December 11, 2016 — Pressing publish can do a lot of things, but maybe the most important thing it can do is to help you find your own voice. There’s power in knowing who you are, what you stand for, and how you want to present yourself to the world. All of this is helped, in deep and incredible ways, with a blog.

December 11, 2016 — Hear Google’s latest stats on searcher and mobile trends, as well as how we’re trying to connect searchers with good content. I hope to share knowledge that will help the WP community make the best decisions for their platform.

December 11, 2016 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS.

Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools using a WordPress-Powered SaaS called SchoolPress.

Case studies will be presented for three districts (2 in NJ, 1 in TX) that migrated to WordPress.

December 11, 2016 — One of the bigger take aways from my WCEU talk is the reminder that your representation in the WordPress community is not your code but you. This talk will address the issues when we have to represent something bigger than ourselves, be it the company we work for or the community in general. How do you handle the days when people hate you for nothing more than enforcing rules? How does it feel to have your reputation shattered when you know you did right? When DO you fight back if you do at all? How do you do it without causing more harm than good? After 14 years working for a bank and 4 for a webhost, with 6 in the middle helping the .org community in support and plugins, I have a unique set of experiences to call from when it comes to remembering the biggest thing. I am not my code. And I am not the haters.

December 11, 2016 — On December 3rd, 2015 (one day before the inaugural WordCamp USA) a service called Let’s Encrypt entered its public beta. Backed by several major sponsors (including Automattic), the service caught on quickly. As of summer 2016, more than 5 million SSL certificates had been issued by Let’s Encrypt, nearly four million of which were active and unexpired.

If you are not familiar, Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, open certificate authority that allows users to encrypt the data flowing to and from their websites easily and for free. The goal of Let’s Encrypt is to make data transfer over the internet secure by default. Towards that end, they have invested a considerable amount of time and energy in making it easy for users of all stripes to secure the data flowing in and out of their websites.

You may have already considered encrypting your website before — perhaps to perform better in search engines, or to gain the ability to accept payments on your website. Regardless of whether you’ve considered enabling SSL on your website or not, the goal of this talk is to demonstrate why encryption on your website matters. We will look at some practical examples and live demos of what data can be stolen from your website, even if you using an encrypted wifi connection. Likewise, we’ll talk about how encryption of all websites — whether they’re dealing with sensitive information or not — makes the web a safer place for all of us.

Last, of course, we will look at how you can get started with Let’s Encrypt on your website. We’ll review the options available to you on common hosting providers, as well as walk through the steps for how you can set this up for yourself, if you have administrative access to your server.

If you already have Let’s Encrypt enabled on your site, this talk may be basic for you (although we’ll do a few cool demos that make for great party tricks, so feel free to stop by).

If you’ve never accessed your hosting provider’s website admin area (CPanel, Plesk, etc), this talk might be a bit hard for you to follow (although you should totally come and ask questions both during the presentation and after).

If you have a WordPress website and you’ve thought about enabling SSL on it but you just haven’t gotten around to it yet, this talk will be perfect for you. By the end of this presentation, you should not only know how to enable encryption on your website, but you will understand why it’s so important that you do.

It sounds like an intimidating topic, but we can do this. Come on and let’s encrypt!

Presentation Slides »

December 11, 2016 — WordPress has come a long way since Matt Cutts first spoke about SEO at WordCamp SF in 2007. The platform has changed and improved much of its SEO capabilities. But what’s left for the end user; which tweaks can really make a difference? Joost covers the most important aspects of a good WordPress SEO strategy.

In this talk, he will cover:
* your site’s settings
* your theme
* mobile friendliness and speed
* needed plugin(s)
* content

Note: while Joost is, of course, the project lead for Yoast SEO, most of this session will _not_ cover this plugin.

December 11, 2016 — Contributor Panel with Michael Arestad, Gary Pendergast, Joe Dolson, Taco Verdonschot and Tina Kesova

December 11, 2016 — No one can dispute the power that democratized publishing affords us. After all, anyone today can start a website and be heard by the world. And of course, WordPress has played a central role in all this. At the same time, the power granted by democratization has led to unforeseen consequences. From the persistence of misinformation to the proliferation of content designed to manipulate our emotions, from the polarization of politics to the spread of radicalism, all of these can be attributed in some way to the ease with which anyone can find a voice on the internet today. My talk will therefore 1) describe the problems democratization can create, and 2) discuss potential solutions. As the saying goes, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

December 11, 2016 — The New York Times recently launched a version of the site in Spanish and is expanding to more languages in the future. The workflow and architecture is built on top of WordPress. This talk will show how the NYT uses WordPress’ built-in i18n capabilities, generates translation files using Gulp, and takes existing projects (not built on WordPress) and turns them into a cohesive theme using Mustache. I’ll explain how we use Guzzle to talk to S3, and the REST API to syndicate content and offload expensive processes.

Presentation Slides »

December 10, 2016 — Pippin will answer some of the questions he is asked most often in regards to plugin development, business, managing a team, life, and other subjects.