Sessions

In this presentation, Troy and Kristina will deliver 101 practical ways you can improve your performance, the quality of the projects you deliver, and your overall business as a freelancer. These tips and tools will help you find and qualify clients, take a great brief, write proposals, price your services, setup monthly website maintenance plans, avoid scope creep and get referrals from existing clients. This is a dynamic and entertaining presentation with lots of great takeaways.

Ratchet up the connection with your blog readers by adding a podcast to your website. Learn the benefits of connecting your voice to your readers’ ears, the best ways to make the connection between podcasting and blogging for your fans, and finally the best resources to start your podcasting journey.

We all want our sites to have great usability. However, we often don’t think about our sites’ accessibility, especially if we haven’t had firsthand experiences with disabilities. This talk will explore empathy and how it relates to building more inclusive, accessible sites. You’ll leave armed with tools to help you experience your sites in ways to ultimately improve their accessibility and usability, reach more people with your site’s message and products, and be a better human being.

You visit your site and you don’t see what you’re expecting; you see a white screen, a 404 or a 502 error. Your site is down, and you’re losing visitors, and potentially lots of money. How do you handle those first pivotal minutes to find out what’s going on? With the experience and tools of front-line web support, John will go through the steps required to figure why your site is down and how to fix it as quickly as possible.

Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, recently described WordPress as a “web operating system”. No longer just for blogging anymore, WordPress can power database-backed applications that run inside a web browser. Now, order management systems, CRMs and more can be built with WordPress.

In this presentation we’ll show you real life examples of applications built with WordPress, and the companies running their businesses on them. Then we’ll dive into the code and demonstrate how you can build these yourself.

You will leave this session amazed and excited to start working on a WordPress application!

With the rapid popularization of web fonts over the past few years, type on the web has never been more exciting! We’ll learn a bit about basic typographic principles, review techniques and services for integrating web fonts into your WordPress sites, and finally conclude with a bit of speculation on where type on the web is heading.

• Slides

React’s been taking the tech world by storm. WordPress developers have been tasked with “Learning JavaScript deeply” — and React is a great JavaScript tool to know. With the WordPress REST API in development, combining React and WordPress is becoming easier. In this talk we’ll review React and some related tools, talk about who’s already using it, and explore how you can use React in WordPress (and why you may or may not want to).

Whether we know it or not, most of the time that we open a website, see an ad on social media, television or even in print, we are taking part in some sort of split test. If your business isn’t yet using some form of A/B testing or multi-variant testing, it’s time to start.

In this talk I will cover using testing to improve your services and increase the conversion on your eCommerce sites and lead generation forms. In addition I will cover when to test and where, as well as how to use split testing to validate or invalidate ideas about your business as early as possible.

It’s extremely tempting to jump right into making a website that looks pretty and does fancy stuff, but what our users need is a site where they can complete tasks and do what they came to do. Before jumping into the design and build, you’ll need to take a step back and plan out your site. It will save you time and money, not to mention, your users will thank you. This talk will walk through everything you need to do before you touch your theme or your code, from determining on your website goals to creating wireframes.

There are more platforms than ever for publishers to consider as they seek new digital audiences. Google AMP, Facebook Instant, Apple News…which should your site prioritize? What’s involved with implementation? How are publishers using data to inform their strategies? This talk will include key learnings from working with hundreds of other data driven media sites.

Ranking organically in Google is every website owner’s dream but few are actually successful. This session will examine the basics of search engine optimization in WordPress. From keyword research to plugins that help with SEO, Lulu will explain the concepts behind configuring your website so that it is Google-bot friendly for SEO purposes, as well as visitor-friendly for human consumption!

In this presentation we will explore how CiviCRM integrates into WordPress. In 2000 I began working with a variety of non-profits in managing their website and database needs and along the way discovered WordPress’s flexible and moldable features, and haven’t looked back! Previously I used a patchwork of options from HTML, Access and a slew of custom hosted tools, enhancing my knowledge how facets of comparable tools can be used in tandem to meet diverse organizational needs. As of 2012 CiviCRM could be integrated into WordPress, essentially creating a web-based non-profit platform, which empowers organizations to track track their constituents, donations, events, memberships and more.

Maintaining user passwords is no fun for a site admin, and having to create and remember passwords for new sites is even less fun for your users. Instead, let’s use oAuth to enable “social login” so your users can login with their Facebook, Google, Twitter or other oAuth accounts and remove headaches for both.

We’ll walk through how the oAuth standard works and the technical ins and outs of integrating oAuth into your plugins and sites.

