October 6, 2015 — This talk focuses on Best Practices in getting started with WordPress. Or “Things I Wish I Knew When I First Learned WordPress”.

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October 6, 2015 — Themes shape the entire WordPress experience, and there are seemingly endless options to choose from. But with all these options, how do you know which theme is the best for you? This talk will explore the vast spectrum of WordPress’ theme dom, from the simplest default themes to the most involved custom creation, including theme option panels, theme repositories and marketplaces, and which types of themes are best for which purposes. Sé will also cover the must-haves (and the red flags) to look for when choosing your next theme, when you should (or shouldn’t) build a custom theme, and how to structure your site so you can go from theme to theme without losing your content (or your mind).

October 6, 2015 — Every technically minded person needs to know how to communicate technical knowledge clearly and effectively. This talk examines the fundamentals of “explaining hard things to humans,” including:

– What makes technical communication uniquely difficult, and uniquely important.
– Avoiding two major impediments to technical communication: arrogance (relating to gaps in knowledge as a hassle or irritation) and breeziness (attempting to gloss over gaps in knowledge).
– How and why to make technical communication both audience-aware and strategic – tailored to both the knowledge level of the audience and the goal of the communication.
– The value of analogies in technical communication.
– Principles of clear technical writing.

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October 5, 2015 — The eagle has landed. WP-API 2.0 is here, opening up new horizons for how websites are constructed with WordPress as a CMS. More and more developers are discovering the benefits of “decoupled” website development: where the front-end is built as a separate system from the CMS itself.

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October 5, 2015 — Often user interface and user experience gets mixed up for both the client and the web developer. These are things we need to help both our developers and clients know in order to ensure making great experiences on the web for end-users.

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October 5, 2015 — A tenth of a second can make a huge difference with how many people stay on your site. What about a whole second? Or two? Or *five*?

Find out what HHVM is, how and why it’s being used by the biggest sites on the Internet and how you can use it right now to improve not only the speed of your site and how that can improve your conversions.

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October 5, 2015 — The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

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October 5, 2015 — I’ll give an introduction to the WordPress REST API and Angular.js in the form of a high level overview (why they exist, what problems they solve, the future of the REST API), and proceed to walk through building theme components with the REST API and Angular.js. I’ll discuss the concerns leading a theme author to chose to build asynchronous components, such as caching issues. Live examples of REST API/Angular.js components will be discussed, with examples of how I built them. Time permitting I’ll conclude by building a REST API/Angular.js theme component live, though will likely do it Emeril Lagasse style (here’s a directive I baked earlier!) due to time constraints.

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October 5, 2015 — Benchmarking is an important practice for high-traffic sites, or even low traffic sites that may have high-traffic spikes.

What will happen to your site if it hits the Reddit front page? Without benchmarking and stress testing, there’s no good way to know how your site will perform under true load.

In this session, you’ll learn some of the basics of benchmarking, some good tools to get started, and when stress tests are the right tool for your site’s performance concerns. Finally, you’ll learn some common performance problems found through stress tests, and their solutions.

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October 5, 2015 — WordPress offers a lot of power as a CMS, but all too often we can lose sight of the most essential of those three letters—the Content. Whether you’re a web designer, web developer, or end user of WordPress, potential pitfalls abound when planning for the structure and delivery of content is left until the eleventh hour. Using examples from real projects, I will demonstrate how taking a content-first approach to our WordPress work allows us to better harness the awesome power underneath its hood, and save ourselves and our clients from massive (and expensive!) content headaches down the road.

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