nginx-batcache/). It’s been very popular so far and the feedback has been that it’s really useful for setting up a fast, reliable WordPress system. I’d love to do a presentation on it that walks through:
* Setting up a VPS and how it differs from normal shared hosting
* What goes into the backend for WordPress (nginx, PHP, MySQL), and how to install and configure it
* Installing WordPress and activating multisite with domain mapping
* Setting up a fast caching system for WordPress (using Batcache)
* Setting up a small set of security and performance-focused plugins
* Testing to benchmark your site’s speed
I work on WordPress.com and pulled together some of the best practices of what we do there, combined with with advice from a few experts in the field, to come up with a really good system for hosting WordPress sites. Since this is something everyone goes through at some point — and something developers and consultants are constantly dealing with — I think a single presentation with well-documented instruction would be really valuable.
Rocking a WordPress network
Everyone always wonder what you can do with a WordPress network installation. Within this presentation I will show a new service for Artists. They can create their own site like WordPress.com but they can also have their own mobile app and connect to their fans in a great way. You can think it is like myspace but then in an improved way.
WordPress Hierarchy and Custom Templates
WordPress’s template hierarchy is powerful and a little confusing. If you are interested in using WordPress as a content management system for yourself or for clients, it’s a good idea to understand the way WordPress chooses page templates so you can automate the process as much as possible.
A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
This introductory session is geared toward bloggers, web designers and programmers who are new to WordPress. Even those who don’t know a Codex from a Cadillac will feel comfortable here. Delving into WordPress from a beginner’s point-of-view, we use unintimidating plain language to explain the fundamental concepts of WordPress, from themes, to widgets, to plug-ins. We go spelunking in the admin panel and show real-world examples of what WordPress can do. Questions are welcome, and no query is too basic, so don’t be shy!
Express yourself with BuddyPress themes
Let your BuddyPress site’s individuality through by seeing how you can go beyond just the default theme. We’re all individuals and our sites should be the same. In this talk I’ll take a look at what others are doing, why it’s important to create a unique identity and how you can do this.
Actions and Filters in Core JavaScript: Hooked on JavaScript works for me!
Did you know that some JavaScript files in WordPress core have actions and filters in them? They do! As a theme or plugin developer, you can hook into them just like the familiar hooks in the core PHP files.
As JavaScript becomes an ever more important part of the WordPress admin, knowing how to use JavaScript hooks will be as essential as knowing PHP hooks. As a core contributor or the developer of an advanced plugin, adding hooks in appropriate places will make your code more extensible and exponentially increase value to the community.
I will be covering how the WordPress hook system works in JavaScript, how to use existing hooks, how to add your own, and how to address performance and security concerns when adding hooks.
Killer Docs for Killer Devs
Writing documentation can be the least fun part of writing your plugin or theme. But it’s an essential step in teaching your users how to use your WordPress product. This presentation will cover how developers and business owners can produce useful, relevant documentation for their WordPress product.
In the presentation I’ll cover:
1. What different types of documentation there are
2. Why good documentation is important
3. The different ways that people learn
4. What you need to do to produce really useful documentation
5. A list of plugins that will help you to produce and maintain documentation.
Can You Go Commercial?
Many successful businesses began in the WordPress plugin or theme repositories. If you’re like most developers, you’ve wondered if your development could make enough money to support yourself and possibly a small business. In this session Garth Koyle from Event Espresso will teach you how to evaluate whether there is a market for your code and if it’s worth the effort. Garth will also demonstrate several of the tools, strategies and methodologies he pioneered to win $40,000 in a business plan competition.
You will learn how to answer these important business questions:
- Who is my target customer and what do they really need?
- How big is my target market?
- How do I determine what price I should charge?
- How profitable will I be or how much money can I make?
- How should I setup my WordPress business website?
- And more!
Supporting WordPress: Caring for your clients and community
The purpose of this presentation is to provide information and insight into what it takes to provide ongoing maintenance for a client or community based on WordPress.
I’ll focus on using popular plugins such as bbPress for a support forum and BuddyPress for creating community. As well as best practices for keeping things up to date. This would be a variety of community-based and premium solutions including:
- WordPress-based managed hosting such as WP Engine
- Updating tools such as WP Remote or Mange WP
- Staying up to date on security by following along with blogs such as sucuri.net.
Additionally, I’ll talk about incentives for community participation. This will specifically be geared towards engaging your community to help each other by creating an environment that rewards that kind of activity. I have experience in doing this as the Support Lead at WPMU DEV. We have built many internal systems to help us track how we’re handling support and to gauge how effective that support is.
Content Marketing with WordPress: How To Improve Your Site’s Pull
An overview of content marketing and how to use WordPress’ features to promote your firm and your products or services online and beyond.
The presentation will include
- Content marketing basics
- The importance of knowing your audience
- Tailoring your site to your audience
- Social Media
- SEO / SEM
- Email Marketing
- Establishing Goals and Measuring Progress
Each area will be covered in overview fashion and will include a discussion of appropriate WordPress plugins and widgets and examples of how you might use them.
Build a Paypal-Integrated Subscription Content Site in 60 minutes or less!
There are two competing packages which can easily manage subscriptions – one called “s2member” and one called “Membership” from WPMUDEV.org. This discussion will explain the relative strengths and weakness of those two packages, and then walk the seminar participants through the creation of a complete site, from scratch, in just an hour.
