December 28, 2018 — Lead generation, page builders, email marketing, customer management and advertising are marketing tools that have exploded in number and popularity because of SaaS, the cloud, has made them inexpensive to build with low initial subscription costs. With a 100 different cloud based platforms offering 14 day free trials, rarely does someone looking for the latest and greatest in marketing tools think of WordPress.
That’s a problem because WordPress provides some of the best marketing tools and the lowest costs. With WordPress, you can build sophisticated eCommerce stores, send emails, and create automated follow-up. For example, there are literally hundreds of lead generation strategies and WordPress offers website builder the most effective SEO markup.
So why are people going to the cloud when they could be getting the same or better for less or free with WordPress? It’s because the cloud currently offers a better user experience.
With the advent of Gutenberg, a new era is beginning for WordPress, one that marks a new focus on providing a greatly improved user experience. With it, you can make your vision come a reality.
In this session, whether you’re a developer or not, I’m going to share with you tips and strategies that will help you create a better user experience for your plugin, your theme or your site so you can compete with the SaaS tools and make WordPress a better place for everyone.

Presentation Slides »

December 28, 2018 — This session is about creating accessible web sites. I will talk about:

Ontario’s accessibility requirements
Some tips for creating accessible code
Free tools to test for accessibility
WordPress themes that are accessibility ready and
Gutenberg and accessibility

People with disabilities can’t use Gutenberg effectively. Larger organizations who implement it may face legal fallout.
The WordPress accessibility community is rallying to make WordPress do the right thing by disabled users. I will talk about those efforts, as well as the efforts of the Gutenberg team to improve its accessibility.
Attendees will learn about:

how blind people use the web
creating accessible web sites
the guidelines that help you know what to do
free tools to test for accessibility and
accessibility ready WordPress themes

According to the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) beginning January 1, 2021 all public websites and web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA. Learn about meeting this requirement.
https://www.ontario.ca/page/how-make-websites-accessible.
Beginning January 1, 2014: new public websites, significantly refreshed websites and any web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level A.
Beginning January 1, 2021: all public websites and web content posted after January 1, 2012 must meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA other than criteria 1.2.4 (live captions) and 1.2.5 (pre-recorded audio descriptions).

December 28, 2018 — WordPress makes dozens (or hundreds) of SQL queries every time it serves a page. Every single one of them involves MySQL, and many of them hit the disk. Learn how Redis can turn those hundreds of queries into a handful, speeding up your site and reducing the load on your database.
Along the way, you’ll learn about WordPress transients (a way of storing data temporarily in the WordPress database), see the world’s most technically-compliant cache, and learn secondhand about server crashes (so you don’t have to learn firsthand).
In the session, you will receive the preliminary results of experiments to evaluate the impact of Gutenberg on a site’s database load. For example, does the way Gutenberg blocks are stored or the standardization of blocks reduces the hits on the server?
In this talk, you’ll learn:

How WordPress transients work
setting up an external object cache with Redis
simple Redis monitoring

December 28, 2018 — Join us for an open-ended question and answer session with a panel of our speakers and WordCamp Toronto organizers, moderated by Robin Macrae. The one topic we will discuss is adoption strategies for individuals, business and enterprises and other practical issues in the changes brought by Gutenberg.
Come and tell us whether you’re stressed, elated and/or resigned and we’ll do our best to put Gutenberg into perspective for you.

December 27, 2018 — A department within a state government recently launched a new site on WordPress, using Gutenberg as the primary editor.
This talk will showcase some of ways Gutenberg was used to provide a custom editing experience that would have been much more difficult without Gutenberg. We’ll also look at how using GraphQL, via the WPGraphQL plugin, with Gutenberg led to performance and developer experience enhancements while delivering custom blocks.
After this talk, developers and users of WordPress should feel excited about the possibilities of Gutenberg, but also have realistic caution about jumping all-in with the new editor and be aware of some real pain points, but also some proposed solutions and workarounds to said pain points.

December 27, 2018 — Creating content to serve your target market takes up a significant amount of your or your team’s time. Content curation is a strategy that gives you lots of fresh ideas to share on your site without requiring a lot of writing. Curating thought leaders within your niche will both provide value to your community and initiate great industry relationships at the same time. It’s the most amazing win-win content activity that anyone can get started with in a few minutes time.

December 27, 2018 — You’re not always sitting in front of your computer when inspiration strikes. Sometimes you need to write a post in a place that isn’t in front of your desk – like on a train, in your car, or just from your living room couch. We always have our mobile phones or tablets with us it seems – so why not use the WordPress mobile apps to run your site?

WordPress for Android and iOS provides a great experience for site admins for running your site. The editor is fully featured as well for short and long form posts! In this talk you’ll get a really good overview of the capabilities of the mobile apps so you can see just how easy it is to be mobile and still in control of your site.

December 27, 2018 — A mother with a wailing baby in her arms – maybe the baby has an ear infection. A trainer at the rec center who is overwhelmed with requests for team building exercises. A gifted data scientist who just. needs. to. focus. An executive with the future of a three billion dollar company on his shoulders.

These are all people who use the intranet web site my team builds. The code we write affects their daily lives, their work, their health, and the company we all work for.

The developer to end user relationship is very direct. We are in the perfect position to advocate for site users, and ensure that the site we build is compassionate in its design, because we write the code. We are the gatekeepers, and we have a both a responsibility and an opportunity to help, and not harm, the users of our site.

December 27, 2018 — State of the Word QandA

December 27, 2018 — State of the Word

WordCamp US 2018