November 3, 2014 — As bloggers, the more personal we are, the more popular we are. Yet we often choose to be fact-based and corporate over honest and human on our blogs. We play it safe. And this gets boring. We want to be exciting and fun. After a brief presentation about reasons and ways to blog, the participants create blog posts and discuss how to build reader interest and suspense. Participants write about their own small quiet moments and big public events. This fun workshop inspires bloggers to get creative in their writing and find new ways to write.

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November 3, 2014 — Finding the right plugin can be a Herculean task, and choosing the wrong one can lead to security problems, bad UX or a complete breakdown of your site. This talk goes over how to group plugins in meaningful ways to identify which would be the most useful. From there, we review how to evaluate plugins for performance, functionality and usability by setting up a complete test environment to stretch plugins to their limits. We end with an overview of red flags and useful signs to look out for, such as support and frequent updates. By understanding the ways in which plugins integrate with the WordPress API, and what to look out for, you’ll be able to find the exact plugin you need, every time.

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November 3, 2014 — Providing support for your themes offers tremendous opportunities to educate people, from explaining how to make a child theme to teaching simple CSS tweaks. It also presents challenges, like writing easy-to-follow setup documentation for a complex theme, or handling requests for help outside official support channels. This session looks at how to support your theme well while making users happy and staying sane – a winning combination in the world of theme development.

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November 3, 2014 — Contributor Track: BuddyPress

November 3, 2014 — The challenges of scaling WordPress depend on many factors. This session centers on three factors that are most often overlooked or misunderstood:
1. Choosing the right caching system
2. Tuning and clustering mysql
3. Tuning apache

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November 3, 2014 — This talk goes over the fundamentals of what constitutes a realtime web application or website, and then explains how we can apply those concepts to WordPress sites and applications.

November 3, 2014 — In January my team was looking for the best available Node.js content management system… and we picked WordPress! Our clients got all the benefits of WP’s content editing interface, and with the in-development REST API plugin we were able to use that content without limiting any of our other technology choices. This talk uses our project as a case study to share lessons we learned while building a Node client for the API, and why we’re so excited about what the next year holds for the evolution of WordPress as a content platform.

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November 3, 2014 — This talk is an exploration of the importance of APIs both within WordPress and the web as a whole. It looks at the history of the technology and the opportunities that are afforded to us by the upcoming JSON REST API, and the importance of standardized meta data as we create “Web 3.0″.

November 3, 2014 — Lighting Talk:
I’ll highlight the major steps in WordPress’ loading process and shed some light on the various APIs used. You’ll leave with enough understanding to dig into WordPress Core for greater detail and a better comprehension of how its many APIs work together.

November 3, 2014 — This talk looks to tell the story of how the WordPress contributors, making decisions in line with our unique philosophies, were able to implement these new features, in terms of both technical and community challenges. We’re not done yet, and there’s more for the community to strive for, which will involve translators, plugin and theme developers, and core contributors.