Responsive WordPress Theming
I recently wrote two articles for .NET about Responsive WordPress theming. Covering the advantages WordPress has, overcoming hurdles and best practices/techniques.
eCommerce Choices for WordPress – Things to Consider
Purpose of the talk: Help website designers and developers learn what questions to ask their customers to make sure they get the information necessary to choose the correct e-commerce solution based on a customer’s 1-2 yr business plan. The talk will review the 4 options for adding e-commerce to a WordPress site – plugins, themes, SaaS solutions, downloads that must be integrated.
What would core do? Extending with class and consistency
Most complex WordPress plug-ins and themes need to add new features to WordPress administration, from special post meta boxes, to new widgets, to whole new administrative options and pages. When you build your administrative extensions, do you stop and ask “”WWCD”” – what would core do? Do you really need a whole new options screen for two new options? Does your theme options page feel like it could have shipped with WordPress? Can your users tell where WordPress stops and your customizations begin? This session blends conceptual strategies for improving our plug-ins and themes with some practical coding tips and techniques.
Your First VPS
Looking for more control over your WordPress site? More power than a shared host? Maybe it’s time for you to consider moving to a one of the many VPS hosting solutions. This talk will outline what you need to know about putting WordPress on a VPS server.
Jailbreaking WordPress: How to move your site to a new hosting provider
Sometimes you’ve got to break the chains of an old relationship; and you’ve got to pack up all your stuff, and fight over the dog. Hosting is very similar. If you don’t prepare your site, the database, your themes, and plugins for the migration, you can suffer downtime or lose content that you spent years creating. We’ll go through the steps you need to take to make sure your site migrates cleanly and completely the first time so you avoid drama and downtime.
Google Loves WordPress – Blogging For SEO
Blogging for SEO is different than optimizing your website. Learning how to blog for SEO can make the difference reaching out to your target market and missing them altogether. In the past year, Google has came out with many updates and programs that are a match made in heaven for WordPress Bloggers. Welcome to the new SEO.
I will be covering the following:
1. Plugins
2. WordPress Settings
3. The hidden WordPress SEO Features Most People Miss
4. How to use the latest Google Updates and Tools to your advantage
5. How to optimize your blog postings for competitive search terms
6. Exposure on bookmarking sites and social media
Selling WordPress to Your Clients
It is important to be able to sell the advantages of WordPress to a non-technical audience. Many times our clients are individuals simply seeking the best web solution for their business. It is up to us to sell Word Press in straight forward easy to understand manner.
3 – Key Points in Selling WordPress
1. More than just theme
2. Your web content, that you can control
3. The ability to grow, adapt and expand in the future
Overcoming the Common Objections
1. Its too complicated
2. I don’t want a template
3. I need a website not a blog
Social Media and Social Movements
Find out how to use social media as a creative, democratic, and social force to bring people together. Over the last year, a number of social movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, Susan B. Konen, and Stop Kony, have gained traction because people joined the cause through social media, including passionate blogs on issues of justice. Learn about, discuss, and advocate for social justice using social media. This is a fun, interactive, and provocative workshop, perfect for anyone who has a cause to promote or works in the non-profit or faith-based worlds. Great for the beginner, experienced, or advanced blogger.
Case Study: DocumentaryTelevision.com and How to Create and Build a Successful Business E-Newsletter
Three years ago I felt like an aged-out business consultant. My clients in the cable TV industry were retiring or getting laid off. The quality work was evaporating. In response, I launched a weekly WordPress newsletter ‘DocumentaryTelevision.com’ that focuses on the business of the factual television business. I now enjoy a revived consulting business, speaking engagements all over the world and sales of e-publications. Above all, I value a really interesting work life that’s personally connected to my colleagues through my professional blog. In this Case Study / Workshop, I present: the ‘Hail Mary’ plan, design concepts, the strategies that worked, the missteps, the roads not taken, the technical and other support, Next Steps? And much more.
Getting the Most from Community Cross-Pollination
WordPress and Disqus were built to help blogs tap into the extended reach of the interconnected communities using those platforms. Disqus 2012, the most comprehensive update to the WP plugin in Disqus’ history, was designed to take this even further by explicitly driving more traffic to blogs across the network and allowing bloggers to maintain higher quality discussions via cross-community reputation signals.
See what Disqus has learned from millions of sites and hundreds of millions of users, about the power of community cross-pollination and how best to harness it.
Using web fonts in WordPress
Use any font you want, and be sure your user will see it.
It used to be that we had to stick to “web-safe” fonts to be sure our site visitors saw the correct font. But now we can store our fonts on the web and serve them to users no matter what they have on their machines. I’ll show how to use the @font-face technique for embedding web fonts in your themes, give some good free/cheap font resources, and talk about licensing. I’ll also cover online repositories like Google fonts and typekit.
Intro to HTML5/CSS3 and WordPress
This presentation will introduce the audience to designing a WordPress theme in HTML5 and CSS3. We’ll discuss the history of HTML5, why HTML5 makes blog design easier, and what you need to do to get WordPress to output valid HTML5 code. You’ll also see how CSS3 can be used to generate an awesome-looking site using little to no graphics. A basic knowledge of HTML4.01 and CSS2.1 is assumed for those who will attend this session.
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