June 2, 2019 — Routine maintenance is crucial for keeping any WordPress site healthy. Whether your a site owner, web designer/developer or maintenance professional, this talk will be applicable for you. Will explore the vast world of WordPress maintenance. From “Why maintenance is necessary”, “How WordPress got here” and “Tips for keeping maintenance lean”.

June 2, 2019 — WordPress has been around for over 15 years. During that time the thinking about templating and themes has evolved as WordPress has grown. This talk will cover the various approaches around getting data from WordPress to rendering a beautifully structured webpage. From templating tags to templating engines like Twig, what are the pros and cons of these different approaches? My thinking on templating has certainly changed over the years and this talk hopes to open your eyes to new possibilities to templating and WordPress.

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June 2, 2019 — The number one goal of any nonprofit website is to help the organization meet its mission. Whether it’s driving donations to help bring access to clean water or recruiting volunteers to build new homes and restore playgrounds, a nonprofit’s website can greatly help with this. This session goes into how to use WordPress to drive and collect donations and recruit volunteers as well as tips and tools on how to maintain a healthy WordPress website over the long-term.

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June 2, 2019 — When building a custom theme, we pay a lot of attention to how everything looks on the frontend — but what about in the editor? This talk will explore how to make sure what your users see in the backend matches up to what visitors will see in the frontend.

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June 2, 2019 — Whether you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re just starting out… creating great content for brands is one of the best ways to make money. Throughout this session, you’ll discover ways to use your own skill-sets to bring value to brands, regardless of what your own personal following might be! You are able to provide value whether your content lives on your own platforms, the brand’s platforms, or both; and it’s your job to get creative with how you package your value. My goal is to answer the following questions…

What services should I offer?
Chances are that your blogging experience has turned you into a one-stop-shop media company! And there are many ways that you can bundle those skills into services that companies are willing to pay for. We will discuss a variety of specific and marketable services as well as ways to figure out which services will be the best fit for you personally.

How can I market those services?
Once you have a clear idea of what you’d like to provide to brands, you need to convince them that you are the best person for the job! The good news? There are endless ways to market your services, and we will dive into various strategies that you can start implementing right away. The bad news? They all take time, effort, and consistency. There are clear paths to success, but there aren’t any shortcuts.

Who should I reach out to?
This part of the process is so crucial! After putting in so much time and effort into the services and the marketing strategy, we are just ready to throw it out into the world and see what happens. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a massive following already, this method won’t get you very far. Instead, we want to be strategic about finding new direct contacts that are a great fit for what we are offering. Again, this is time-consuming (and oftentimes brain-numbing), but it works!

The beauty of this process is that any blogger can follow it and find a new source of income. Once we start thinking of ourselves as mini media companies, a whole new world opens up!

June 2, 2019 — With much fanfare React.js has overtaken the post editor, and this is just the beginning. As we enter phase two of the Gutenberg project, we find that change has begun for widgets and even menus. While the thought of building our own editor blocks from scratch may be too daunting for many of us to want to undertake, WordPress delivers React to us in a way that allows us to add our own flavor to existing blocks. React is designed with modular units for easy reuse, and in this talk we’ll review key components of blocks and different ways to enhance or redefine blocks using the set of filters available in the WordPress namespace.

June 2, 2019 — When it comes to search results, sometimes the competition against your website is in the millions, and sometimes earning the top spot is downright impossible. Learn how to make your posts stand out, especially with structured data, even if you can’t gain that coveted number one position.

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June 2, 2019 — How does a front-end developer that doesn’t write React create custom Gutenberg blocks to meet unique needs? There are plugins that offer extra out-of-the-box components, but for the greatest customization, we’ll focus on leveraging Advanced Custom Fields 5.8 (currently in beta) in a custom theme.

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June 2, 2019 — All of the data for your WordPress site is stored in the database. We’ll look at what this means and how this information is organized. Understanding the WordPress database has allowed me to perform emergency maintenance on sites and made me a better developer. Join me for this light-hearted romp through the WordPress database (no prior database experience necessary).

June 2, 2019 — You missed the boat on Gutenberg. Either you believed its release would never actually happen, you thought there would be time to learn about it once it was out (and didn’t), or you didn’t really pay attention to what Gutenberg was and how it would impact you and your work until it was released this past December. Now you’re worried because you feel behind professionally and you’re not sure how to fill the gaps in your Gutenberg knowledge. Most importantly, you think: are you too behind to catch up? Do you need to find a different career? A different content management system?

The short answer is: no. Gutenberg is here to stay and, just like anything else, you can learn what you need to learn in order to continue your work with WordPress. We’ll talk about creating your own personal curriculum to “learn Gutenberg” by working through how to identify the gaps in our own knowledge and then how to identify resources to fill those gaps. In doing so, we’ll cover the basics of what Gutenberg is and how incorporating its existence into our workflows will impact different types of experts including content managers, project managers, designers, and developers.

As a case study, we’ll look at how I (a developer) “caught up” on Gutenberg after a 2018 where I didn’t have the time to focus on the ever-changing landscape of the Gutenberg project until right around its release.

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