October 3, 2015 — Keynote from WordCamp Rhode Island 2015

Jesse Friedman has been building websites for 17 years, and exclusively with WordPress since 2006. Since then he has written several books, taught 100’s of students as a professor, and organized dozens of local meetups along with a few WordCamps. He has spoken at tech conferences worldwide and has utilized his expertise as a consultant for small agencies and billion dollar international companies. Today he’s a proud team member of Jetpack at Automattic.

Twitter: @professor

October 3, 2015 — As developers and users of WordPress, we may get very comfortable using the software, and we may find ourselves getting nothing but WordPress jobs or only working with WordPress. This is wonderful, we become experts in our respective fields, yet there is a danger to this as well.

I would like to remind everyone and explore some of the ideas that come from outside the WordPress bubble. All too often it’s easy to get entrenched in one way of thinking (the WordPress way), and while this is very necessary to understand how to work with WordPress efficiently and correctly, it often helps just as much to step outside of our comfort zone and explore how other people are handling the same problems we run into.

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October 3, 2015 — The art of inbox 0, tools to supercharge productivity, and a way to master your tasklist that actually works. Being busy is great for the bottom line, but often leaves you in a constant state of scramble. So how do you effectively make progress without running yourself into the ground? Get out from under your email, stop drowning at your desk in a sea of to-dos, and start rawking the face off your goals.

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October 3, 2015 — It’s not sexy. It’s not flashy. But it’s one of the most important things you can do to improve professionally. Documentation. Don’t like that word? Fine. Call it what ever you like, but all throughout the creative, development, and business process, writing things down is critical.

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October 2, 2015 — Multisite is often treated as one of the dark corners of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite from its early days as another b2 fork. We’ll walk through the structure and the load process to show how things really are straight forward. We’ll cover situations to be aware of and code to use when you are developing something for multisite.

And! We’ll cover the future of multisite and allow for some good Q&A, so bring your questions!

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October 2, 2015 — CSS is awesome. Except when it’s not. From diagnostic styles to dev tools, we’ll cover a variety of techniques to help you determine if that unexpected behaviour is the result of a misplaced semicolon or if it’s time to file a bug report.

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October 2, 2015 — Recent growth in places like China, Vietnam, India and Russia brought astounding economic and technological successes that also yielded some of the largest networks of censorship in history. The Great Firewall of China, DPI and SORM in Russia, and SmartFilter in Iran and Saudi Arabia are just a few of the tools used to block the free expression of millions of people.

For this talk, we’ll discuss how WordPress can empower users while still understanding the pitfalls and considerations required to reach those affected by censorship.

Other topics will cover how WordPress sites and plugins get blocked, issues designing and maintaining sites, and how the OpenNet Initiative affects WordPress. John will also give insight into his own experiences working with censorship and the Web from his time working in China.

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October 2, 2015 — The way software books and websites teach Object-Oriented Programming(OOP) is typically quite dull. It doesn’t have to be that way. Learning should be fun! I’ll teach you the fundamentals of OOP using robots from popular culture — and how to apply them to your WordPress themes and plugins. Whether you’re a novice developer looking to level up, or an experienced dev that wants to have a laugh – you will enjoy this talk.

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October 2, 2015 — The WordPress contributor community is a massive ecosystem of volunteers spread across a multitude of teams and timezones. And for anybody who has ever contributed or is looking to contribute, figuring out who the movers and shakers are and how they tie the community together can be a daunting task.

This talk seeks to examine the makeup of the WordPress contributor community to better illustrate the organizational structure of the open source project we love. The idea is to pinpoint who is involved, what they work on, define cross-connections, and determine how they fit into the overall picture of WordPress. The end result is that everyone is closer to being on the same page. Win!

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October 2, 2015 — Getting the right people to your site is hard enough. And making a sale to first time visitors is nearly impossible. So you need a way to build a relationship with your visitors and keep them coming back to your site until they are ready to buy from you.
You Need Email Marketing! Warren’s talk will cover:
– Selecting an email provider.
– Quick start guide to setting up your account and creating your first list.
– Creating your email template.
– Integrating your list with your site (collecting subscribers).
– Communicating with your list.
– Measuring, monitoring and improving your engagement.
– Case studies – what works and what doesn’t.
– Taking it further – segmentation and funnels.

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