October 29, 2016 — At work I sometimes stumble upon websites that are hacked. These can
send out spam, host a phishing site, etc. All kind of things we don’t
like and also things we don’t want our own website to be doing.

In this talk I’ll show you a bit of what it looks like when your website
is hacked. We’ll take a look at a couple of scenarios that might happen
if you’re not careful enough. And after that I’ll give you some pointers
on how to secure your website in a few easy steps.

October 29, 2016 — As a developer, understanding character encoding adds a lot of clarity to your work, especially when you’re dealing with text that contains characters beyond A-Z. If you’ve ever migrated a database from one site to another and ended up with jumbled characters in your content, this talk is for you. I’ll also explain why emoji in WordPress is the public relations face of something much more important.

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October 29, 2016 — Plugins contribute to one of WordPress’ major strengths; it’s flexibility. But as with every major strength it also comes with a few big downsides, which we’ll explore in this talk.

This is a story about a WordPress agency that wanted to do something different; write almost everything themselves. The talk explores the following questions:

Why would you want to build yourself?
What is it that you are going to build?
and How would you go about doing this?

October 29, 2016 — Here at Level Level we created an Open Source Twig based plugin ‘Clarkson Core’: a template engine with under the hood a collection of Object-oriented WordPress classes and some lightweight handy features.
This, in combination with a basic modern starter-theme and some agreed upon guidelines, contributes to a workflow that keeps comprehensive projects aligned with our technical goals. Meanwhile keeping the WordPress way of development in mind.

Currently every new project runs upon the Clarkson stack resulting in a variety of already delivered websites like Autotaalglas, Elsevier.nl, Kansfonds, SOMO and more. Our goals were to deliver maintainable, high quality and stable code that kept running after every automated deployment without having to hold our breath.

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October 29, 2016 — WordPress is growing and the number of big brands, complicated projects and high-traffic sites running on it grows as well. But what does it take to run a stable business based on WordPress? How do some agencies manage to get big and take on more and more challenging clients and projects while others struggle?
This talk explores several habits that successful open source agencies have in common. From client relations to processes, company culture, and hiring, it gives you pieces of know-how from some of the most successful WordPress agencies.

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October 29, 2016 — In kindergarten you were taught how to share. WordPress is built on the idea of sharing. It’s what makes our community strong and supportive. However, for many of us, this is our business, our livelihood, and so our opinion about the “proper use” of GPL sometimes taints how we code or interact with “the competition.” I’ll share some stories and thoughts that may challenge you point of view – in a good way.

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October 29, 2016 — “Everyone’s code has bugs. Luckily there are almost as many tools to help squash bugs as there are bugs to be squashed. In this talk, we’ll take a detailed look at how to debug and fix some common issues associated with WordPress sites.

We’ll explore how Chrome’s Developer Tools can help us pinpoint front end bugs.
Then, we’ll take a look under the hood with the Query Monitor plugin and see what’s going on behind the scenes with your WordPress site, including database queries, included template files, and more.
Finally, we’ll see how Debug Bar can help us keep an eye on any errors or irregularities that crop up in our code right from the WP Admin bar.

With all these tools in your toolbox, you can ensure that your code is in the best possible shape and ready to ship!”

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October 29, 2016 — The journey of how we leveraged WordPress to build our online learning startup, AdvantageLearn.com.

In this session I’ll chat about how a non-developer (me!) is using WordPress to run our click to pay to learn online education company. We manage this through a best of breed compilation of WordPress plugins (most notably Sensei and WooCommerce).

I’ll outline our journey with WordPress thus far through the lens of AdvantageLearn.com noting the challenges, trade-offs, failures and victories to date. It will be an honest account of my learnings as a Non-Dev building and running an online learning business.

October 28, 2016 — Finally figure out what metrics you should measure based on your specific goals, learn how to properly track specific visitor actions throughout your WordPress website as well as automatically keep count of each successful important website actions as Google Goals within Google Analytics, and then use these data points to guide the direction of the overall layout and content to create your very own data-driven WordPress website.

October 28, 2016 — Sitting in front of a screen all day and getting nothing done? You’re not alone. Procrastination? Distraction? Waning interest? Instead of giving up, get productive! Here’s 25 tried & true tools & widgets to get more done in less time.

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