October 2, 2015 — Content personalization and paywalls are emerging trends in the publishing space, especially amongst online media companies. Building a platform that is capable of handling high traffic, high availability while providing a dynamic experience for end users is an ongoing challenge.
In this talk we are going to give a practical example on how to implement a paywall and content personalization using a Varnish feature called Edge Side Includes. (ESI) A case study where this was implemented on the Aftonbladet Blog platform will also be presented.

Presentation Slides »

October 2, 2015 — Meryl has been using WordPress since 2011, but still considers herself to be a novice. Having seen the list of august speakers coming to the WordCamp, people with serious dev skills, entrepreneurs and the like, she has some trepidation about volunteering to present; however, we all had to start somewhere and if she can inspire another newbie to think “Hey, I can do that too”, then the anxiety will have been worth it!
As a non-coder she finds the WordPress platform perfectly suited to the skills she can bring to the table. With over 20 years’ experience as an Information Professional (aka a Librarian), helping small businesses and not-for-profit organisations to create well-structured websites, with quality content, that they are able to manage themselves (to a large degree) is something she finds very satisfying.
Being programmatically challenged, Meryl uses quality commercial themes to do the heavy lifting and has begun to delve into the mysteries of CSS in order to tweak the design to suit the client. Still unsure about whether this fascination with WordPress can actually generate an income, she has nonetheless taken the plunge and finally got a business card. ☺

October 2, 2015 — Advocacy is a key driver in moving consumers through the path to purchase, with word-of-mouth and recommendations from other travellers being the most honest and effective form of tourism marketing today. Kate’s talk will centre around Tropical North Queensland‘s advocacy strategy and the role of their new WordPress blog in their marketing endeavours.
Kate’s talk will cover the following topics:
The evolution of tourism marketing: From a controlled industry with a few small players to a more open, interactive and consumer driven market.
How things we all take for granted now-days such as mobile devices & access to free WiFi change our expectations and interaction with the tourism industry because millions of people can share their experiences online. This sharing (or advocacy) is at the core of TTNQ’s marketing strategy.
How Kate and her team use their WordPress blog as a platform to build a profile of their advocates and point consumers from their social media channels and tell a deeper story about the FNQ destination.

October 2, 2015 — Managing several projects in one machine can be painful and limiting:
– upgrades and experiments are discouraged for the risk of messing up the whole development environment
– sharing work with other colleagues can be difficult
– project setup in not so small teams can be a waste of time
– Vagrant offers an easy way to create and manage a dedicated virtual machine. Every WordPress instance can now be run in a fully isolated environment, saving time and headaches.

Presentation Slides »

October 2, 2015 — Are you a freelancer who is at capacity with clients but aren’t earning the income you would like to be? Are you a freelancer looking to expand your reach beyond the one on one client work? If you answered ‘Yes’ to either or both of those questions then this is a must see talk for you!
Helena will help you plan your first online course by helping you with following tasks:
Do you have a list? If not start building one now so you can survey your list to find out what they may want.
Can your current skills, the ones you use in your freelance business with one-on-one clients, translate into an online course?
– Skills assessment.
– Target market – who are you be able to teach your skills to?
– Creating your course – delivered live or pre-recorded?
– Minimum viable product and iterate as you go or at each release.
– Fitting course creation amongst current work.
– Cut back on one-on-one work to make time to deliver the course.
– Specific launches or Evergreen course.

Presentation Slides »

October 2, 2015 — Content is the biggest bottleneck in any web design project. From ideation to development through review and signoff, there are several bumps on the road to building a content focused website. Don’t settle for Lorem Ipsum while waiting for signoff on content. Adopting a content-first approach helps tackle these issues iteratively and through collaboration.

In this talk we cover:

– A content-first approach to building wordpress websites
– Why you should never use Lorem Ipsum
– Importance of content-informed design
– A collaborative approach to content development
– How content informs UX and accessibility
– Make the best use of WordPress as a CMS

October 2, 2015 — This session is guaranteed to win the most boring session award. But if you hang out for 60 minutes, there’s a good chance you’ll pick up some new tricks to help you design creatively awesome WordPress sites. No razzle-dazzle web design show-and-tell here, this is all about foundational paperwork. (Bleh!) Hang on. You will actually learn the 10 questions you should ask in a kickoff meeting and why the answers aren’t as important as the conversation, why you need to do at least six site maps for every project and who the most important person in the room is (I’m guessing it isn’t who you think it is). So bring your RedBull and get ready to trade in your creative doormat for a shiny new web design superhero cape b/c after this session, you’re going to be super awes!

Presentation Slides »

October 2, 2015 — Being a WordPress developer means that our main programming language is PHP. Which works for building websites but not for running tasks. In this talk I will share my experience using Node.js as a platform to build on. Explaining why I have chosen for Node.js and show you how I used Node.js to build microservices that are supporting my WordPress projects.

Presentation Slides »

October 2, 2015 — – How to identify the most lucrative prospects
– How to pitch large projects (value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections
– How to execute (IA, Project Management, Resources, post-launch support).

October 2, 2015 — Finding the right balance between making money and contributing to any Open Source project is hard. By sharing some of his insights, success stories and failures Jimmy hopes to help future entrepreneurs building their own Open Source-based firms.