October 23, 2017 — This talk will demonstrate the benefits of using Xdebug to debug PHP, why it beats the pants off of `var_dump()`, and how it has helped, and continues to help me become a better developer. I’ll talk a bit about what Xdebug is, how it works, and a few common scenarios where Xdebug has helped me to solve problems and gain a better understanding of how various tools work together. I’ll be running Xdebug on a Vagrant box and using PHP Storm for my demonstration. I will cover: 1. How to quickly configure a project to use Xdebug 2. How to set break points and step through code execution 3. How to inspect variables 4. How to use the console to evaluate expressions Xdebug isn’t hard to use, and once you’ve used it you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it.

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October 23, 2017 — Tim loves WordPress and enjoys leveraging it to meet businesses needs. I lead the Customer Community Team at BoldGrid. I’m passionate about SEO, internet marketing, and e-commerce. When I’m not tinkering with WordPress I spend my time on adventures with my awesome wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, & Petra.

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October 23, 2017 — Sass (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets) has emerged as the dominant CSS extension and preprocessor used by front end developers. At first, I was afraid to make the jump from writing vanilla CSS to learning Sass, but once I dedicated myself to the concept of learning Sass I found that it wasn’t as hard to learn as I thought it would be AND that it also made my code more elegant and my development process more efficient. This talk will explore how to get started with Sass in a way that eases the transition to using a preprocessor. We’ll take a look at a number of considerations regarding Sass, including how to set up a WordPress theme to use it, the basics of variables, mixins, nesting, and partials, and helpful resources to learn more.

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October 23, 2017 — The talk discusses dependency injection to allow for Advanced PHP “containerization” of classes using autoloading, namespacing. We’ll look at this methodology used in other languages, but relatively new to PHP and how that can enhance WordPress development. We will discuss techniques used in the greater PHP community, while still embracing the philosophy, flexibility, and architecture of WordPress.

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October 23, 2017 — Introducción a la segurización de un sitio web con WordPress. Consejos y pautas básicas para iniciarse en la tarea de mantener tu sitio web y tus usuarios protegidos. Sugerencias de plugins y protocolos de actuación.

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October 23, 2017 — She enjoys front-end development but also loves to build sites from start to finish. She started in Joomla back when it was 1.0.x and worked her way into WordPress and Drupal about 7 years ago. She enjoys teaching others to code as well as speaking at conferences and youth events. Tessa is a northern Minnesota native, but now lives in the Twin Cities with her husband and four children

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October 23, 2017 — Plugin angst – That horrible feeling when you find a plugin that does *almost* exactly what you want but to get the right behavior you’ll have to change some code. And by changing the code, you lose the ability to update the plugin, which means missing out on security patches, bug fixes, and new features.
We’ll look at how plugin authors can help you avoid this angst by writing extensible code. Plugin behavior can then be modified without making changes the original code.

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October 23, 2017 — WordCamps and meetups are always brimming with help on how to best tune your WordPress development environment for your MacBook Pro. But what about us Windows users? Nadda. Let’s see how to put that time-tested OS to work and create the ideal set-up to get your Windows box all jazzed up to pump out an awesome WordPress site.

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October 23, 2017 — Design is a broad specification with many disciplines, and naturally, with such an expansive set of tools, practices and thought processes, it can feel seemingly impossible to define. As a result, some have sought to create tightly controlled representations of what “design actually is”. However, this line of thinking is … quite frankly, BS, and can be to our detriment in the ever evolving design landscape; leaving design out of some rather important and influential conversations, when it could (should) have a bigger role in general. Why? Because design plays a role in pretty much everything we do.

In this talk Joe will discuss the importance of designers embracing their role as empathy dealers, and the core areas in which the need for designers to engage is more important than ever.

October 23, 2017 — Drew Poland is a freelance WordPress developer in the Baltimore area specializing in custom theme design & development. He is also a regular WordCamp speaker.

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