Web agency designers and developers sometimes fall into a pattern of thinking of the client as a necessary evil to be tolerated at a distance: “this job would be great if only I didn’t have to deal with clients.” At best, this way of thinking prevents productive collaboration – at its worst, it can translate into combative relationships that ruin the project for vendor and client alike.

Drawing on real client experiences and memes from popular culture, I’ll cover everything from how to establish and maintain diplomatic relations with clients to how to right client relationships gone awry and when to break ties and walk away.

• Slides

In this talk I’ll show you why Vagrant is so awesome and how you can get up and running quickly. Vagrant is a great piece of software that creates reproducible and portable virtual machines which can be used as web servers for local WordPress testing environments. Vagrant is a tool for managing virtual machines – creating a programmatic way create and configure virtual machines that mimic an application’s production environment.

I’ve collected a few WordPress-related Vagrant resources that will help you get started. Will discuss many of the different vagrant boxes used to create a portable WordPress environment that are cross-platform compatible and easily to be deployed to almost any live environment.

Description: No, you are not going to become a “WordPress developer” without having to write code. But you can become a better developer by improving your processes. Rather than thinking of “coding” and “programming” as synonymous disciplines, consider coding as but one phase of programming. We often dive into implementation without planning or design, promoting and prioritizing coding above all else (“patches welcome”, anybody?). What are these other parts of programming and how can we work them into our individual and group practices?

We start with the premise that for many, WordPress is not easy. Clients get frustrated because improper, insufficient, or no instruction was provided. Frustration leads to failed sites and disasters.

From years of instruction experience I know what many feel are obstacles to mastering WordPress. I’ll explain where the stumbling blocks are and how they can be overcome.

While my talk is targeted to designers and developers who provide – or want to provide – an instructional component to their offerings it’s going to work for a broader audience of users and bloggers who just may be having some trouble with WP.

Does the thought of creating video content scare the crap out of you? Do you want to create video content but not sure where to start? In this session, you will learn what equipment you will need and tips to start creating great video content for your WordPress site.

In this session, all-level attendees will learn basic design principles that they can use to build a better WordPress site. I will cover the importance of layout and whitespace, basic color theory for branding, and choosing better typography for the best user experience practices. I will also provide examples of three user case studies and offer tips that every WordPress user can begin implementing for better design.

Many developers understand that git is important to use in their workflow, but don’t quite know how to take advantage of all the features given to them. In this talk, we’ll be going over some common use cases for git in a bigger organization and examine what is useful to do on your own team. This ranges from internal code reviews all the way up to code debugging.

Five talks, all five minutes long. The first one is chosen by me ahead of time, but the next four are picked by the audience voting live. The topic options will include build tools, design philosophy, Accessibility, WordPress APIs, Open Source, International Politics, and more!

Content Management Systems are by nature resource intensive, expensive to customize, and difficult to manage at scale. What if we can change this perception and help PHP / WordPress developers architect a content platform that is high performance and low cost, high security and low maintenance? This talk will focus on 3 key topics: 1) serverless environment, 2) microservices architecture and 3) hands-on demos. We will describe a serverless solution and propose a scalable architecture that will help WordPress community to adopt cloud-native approach without huge efforts or expensive resources allocation.

In the last five years, WordPress has steadily become the CMS of choice for publications, especially the national publications headquartered in NYC. Bloggers, editors, and writers are the reason behind this industry-wide change, advocating for WordPress from the bottom up. In this session, we’ll take a look at the ways WordPress has changed the editorial workflow at large publishers. Through case studies, we’ll see the customizations the publishers have implemented to help journalists heart WordPress. And by discussion, we’ll give attendees a chance to share some of their challenges and solutions.

WordPress is nothing without the numerous amounts of contributions that have made it into the CMS that it is today. When someone tells you that anyone can contribute to WordPress you may not believe them.

In this talk Jenny will discuss how every contribution counts, and explain the different ways you can start contributing back to the open source project we all love so much.

Backbone works perfectly with the new WP REST API; lets dig in!

Learn about connecting Backbone to the REST API building on its bundled JavaScript client, and extending the REST API with hooks.

The WP REST API JavaScript library provides base Backbone models and collections for every endpoint: learn how to use and extend them with logic and views. We will also look at adding additional data to existing endpoints as well as creating custom endpoints for our application on both the front and back end.

Learn about what is easy and what is not so easy when working with Backbone and the WP REST API.

