October 30, 2016 — This talk is an overview of how to incorporate Sass into your theme building practices.

The talk will cover:

What is Sass and why should you use it
File organization, including WordPress-specific considerations
Sass best practices, including WordPress-specific considerations
Using a task runner (grunt/gulp) and development best practices
Thoughts and considerations for parent/child themes
Incorporating 3rd party libraries and frameworks
Exposing styles to WP Admin for better WYSIWYG display
Thoughts and considerations for development vs production CSS
Debugging CSS issues in the Sass
Mention of PostCSS and how it can complement Sass

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2016 — Online courses are hot in business right now, and the best classes are much more than a series of videos. With WordPress, you can create a perfect platform for learning along with solid courses to serve your audience. We’ll explore what makes a great platform and a solid course plus WordPress configuration options to create this. From bbPress and Learning Management Systems to BuddyPress, we’ll look at what’s possible along with difficulty levels of the various implementations.

Whether you are a business owner looking into how online courses can increase business or a developer looking for a new package to offer customers, this session is for you.

A downloadable guide and private area demonstrating one of the implementations will be available to attendees.

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2016 — Akismet, Jetpack, Disqus, all of these big companies are utilizing the cloud to deliver services through a plugin. Can a small WordPress development shop even attempt this? Yes, you can, and it’s not that hard to do. Heavy volume processing, shared data across clients, AI and big data are just some of the services you can more easily deliver through the cloud.

This talk will cover key concepts you need to know to get started, including:

Identifying processing best delivered through cloud services
Architecting a cloud service plugin
Building a cloud service on Amazon with PHP/Apache
Communication between your plugin and the Cloud Service
Tips, volume metrics and other lessons learned in 4 years of supporting Artificial Intelligence and volume processing through a cloud service plugin.

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2016 — There’s a lot of great reasons to blog — most of them have been articulated by tons of brilliant folks (you can make money, you can have influence, you can demonstrate expertise). What I’ll share with you is five things you will discover about yourself as you start blogging consistently.

Presentation Slides »

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.

Presentation Slides »

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.

Presentation Slides »

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.

Presentation Slides »