December 10, 2017 — Building software means much more than writing code. In fact, you can make a bigger impact with people skills and thoughtful human-centered design than simply with code. After running WordPress releases and then spending two years working in government, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin wants to talk about how your interactions with others matter and how it’s important to think with people, not for them.

December 10, 2017 — Using WordPress to queery (not a typo) data and generate statistics based on the entire history of television and understand the impact of fictional death in the media on real life people. As seen on https://lezwatchtv.com

Overview

This presentation will discuss the complications of using WordPress to manage a site filled with cross-related data, in order to understand the social and psychological impact of the Bury Your Gays trope on TV. By using WordPress, we were able to easily output the data, but building out a site without planning what data will be captured leads to headaches. There were difficulties in the growth of data, including handling multiple actors and shows, with separate roles, characters who changed names and genders, and the death and revival of another character (does she count as dead)? Through it all, we prioritized open data and open discovery of the data to allow people to take the content and use it for their own purposes.

Aspects

– The dead lesbian / bury your queers trope (see also: The Lexa Effect of 2016)
– Rest API for data promulgation and distribution
– Confirming theories with data
– How WordPress makes it ‘easier’ for people to find themselves reflected in media

December 10, 2017

December 10, 2017 — The Italian WordPress community was dormant for years, until a bunch of people got together at WCEU Contributor Day in Seville, in 2015, and decided it was time to revive it.

After months of online chats in our Slack team, we organised an event that kick-started an avalanche of Meetups and WordCamps in Italy: a stand-alone Contributor Day.

Two years later, Italy has more than 20 active Meetups, 4 cities with WordCamps in planning, and a great numbers of Contributors across the project.

In this talk, I’ll go through the steps we took to organise it, and I will also talk about Contributor Nights, special Meetup events where we concentrate on one of the Make teams and learn how to contribute from scratch.

December 10, 2017 — You’ve heard of financial forecasting, but you’re not really sure what it entails. However, you do know one thing: planning is good.

Planning allows you to grow strategically, be prepared for setbacks, and prioritize your time. Would you be surprised if I told you that that’s also the definition of financial forecasting?

Ever wanted to talk about what might be the key economic indicators of the WordPress industry? This talk is for you.

We’ll take some really complicated topics in the world of financial forecasting and break them down into ultra-simple ideas using contexts that we, as developers or marketers, actually understand. You will walk away being able to define qualitative vs. quantitative forecasting, the Delphi method, regression-based analysis, moving averages and exponential smoothing, but all in the context of WordPress business-specific applications.

This won’t be a math-heavy talk – the goal here is theoretical understanding. Understanding how the models work in theory will unlock a powerful, high-ROI thought process: to apply what you already know about the work you obsess over, and use that knowledge to think like a forecaster in your decision-making.

December 10, 2017 — TinyMCE is the world’s most popular open source library for online WYSIWYG editing of HTML. It is used by millions of applications, including WordPress.

Although first established in 2004, it was not until 2015 that the team behind TinyMCE began trying to commercialize it and build a business behind the open source project. What is the best way to make money from open source? Support, commercial licenses premium add-ons or hosting? And how do you avoid alienating the open source community? In this talk, learn what has worked and what hasn’t in the past two years.

December 10, 2017 — Every WordPress user is a VIP, and part of that VIP experience is knowing their installation, data, and user accounts are secure. WordPress.com VIP hosts and secures sites for some of the pre-eminent publishers and companies in the world. Ryan will share with you best practices from WordPress.com, WordPress.com VIP, and personal experience, to help you secure your sites, whether you are an individual blogger, a consultant helping people get started with WordPress, or an agency with multiple clients and customers.

December 10, 2017 — The Deaf community is marginalized in most countries around the world. Using WordPress, one couple is trying to increase understanding of and participation in the Deaf community in Jamaica. This presentation will share how a partnership with a WordPress developer has changed how they spread their message and improve the way of life for the Deaf in this island nation.

December 10, 2017 — WordPress at its heart is a blogging platform, designed to serve a site that’s largely read-only. Logging in isn’t necessary unless you’re an admin looking to write a blog post or adjust settings. This is a good thing! Scaling a site that’s predominantly read-only is very easy because you can place a CDN like CloudFront or a page cache like Varnish in front of a single server and serve many, many requests from hardware as cheap as $5 per month.

But what happens when you have a site that isn’t read-only? What happens when you have, for example, a WooCommerce site with a couple hundred transactions a day? Or perhaps you run a news site with millions of pageviews a month? All of a sudden, that poor $5 server is catching on fire and asking what it did to deserve this!

Running a single server like this is called a “Single Point of Failure” and that is a very big no-no to run in a production environment. Cloud servers are ephemeral in nature and aren’t guaranteed to stay up 100% of the time. Any number of things can go wrong, which is why designing your infrastructure to respond to bursts of traffic as well as be able to continue serving requests when servers go down is paramount to a reliable production environment.

This talk will give an overview of what is involved from moving from a single-server setup to a scalable, highly-available infrastructure on AWS.

December 10, 2017 — WordPress has successfully transitioned from a Blog to a CMS and now is becoming a platform for which anything can be built. However, the evolution is still continuing, and GraphQL is part of the platform evolution.

GraphQL is a query language spec that allows data from any system, including WordPress, to be queried as if it were a Graph of data.

I will walk through what WordPress as an Application Data Graph looks like, and how GraphQL can make querying data from the WP Application Data Graph easy, declarative and highly performant.

We will look briefly at how GraphQL compares to REST, some similarities and differences.

We will look at some examples of WPGraphQL in production on large publishing sites, such as DenverPost.com and SiliconValley.com.

We will dive into how to use GraphQL to query data from WordPress using the WPGraphQL plugin (https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql).

In this portion of the talk, we will look at demos of querying and mutating (writing) data in WordPress using a GraphQL IDE tool called GraphiQL.

Then we will discuss what benefits GraphQL provides for decoupled applications, the tooling around GraphQL that makes it a pleasant experience to work with.

Some benefits I will highlight are: performance gains over REST, the ability to request multiple resources without round trips to a network, tooling around GraphQL (such as GraphiQL IDE and other IDE plugins).