December 13, 2015 — A look at people in our community that have had their lives changed by being involved with WordPress.

December 12, 2015 — A presentation on the strength and value of WordPress as a content management system (CMS).

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December 12, 2015 — This talk starts with an explanation of what WordPress action and filter hooks are and how to use them. We then go into the most common and helpful hooks for theme and plugin development. This will include helpful information for people who have not yet begun to use hooks much as well as supply those who do use them regularly with some helpful hints.

December 12, 2015 — Take advantage of the resources online and the local community to learn how to build a WordPress site that can promote a product/service, raise awareness of a cause, or simply entertain the masses.

December 12, 2015 — Today, developers are well into embracing WordPress to enable the next generation of applications: creating rich native applications, powering home automation devices, supplying data to video games, and powering the data behind 3D applications.

With very few exceptions, much of these applications are widely unknown to a site owner in 2015. Similar to how custom post type functionalities are now well-known among the masses, what does the world look like when clients begin demanding these new possibilities? When developers start building them?

December 12, 2015 — 10up open sourced their WordPress Best Practices (PHP, JavaScript, tools, and workflows) in late 2014. As the Director of Engineering at 10up, I drove this project and am the lead contributor to the docs. These Best Practices allow developers to build sites that scale, perform, and are secure one sites receiving millions of page views per day. They also standardize development practices in such a way that facilitates team collaboration. This talk will highlight some important parts of the Best Practices and reveal some valuable tips about how we (10up) engineer some of the most complex and most viewed WordPress sites in the world.

December 12, 2015 — Three years ago, WordCamp Europe was held for the very first time. But besides bringing together thousands of people from all over the world, this international event had another unforeseen result. WCEU gave a few local WordPress communities unexpected momentum as a consequence of the unique environment it created. As a co-organizer of WCEU 2015 and a member of the Italian WordPress community, I will trace the extraordinary journey from stalling local community to thriving ecosystem of meetups and enthusiastic members, using real case studies from the German and Italian WordPress communities.

December 12, 2015 — As one of the first museums to fully digitize its collections and make them available online for the public, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian has embraced open source tools to empower its audience and staff to discuss and experience art. We are counting to leverage this open attitude by working with a small group within Automattic to research, plan, and design the Freer and Sackler site. As a team, we are developing custom plugins and code in-house that will be made available to the public and other cultural institutions on GitHub in hopes of furthering open source within the cultural environment.

During the presentation, we will briefly discuss the democratization of art, review our planning and design process and how we are working to make sure the tools we develop are usable by others. We will finish with an open discussion on how cultural institutes can maximize their use of WordPress. While the case study will focus specifically on a visual arts museum, the lessons learned and tools used can be applied to any WordPress-driven website rollout.

December 12, 2015 — Integrating Accessibility (a11y) into the project process can be downright scary. In this session, I’ll cover basic web accessibility principles for web designers, developers, and site owners, then show how to turn seemingly daunting and confusing accessibility requirements into understandable, actionable tasks and techniques. The talk will cover some of the accessibility-specific WordPress plugins and themes available, as well as some quick, easy tests to integrate into design and development workflows.

December 12, 2015 — How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances.

Presentation Slides »