November 7, 2014 — Follow The Yellow Brick Road: Avoiding Dangerous and Low-Quality Plugins and Themes

November 7, 2014 — In this session we will go through ‘common’ problems with WordPress and what to do about them. Common is way too vague, but what we will cover is the best way to troubleshoot when your site is not acting the way it is supposed to. We will aim this talk at the beginner, our goal is to stay away from code and error logs to show you what you can do to troubleshoot your site if problems arise.

November 6, 2014 — You’ve been managing content in WordPress, maybe you’ve dabbled with modifying a file, but you’re not sure where to go from here (other than total failure). In this session we’ll cover how to transition from dabbler to budding developer, learning opportunities around the web, and issues that can impact your learning, ranging from imposter syndrome to gender and generalisms to non-computer science educational backgrounds.

November 6, 2014

November 6, 2014 — Icons have been a integral part of the WordPress admin since 2.7. However, version 3.8 saw a complete overhaul of the design of the icons, from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint. I’ll talk about the shift in aesthetic approach, touch (briefly!) on some of the technical challenges, and demonstrate best practices in designing your own icon icons—either as a plugin developer or as a design contributor— for WordPress.

November 6, 2014 — The success of building your own plugin is all depends on how you start. From making the right decisions to finding the right structure and tools to maintain it.

We will cover during this talk the last part. I will short talk about how to setup your plugin, which things are needed and from there talk about some basic unit tests you should include in every plugin to make your live a bit easier. As last part I will cover grunt which is a task runner which can automate all your processes so you don’t need to even think about most of the things.

November 6, 2014 — Want to be part of the community? Want to learn how you, YES YOU can give back to the WordPress community at large, even if you don’t know how to code?

Follow my journey from mild mannered homeschooling housewife, to well known community member who now works for a leading company in the WordPress ecosystem. Best part? I’ve done it all in my jammies.

November 6, 2014 — In this presentation, I’ll address both the *why* and the *how* of contributing while freelancing. I’ll lay out both an economic and a philosophical argument for why freelancers ought to budget for time on the parent projects. And I’ll talk about some concrete strategies for making the process less painful than it might seem at first glance. I’ll use myself as a case study, and talk about how my yearly earnings have steadily increased at the same time that the proportion of my working week spent on client work has actually gone *down*, to the extent that I spend over 50% of my time on free software work that I’m not paid for directly.

November 6, 2014 — Using Ajax and JavaScript in WordPress plugins. JavaScript is an incredibly powerful tool to make your website and or web app more powerful and interactive. See the full power of integrating right into your WordPress with wp_ajax and taking advantage of client side scripting.

Presentation Slides »

November 6, 2014 — People put a lot of effort into putting a website together, but often stumble at the finish line when it comes to making their final design decisions. Learn how seemingly minor design choices have a huge impact on how people interact with and understand the content of your site. In this video, Michelle Schulp goes through specific examples of simple design tweaks that make a big difference.

Presentation Slides »