December 13, 2013 — Project Argo was a project at NPR, funded by the Knight Foundation and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, to build topic-based verticals at member stations around the country. Those 12 beat blogs were built on a set of WordPress-based tools built under the Argo banner.

Presentation Slides »

December 13, 2013 — Presentation Slides »

December 12, 2013 — We will discuss common issues that can face WordPress service providers, ranging from how to get more clients, pricing, contracts, project management, staying up-to-date, finding other people to hire or work with, marketing, sales, etc.

December 12, 2013 — Introducing WordPress 3.8 “Parker”, a release — named after Charlie Parker — that introduces a redesigned, responsive admin, theme browser, and a new magazine theme, Twenty Fourteen. You can learn more about the release here.

December 12, 2013 — This is a tale of a theme, from its early stages of research through to the first steps into wireframes and the move into a prototype. It’s a tale of joy, sadness and a dash of danger as browsers are fought and code tamed. This is a story that doesn’t include Photoshop but that does include designing in code. It’s a story we all know variations of and this is my version. This is the story of my design process and how I create themes.

December 12, 2013 — If you’re running a business based on open source software like WordPress, your business depends on the prosperity of that project. The demise of the project could easily be the demise of your project and the project’s growth could lead to your business growing immensely. The larger your business becomes and the bigger the impact of your company on the project, the more this is true. Economically this is a very unusual situation. Joost will explore what this means and how you should deal with it.

This is pure economics; it starts with the well known story of the Tragedy of the Commons but, applied to open source, leads to a completely new outcome. If your business is build on WordPress, you should be here to listen to Joost’s talk and discuss afterwards.

December 11, 2013 — What are unit tests? Why put the effort into writing unit tests? You might say, “Heck, I know my code works because I wrote it, sniff”… Besides, what do sustainable unit tests look like so I don’t have to spend all of my time on them? If this sounds familiar, this talk is for you. You will be introduced to the world of testing, with a focus on testing at the unit level, along with demonstrating practical examples for WordPress plugin development.

December 11, 2013 — As someone who writes with other people, I often encounter the same problem: you either email tiny changes to your article to the one who’s ultimately responsible for the website, which is bound to go wrong. Or you log into your CMS, make some changes to your piece and save it, while one of the other editors does the exact same thing, just using another shiny laptop. Changes get lost. Stuff gets added twice and you end up frustrated because the preview doesn’t reflect your work. Now this is annoying as it is, but if you program a bit on the side (like I do) and you use version control, you know that there is a solution for that. For WordCamp, I’ll gather my thoughts on what would make a great version control tool for WordPress and test existing plugins by these requirements.

December 11, 2013 — When doing client work there is a fine line between what the client wants and what we, as designers, would like to deliver; balanced on that line is what the client truly needs, and achieving it takes more than talent – it takes self-restraint and great communication skills.

Every designer has, at some point, been faced with that client who has a need to micromanage every aspect of the design, who relentlessly attempts to relegate the designer to the same role one would a keyboard or a mouse. This is a talk about the design process, about the pitfalls that lie in bowing to the client’s wants instead of tirelessly seeking the answer to their needs, and about the other fine line in this equation – the one between subservience and ego.

December 10, 2013 — Once you get to the point where you feel that version control might be a useful tool things get different. Most people will point you to Git, probably the most widely used version control software around. A lot of people, though, seem to have trouble getting started with it.

Instead of throwing basic commands at you we want to invite you to explore the “Git Universe” with us in a kind of fireside chat between Kirsten, representing the web design world and Elisabeth, who gained her first computer experience with Basic many years ago.
Our focus will be on how Git works, what those strange commands really mean and how you can benefit from integrating it into your theme development work flow.

This talk aims at people working with WordPress and developing their own themes.