June 19, 2019 — Selling WordPress is a discussion I’ve been having with Joost de Valk and others on the marketing team since last December. It’s a challenge that I face in my business life each day, when WordPress comes up against other CMS and DXP platforms, especially when they have such great presence and marketing behind them.

The truth is, we don’t do enough as WordPress to show off who we are, why we’re more than just a credible competitor, or to help our community communicate the benefits of WordPress to their clients.

So why is WordPress a sellable CMS? And how easy/hard is it to endorse WordPress when a client is asking about other platforms?

These are some of the questions I want to help to answer without simply shouting “we’re the best, everyone else sucks!” It’s something that I work to achieve on a daily basis (with a mixture of success and failure).

The CMS we all love is flexible, expandable, fast, well-supported, great for content editors and ultimately great for business. It’s not just a small blogging platform anymore, it’s a product that suits tiny businesses and enterprise businesses in equal measure, depending on the experience of the designers and developers working with it.

So… this talk will help to give a fairly broad range of people new ideas, new arguments and renewed thinking on how to say “WordPress is the platform for you.”

Presentation Slides »

June 19, 2019 — WordPress 101 – part 1 of 2

June 19, 2019 — WordPress 101 – part 2 of 2

June 19, 2019 — WordPress is a powerful tool to help businesses and community organizations of any size communicate with the people they wish to serve. But having a website is not enough. Instead of using a website solely as a catalog or sales brochure that focuses only on your products and services, website owners should turn the spotlight on to their customers, who are searching online for information that helps them solve business and personal challenges. WordPress, because it’s so accessible to users of all skill levels, is the perfect platform for businesses and groups to regularly share insights and how-to details that their end-users crave. In this session, you will learn about five ways to use WordPress and third-party plugins that make it easier for you to publish more articles, infographics, photos and videos that meet your audience’s information needs.

June 19, 2019 — Get Options is a WordPress Q&A podcast hosted by Adam Silver and Kyle Maurer. Adam and Kyle are long time WordPress users who love helping and teaching. In this session, audience questions on all topics will be passionately and politely addressed. No topics are off limits.

June 19, 2019 — As perfectionists, admit it, you are one, we can spend hours on a site to get it just so. What if there was a way to achieve Just So, but faster? I want to dive into the time saving features a builder can offer. Not to mention the increased revenue streams buy using a builder. Don’t let the idea of builder keep you away from the freedom it can provide. Come see what the builder business is all about!

Major takeaway would be to expose the general audience to the the time saving and integration features that are already in a builder eliminating the use of extra plugins and preventing vulnerabilities.

June 19, 2019 — In 1786 Benjamin Franklin said there are two certainties in life: Death and Taxes. Another certainty can be added: Change. It is important for you to understand what impact the change in the tax law will have on your WordPress business. We will build your tax knowledge by exploring ways that you can take advantage of all the allowable IRS personal and business deductions. We will look at the new tax rates and brackets, explain the Section 199A Qualified Business Income, and address different business structures. You’ll learn that taxes are fun, not boring.

June 19, 2019 — Has a client ever wasted your time in a consulting session? Ever had a one-hour consultation turn into 3? Have you experienced the sinking feeling that comes when you leave the consultation and realize you failed to ask a key question? This talk provides answers to these issues and more. Attendees will leave with a clear, memorable outline to manage the client consultation.

June 19, 2019 — It used to be that WordPress required a very different toolset than other types of modern PHP apps. Now, however, PHP developers can use many of the same tools to work with WordPress that they would use with Laravel or any other PHP framework.

In this talk, we’ll look at how to modernize development of WordPress sites by using Bedrock to give us a modern stack, WP-CLI to interface with WordPress through the command line or even create scripts to run operations, how to use composer and plugins specifically designed for developers, and ways to deploy WordPress that are easier and more stable than FTP. In addition, we’ll talk about new considerations that Javascript is bringing to the WordPress ecosystem.

Come take a look at how the WordPress ecosystem is maturing in 2019 and beyond!

June 19, 2019 — WordPress is a tightly-coupled system, representing over a decade and a half of ideas, decisions, technological shifts, and ideological struggles. There’s a lot of history to be parsed and often the simplest task can have unintended consequences.

Meanwhile, automated testing is one of the best ways to ensure software can be released regularly with high confidence and low risk of regressions. Sadly, the leap from “building WordPress plugins” to “building WordPress plugins with tests” is often viewed as a challenging hurdle. Luckily, there are tools to set up a test harness within an existing codebase with ease.

This talk introduces the fundamentals of automated testing, especially within the context of WordPress. After developing an understanding why automated testing is so critical, attendees will learn how to begin testing their plugins and themes, using features found both in PHPUnit and the WordPress core testing framework, to build and release quality software.