March 29, 2017 — Between 2015 through 2016 Google saw an increase of 160 percent from the year before. With WordPress powering over a quarter of the entire web, we can be confident a good percentage of those sites were running WordPress. In this session, we will examine blackbox scanning tools to discover what types of information your WordPress site might be leaking to attackers, information they can use to potentially compromise your site. Then we’ll explore steps we can take to stop this information leakage — one key segment of a larger strategy to fortify WordPress sites.

March 29, 2017 — My topic will be centered on ways to customize WordPress posts, pages and custom templates with Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) for a better user experience. I will start out by giving a brief introduction to the plugin and how to use it, but the main focus will be on tips and tricks to making your fields clean and organized so that your users don’t freak out when looking at the backend of all their posts, pages or custom templates that use numerous custom fields.

The topic will be WordPress backend heavy, with a little bit of development talk to describe how to create fields in templates during the brief introduction to the plugin.

March 29, 2017 — JavaScript is awesome when it works, but when it doesn’t, it can be extremely frustrating. How do you troubleshoot an AJAX call? How do you know if your JavaScript is even on the page? How do you know if it is executing when and how it should? We will walk through some of the best practices for finding and identifying problems with your JavaScript inside WordPress.

March 29, 2017 — Developing WordPress sites doesn’t have to be painful. But for most of us, it’s a nightmare: we work on our local copy, then we have to set up the staging server, export the content, import it on the staging site (and hope it all works), remember to install all the plugins, and move over the media files. All over FTP.

But we’re developers. Why are we doing all this manual work?

In this talk, we’ll look at the modern WordPress tools from the Roots team — Bedrock and Trellis — to learn how we can set up a local WordPress development environment in minutes using Trellis, then deploy it to production fast with free SSL and two-way database syncing. Migrate everything — theme files, plugins, media uploads, posts, users, and all the rest — with simple commands using free and open-source tools.

This talk will cut your WordPress setup time to 30 minutes and give you hours of your life back.

March 29, 2017 — There are a lot of parallels between the open source development world and Improv communities. The goal of this talk is to expose the similarities and directly apply the core principles from the stagecraft of improv to get better code, smoother projects and ultimately happier customers. At the end the audience will be able to take practical examples and very simple exercises back to their organizations to better communicate with customers and internal stakeholders alike as well as techniques to get ‘unstuck’ when hitting major blockages in creativity needed for elegant code.

Topics will include:
Parallels between the Dev Community and Improv
Core principles of Improv and how we can embrace them for better code, including
– Active Listening
-Yes, And…
-Embracing failure as part of the process
Simple group exercises for any size team to improve communications

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March 29, 2017 — Security can be complex, intimidating, and even frightening. Don’t let the enormity of it scare you into inaction. Learn what some of the security researchers and security professionals deal with, and then find out some simple steps you can take to secure your sites.

March 29, 2017 — You create a killer read. Your article will change the way your ideal client does business. You’ll be inundated with calls from prospects wanting you to help them better their business. But there’s one small problem … no one’s reading the killer content you created. Writing and publishing doesn’t build a business unless your content lands in front of ready to read eyes.

That’s where smart social sharing comes in. But often this part of the content marketing equation is ignored or misunderstood. How can you get more eyes on your content prize? That’s what this talk will deliver.

We’ll talk social sharing best practices, etiquette and connection building techniques. We’ll also talk tools (plug-ins and schedulers) and smart social sharing set-up, including how to use – and not abuse – hashtags and keywords … and a whole lot more!

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March 29, 2017 — All of our speakers came together for the last sessions to discuss a variety of topics and take questions from the audience.

March 29, 2017 — According to Google, 55,000 sites got compromised per week. As we know, WordPress runs majority of the content-driven websites in the world. It then became the number one target for hackers and phishing scammers. In this presentation you will learn the What, How, Why, Where, by following an up to date security checklist with steps to prevent and avoid your WordPress getting hacked.

March 28, 2017 — In this session we’ll be exploring how to setup WordPress in AWS (Amazon Web Services) without using a server. It is also referred to as server-less computing. It takes the pain out of having to setup and manage a VPS, or dedicated server for WordPress.

Presentation Slides »