October 3, 2014 — For an hour Matt was answering questions. First, by his friend and top tech journalist Om Malik, then by the audience.

October 3, 2014 — This talk is about practical examples of using WordPress for more than just brochure sites or classic CMS. It walks through consumer facing apps and internal process apps like CRMs. And provides real world apps out in the wild and walks through how we went about building WeHeartDesigners.com as an example.

Presentation Slides »

October 1, 2014 — The biggest question every writer asks when they start publishing online is, “How do I get people to read my stuff?” There are many answers to this question, and these answers are usually now referred to as “content marketing”.

In this talk Rian van der Merwe shares why it is better to stay away from the easy ways and choose the difficult ways instead, and how a struggling blog with an insignificant number of readers can become not only a source of great joy and expression, but also a source of non-insignificant income.

October 1, 2014 — Front-end Developer Kurt Archer walks users through all the new features and shortcuts of WordPress 3.9.1. (commonly referred to as Smith). By the end of this session, you’ll have some more tricks in your web design and content creation arsenal.

September 30, 2014 — Gabriel Koen from PMC (Variety.com, Deadline Hollywood) presented “Launches: Lessons Learned” at the recent Big Media & Enterprise Meetup in San Francisco, California.

Presentation Slides »

September 30, 2014 — It took over 6 years of failure, and trying thousands of tips, tricks and best practices to build an audience and a blog presence. One morning, everything changed. The right words came out through the keyboard, they connected with the right people, traffic quadrupled almost instantly, Publications came knocking and business started coming in from across the globe.

September 27, 2014 — This introduction to WordPress walks the fine line between abstract concepts and specific use-cases for many administrative tasks within WordPress. The goal of the presentation is to not-only teach you how to navigate and use different functionality with WordPress’s dashboard, but to also provide understanding as to why the differences in functionality exist. By the end of the presentation, you should understand how to use WordPress to effectively create and manage simple websites. Topics covered: common settings, pages, posts, categories & tags, themes, widgets, and plugins.

Presentation Slides »

September 25, 2014 — One of my favorite WordPress releases is 3.5, when Daryl Koopersmith banged out umpteen lines of JS to gives us the new Media experience. It was a game-changer for the admin interface experience, and will echo in WP eternity. A utilitarian fill-out-form-and-submit-page will (probably) never go away. But JavaScript (with an MV* framework) is key to building user interfaces to deal with complex data in user friendly ways. Let’s go there.

September 25, 2014 — We know intuitively that searching in WP kinda sucks; the flaws in a traditional datastore (a.k.a. MySQL) make fixing these problems extremely hard. Elasticsearch complements WP and allows us to solve these issues to transparently provide a better user experience. Take a look at how and why Automattic is using Elasticsearch and how to leverage it for your own site too.

Presentation Slides »

September 25, 2014 — This talk will include a peek behind the curtain of one of my own websites from early conversations and design questionnaire to the project board that includes the UX/UI, fonts, color scheme and design inspiration to the finished WordPress website. There will be tools and tips for how to think creatively when designing for WordPress… Also I will ask the co-developer for this site to join me on stage for the Q & A portion of the talk to assist in answering questions about development of this website.