August 16, 2016 — I’m a digital marketer with a love for my community and the nonprofits that serve my community. Some friends and I set out to create a way to help marketing professionals and developers use their specific skills to help local nonprofits, and 48in48 (48in48.org) was born. We recently finished our first 48in48 event where a team of over 150 people built 48 WordPress websites for 48 nonprofits in 48 hours. This session will explore what I learned during the creation, planning and execution of the event and will give some thoughts on how the WordPress community can give back using their professional skills.

Take aways:

How we approached building a plethora of sites a short amount of time.
How we approached the volunteers.
What plugins we used that were essential for the success of the project and for the long term success of the nonprofits.
Overview of what we learned and what we plan to do next.

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August 16, 2016 — Version 4.6 of WordPress, named “Pepper” in honor of jazz saxophonist Pepper Adams, is available for download or update in your WordPress dashboard. New features in 4.6 make gets you where you need to go faster, whether you’re adding a theme, updating your site’s plugins, or navigating the WordPress Dashboard.

August 16, 2016 — Hooks give end users a chance to write custom code that safely alters the behavior of WordPress core, plugins and themes – all without modifying the core, plugin or theme code itself.

In this talk, we’ll go over basic usage of WordPress hooks, and we’ll explore ways to find the right hook when you have a need for custom functionality. We’ll also talk about how easy it is to create your own hooks, and how important it is to do so when creating plugins and themes.

Take aways:

Learn how WordPress is listening for you to run your own code at certain key points.
Safely alter or add to the behavior of WordPress core, themes, and plugins.
Give others a chance to expand upon your own code as they see fit.

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August 15, 2016 — There has been lots of discussion around using WordPress as an app framework. In this talk, we’ll take a detailed look at the ups and downs of using WordPress to build a web app (hireotto.com) with:

WP REST API Endpoints
OAuth Authentication with 3rd party services
WP Cron & Job Queues
3rd Party API integrations
Webhooks
User Registration & Account Management
Recurring Billing
An overview and look into how all these components work together, where WordPress saved development time, and where it caused headaches.

This talk is not an endorsement or condemnation of using WordPress as an app framework. Each project is different, and the goal is to openly discuss the tradeoffs so developers can make informed decisions for their own projects.

August 15, 2016 — SVGs provide designers, developers and users with an array of benefits including performance, styling and animations. In this talk, theme developers will walk away with the benefits of using SVGs in their themes, understanding the different approaches to rendering SVGs, and adding some styles and animation to help bring sites and applications to life.

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August 15, 2016 — 1.) Beginners: what a Multisite is; what they’re good for; what they’re not good for

2.) Intermediate: sub-domain vs sub-folders; network admin.

3.) Advanced: Caveats; domain mapping; quirks

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August 15, 2016 — I will walk the audience through the different caching options they might have at their disposal depending on their hosting needs and the hidden gotcha’s they might not be aware of.

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August 15, 2016 — Heroes? Pricing tables? THE GRID? Why DO all websites look like the same? Starting with a well-organized theme framework and a little SASS, this talk will cover how to identify user experience patterns and stories that guide your visitors where you want them to go, while giving you the freedom to create new designs that stand out from the sea of sameness prevalent in today’s websites. We also cover how curating your own pattern library enables you to hit the cornerstones of successful web design – Accessibility, Responsiveness, Usability, and Conversion.

August 15, 2016 — “These spreadsheets are killing me” was a complaint said to me about a year ago. Since then, I have been partnered with my client to build an internal tool that can standardize their sales quoting process, replace their current CRM process, and remove operational bottlenecks that prevent the business from scaling. This presentation covers the of development of the tool with WordPress, concerns in the process, and tools utilized.

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August 15, 2016 — We all have a “toolbox” of tried and tested techniques that we use again and again when developing, but is there another way? Possibly a simpler way? This is not a talk about doing CSS the “right way”, but looking at some lesser known CSS that you may not know about and that might (hopefully) prove useful.