February 22, 2018 — This talk will be helpful for any WordPress developers or consultants who are thinking of building products of their own. I’ll use our own story as one example of how to do this, with advice that should helpful for businesses and freelancers looking to increase the value of their consulting services, add revenue streams from products, or transition 100% into products like we did.”

Presentation Slides »

February 22, 2018 — When more people from underrepresented groups start speaking at WordPress events, everybody benefits. At WordCamp Vancouver, we started by focusing on women. In 2013, not many had applied. The following year, three times as many women applied and fully half of selected speakers were women. This dramatic shift was no accident. My talk will share how we accomplished it, some of the lessons we learned along the way, and the positive changes that resulted in our community.

February 22, 2018 — An extremely engaging moderated discussion of the challenges that face large WordPress sites with 100s or 1000s of users.

Come learn lessons and hear advice on managing user needs and providing tools that make site management easier for everyone.

February 22, 2018 — Are you a small, ambitious nonprofit with lots of programs but a little marketing budget? Is it hard to show what you do on your WordPress website because your org just does so many different things? Do you need help maximizing your WordPress site’s potential to market your mission? In this session, we’ll share 3 cost-effective ways of promoting your nonprofit’s work:

1. Build an online annual report
This is a highly effective and super shareable way of showing your nonprofit’s impact. And you won’t have to print and mail those reports again.
2. Build microsites for your special programs/events
Highlight your special fundraising events or conferences with a microsite, which has its own mini navigation bar.
3. Create an issue specific resource
You can create a crowd-sourced Google sheet that will drive new traffic to your site. It’s an easy to maintain document too. (Ex: Women in Tech).

February 21, 2018 — Unfortunately, when developing WCAG2, the Working Group did not envision the current world where mobile is almost ubiquitous. For example, on a mobile device there is no continual access to a keyboard (unless someone is using it as an add-on to the device – or using a Blackberry Classic). WCAG2 requires that all content be accessible to the keyboard interface, but it does not require that all content be accessible to a mouse or to a touchscreen user – which is essential on a mobile device. Gian Wild talks about the unique accessibility issues on a mobile site and mobile app, including hover traps, VoiceOver swipe traps and zoom traps.

Accessibility is important to all – not everyone using your mobile app, device or wearable will be fully functioning: either because they have a disability or they are simply engaged elsewhere. Gian Wild talks about the things that are essential to avoid when designing mobile apps, devices and wearables to ensure that everyone can use them.

This is a fun talk, with lots of gasps and laughter. It is example after example of mobile accessibility fails – but they just look like mobile fails! In this way I try and stress that a usability issue is really an accessibility issue, and making a mobile site accessible actually makes it usable too.

I talk about specific mobile accessibility features: pinch zoom, native screen readers, haptic keyboard etc, and system accessibility settings: font size, screen rotation, high contrast etc
I outline the major things that need to be considered when dealing with a mobile site or mobile app:

PDFs
Mobile-specific
Autoplay and movement
On-screen keyboard traps, hover traps, VoiceOver swipe traps, Touch traps
Alternatives
Text size
Inherited system settings
In-app settings
Color contrast
Missing functionality
Pixellation on zoom
Touch target size
Spacing between touch targets

February 21, 2018 — In trying to figure out how to build better WordPress sites faster, we at Cornershop have developed an approach that leverages WP-CLI to dynamically inject configurable, pre-written code (HTML, PHP, JS and SASS) into our in-house starter theme. This novel approach speeds up our custom development work by letting us quickly assemble oft-used functionality without littering our theme with superfluous code.

Come learn about the decision-making that led us to go down this road, and see exactly how we’ve gone about building our extensible framework as a plugin that extends WP-CLI. Whether you’re an agency or a solo freelancer, hopefully seeing our approach can lead to fruitful thinking on how you can deliver the most value to your clients.

February 21, 2018 — “Going from hacking all the things to engineering solutions because I have open access to the WP Community and the WordPress source code.

I’ll touch on my journey, Software Engineering within the WP context and how one can become better by being part of the WordPress community.”

February 21, 2018 — This talk will explore browser-compatible innovations in CSS that you should start employing in place of media queries. The end result will save time and create more adaptive web experiences.

We will walkthrough practical use cases for the calc() function, Flexbox, and CSS Grid.

February 21, 2018 — WordPress now powers over 28% of the web, and it’s built and maintained by hundreds of contributors all over the world. There are as many ways to contribute to WordPress as there are dishes in a feast! In this talk, we’ll look at some recipes for successful contributions followed by people who’ve made a big impact on WordPress. There’s room for you at this table — join us!

February 21, 2018 — The term ‘Digital Nomad’ refers to people who are location independent (nomad) and can still perform their job through the use of technology (digital). That sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, today thousands of people agree and practice this modern lifestyle, and it is only trending upwards!

It’s not difficult to imagine why this has gained such popularity due to the many pros of traveling and working remotely, but it also comes with many challenges. Chris Muller, of Pango, recently experienced the digital nomad lifestyle first-hand while being located in Europe for 2.5 months.

He is now eager to share insights into this growing global trend, and his experiences/takeaways while being a digital nomad for the first time.