June 7, 2016 — We’ll go over the basics of keeping your WordPress site safe.

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June 7, 2016 — Shiny Updates is an effort to make the user experience around managing plugins and themes smoother and more pleasant. It has also shown to be a feature that is subject to all the challenges that software projects face around the world, and as such makes for a great case study to review the current approach to WordPress Core development.

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June 7, 2016 — Guilt-free Coding is a philosophy, it’s about learning to let go of the guilt that you might have for not doing something the right way, or even newest way, and accepting sometimes it’s good to give yourself a break and just get it done. In this talk, I’ll walk you through my techniques of letting go of guilt, and finding real enjoyment in learning. Applying these techniques made learning React.js a joy for me; I’ll be covering some of the successes and failures I had during this process. Don’t worry, though, I won’t be suggesting you “throw out the rulebook”, as there can be consequences in doing that.

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June 7, 2016 — For a food bank charity we put together a complex plan for a WordPress multisite containing:

at least 3 different but connected themes
a shared media system
a process for pushing content from subsite to the “main” site without db headache
a live clone system
all of these and more helped us keep the charity and their over 400 locations all have a web presence. This talk will cover the ups and downs of this complex behemoth and the lessons we learnt from it.

June 7, 2016 — It could be a defacement, your server is sending thousands of viagra emails, or more subtle things like your WooCommerce transactions being syphoned away. Hacked sites cost the economy millions of pounds a year. For hosting companies they are an almighty pain. For site owners they feel like a violations. This talk will guide you through how you can identify hacks, what steps can be taken to remove such hacks as well as how we can prevent them in the future.

June 7, 2016 — I want to talk about transients, this little, but so useful caching system included in WordPress Core. This famous (or not ?) API is a friend, let’s see some concrete cases to lower external requests, avoid to perform same DB queries, pass param without using a param (what??), transients are used more than you think. You will learn how it works, how and why to use it, the goal is to reduce your website’s loading time.

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June 7, 2016 — How do you get a plugin onto the WordPress.org repository? What steps do you need to take? Are there any specific requirements? These are just some of the questions this talk, aimed at anyone who wants to push a plugin to the WordPress.org repository will answer. We will go through the steps you need to take in order to prepare your plugin, some best practices in the plugin code and how to submit it to .org.

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June 7, 2016 — Newer Web APIs give developers abilities that were unthought of just a few years ago, making your website so much capable and powerful. However, these features are only available over HTTPS, to avoid security risks. Likewise, HTTP2 will only work over HTTPS encrypted connections. And even Google recently promised small bumps in their search results for sites served with HTTPS! Sadly, not only do HTTPS certificates cost money and are tedious to set up and maintain, but the renewal must be repeated annually… until now. Let’s Encrypt is a new authority that provides free and easy to manage certificates that work with all major browsers, with the aim of making encrypted connections the default. In this talk we’ll look at why you should add HTTPS to your WordPress installation, how Let’s Encrypt works and how to set it up in our WordPress websites, plus potential workflow improvements for the future.

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June 6, 2016 — Design Thinking is an alternative approach to the problems we’re working to resolve. It focuses on empathy and asking the right questions (which is normally, “why?”) to explore new solutions that may not initially be so obvious. This talk will review the process of Design Thinking and how it applies to our life and to the problems we face regularly. It’s about putting the user first and producing results that fit the user’s desires, needs, and capabilities. This method is rooted in the discipline of human-centered design and promotes a holistic effort to accomplishing everyday tasks. Come learn why Design Thinking isn’t about designing by committee, but rather an integral part to solid results that are understandable, usable, and purposeful.

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June 5, 2016 — Damian will be talking about the way WordPress is shaping towards stronger/more frequent use as a fully fledged CMS platform with a strong focus on frontend content delivery using JavaScript technologies.

Some of the key areas they’d like to highlight during their talk are the RESTful API integrations with WordPress, whenever it’s exposing WordPress functionality through use of WordPress REST API 2.0 Plugin, or integration with external services and how this can be done with technologies such as AngularJS.

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