Overview
Using the WP REST API with Backbone apps
Extending the REST API Backbone classes
Using hooks to extend the REST API endpoints and create custom endpoints
Putting it together
Build a demo extending the base objects and loading and saving data with the REST API
Extending Data returned from the API PHP side and using that data in Backbone
Extending Data stored on the API side and tying into Backbone
JavaScript debugging tips and tools
Authentication, security and accessibility
Summary
The easy parts: data binding, extending, connect WordPress data to Backbone models and views
The hard parts: authentication, big apps, browsers
Some gotchas: no-js, a11y, i18n
Some help: workarounds, helpers and resources

Learn the basics and some advanced tricks of WordPress plugin development as we code a new plugin from scratch live in the session. We will also dissect the Hello Dolly plugin and insert our own favorite song lyrics. This session will demonstrate how to create a complete plugin from scratch and make it work with any WordPress site. Topics covered include hooks, content manipulation, some of WordPress’ most powerful APIs that are utilized by plugins. By the time the session has completed, attendees will have the skills to develop plugins from scratch using simple PHP and the WordPress API.

Hey, I found a bug in WordPress! What happens next?

The first – and often irresistible – reaction is to write a patch. But proposed fixes are almost always inadequate without a complete understanding of when the bug was introduced and why the code was originally written the way it was.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the importance of a historical sensibility when fixing bugs, and I’ll demonstrate some of the technical tools that I use to dig through a project’s history to develop this sensibility. My focus will be on WordPress core, but the ideas and techniques discussed can be applied to any complex software project.

As more developers move their environments to virtual machines, the need for a good debugging system grows. Amongst the myriad of options we are given, some exceed expectations and make this process as needed as it is easy to put in place.
In this session, I will debug a complete WordPress installation on a Vagrant machine with PhpStorm, Google Chrome and Xdebug, step by step with real project examples so the audience can easily follow along throughout the session.

How breaking from developer salt mines to make the most awesome of peanut butter and banana sandwiches saved my sanity when beating my head up against the development creativity wall under extreme deadline. So in ten minutes I will tell this riveting story and hopefully help millions of developers, well ok the ones in the room, beat the developer’s equivalent of writer’s block.

Trust me it will be fun and besides, unless you are allergic, peanut butter and banana sandwiches are awesome.

Do you ever wonder where life will take you? Two years ago, I had no idea I would travel around the world, and come back a completely different person. And it’s all thanks to my involvement in the WordPress community.

Working remotely in the WordPress community has enabled me to travel the world, make friends in multiple time zones, and experience things I’d never imagined.

Come along with me, as we trace my steps. And see if working remotely for a company in the WordPress community could change your life, too.

Ever wonder how a WordPress release is structured?

Every 4 months, the project goes through a loop that results in a major release.

By the end, you’ll understand what to expect during the stages of a release, and how you can get involved.

The longer-running version would include wider contribution information. A lightning talk would be a concise explanation of the release cycle.

This session will be a deep dive into how color is implemented in web design. We’ll cover the details of what exactly websafe, HEX, RGB, and HSL values are and then delve into different ways we should consider color when designing and developing for the web. What should you do when a client gives you only CMYK or Pantone brand colors to work with? What colors lead to the highest conversion rates? How does color impact accessibility? We’ll talk about these considerations and more as we discuss the details of the color choices we’re making on the web.

So your plugin was approved. Now what? How do you handle reviews, support requests, pull requests, and complaints? How to you expand to a team? Should you support your plugins in the forums or on your own site? Where do you draw the line and how? And what, exactly, does it mean when your plugin gets removed?

Security is hard. As critical as it is to our collective work, far too many of us don’t have a solid grasp of addressing and avoiding vulnerabilities in our projects. This talk will both explain several real world examples of common vulnerabilities and exploits, including open redirects, server-side request forgeries, charset issues, as well as how keeping in a security-conscious mindset can save everyone time and headaches in the long run.

Please Note: While this is a development-oriented talk, but will not get too deep into code.

Have you ever not wrote that blog post, not applied to speak, or not shared your work because you thought you’re not good enough? You have the Impostor Syndrome, and so do most of us. It’s that malicious voice in the back of our heads that prevents us from growing to our potential. I will share my story of how joining the WordPress Community helped me overcome my Impostor Syndrome, and how you can too.

The command line can feel daunting – especially when trying to learn a new topic. I’ll help you move beyond the basics. You’ll learn some theory, with an emphasis on practical skills. This is a talk that will increase your understanding of the CLI, and help you level up. Topics like bash functions, command substitution, regular expressions and shell configuration, wont feel as mysterious. Hopefully, you’ll be inspired to adapt the material to better customize your command line user experience.