January 8, 2014 — Can WordPress Really Do That, Take 2 is a case study of how we took a site that cannot be described as anything other than a complete disaster and resurrected it with the help of WordPress. The talk touchs on everything from IA and UX to design challenges, CPT and taxonomy implementation, working with a designer, to how to get the most out of WordPress by building on its strengths.

January 8, 2014 — This talk breaks down some of the popular lessons from my WordPress business podcast where I interview other WordPress entrepreneurs reaching for the same goal and how to you find the right client (and fire the bad.), landing $100k projects, growing from a 1 person to 25+ member team and starting your own marketplace of products.

Presentation Slides »

January 7, 2014 — This panel is for people looking to build their WordPress business past an employee of one. It discusses hiring/firing, money management, team collaboration, finding higher level clients, our “breakout” moments.

(no slides available.)

January 7, 2014 — Attention to detail in your code and design work is important – but before you lay down one single pixel, or one single line of code, you need to make sure that everyone (you, your client, your clients client, etc) are on the same page and make sure you are managing expectations on what the desired project outcome is.

This presentation covers hard lessons I’ve learned in a decade of client work – I hope to pass those headaches on to you so you don’t make the same mistakes.

Presentation Slides »

January 6, 2014 — Composer has gained a lot of popularity and momentum in the past year. This session is a brief crash course in PHP dependency management using Composer. It explores how to install dependencies as separate packages and as WordPress plugins or themes. And it looks at how this can be used to speed up dev environment setup times.

Presentation Slides »

January 6, 2014 — Sakin shares his experiences and some tips and tricks that would help your free theme appear on the top 15 Most Popular Downloads at WordPress.org repository. This is a great achievement if you want to become a professional WordPress Theme Developer and want to sell your themes.

Presentation Slides »

January 5, 2014 — This talk covers the “blobs vs chunks” distinction popularized by Karen McGrane and why content modeling matters in the CMS world. Then covers custom post types, custom meta fields, custom taxonomies, and other ways of doing structured content in WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

January 5, 2014 — Understanding different caching tools and techniques available to WordPress developers such as the Transient and Object Caching APIs and how/why they can make or break your site.

Presentation Slides »

January 4, 2014 — Tips, Tricks and Tools used by Blogger ITProGuru (Dan Stolts) to become one of the top Microsoft bloggers. Dan shares his secrets to amassing an audience of more than 65k unique visitors every month. He shares how to get content ideas, how to bring those ideas to life in a compelling way, how to get people that visit your blog to act while they are there, and how to be relevant in search.

Presentation Slides »

January 4, 2014 — This session goes through examples of several common attacks, vulnerabilities that allowed them to happen in core, how they were fixed, and how our community can work together to stay safe. This session involves brief code snippets and discussions, but is generally a higher level overview of the types of security problems that affect the WordPress community and how we can continue to fix them.

Presentation Slides »