August 23, 2013 — Making ebooks isn’t as simple as spinning up a new WordPress site, but it can be done by just about anyone.
This presentation is all about understanding recent shifts in publishing with an emphasis on how to publish a professional-quality ebook.

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August 22, 2013 — This presentation builds a foundation for why customizing the WordPress Admin is an essential part of every project, it covers varying case studies for customization, and provides real examples of how to do so with your own projects.

If you work with clients, whether you write code or simply wrangle plugins and themes, this presentation gives you actionable steps to create a more simple, easy to use, and effective admin experience for your clients.

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August 22, 2013 — Checklists can help us write and publish quality content with more consistency, and minimize bugs introduced while building and updating websites and web applications.

This presentation explores some of the history of how checklists have been applied in other industries, then takes a concrete look at practical ways to apply them to website development and publishing.

August 21, 2013 — This presentation talks about understanding your learning style, as well as finding the resources that work for you and coming to grips with your own limitations, and learn how to avoid wallowing in a sea of unnecessary information.

It explores how to gather and organize what we need to know—and how to make all of it stick. Whether you are learning WordPress yourself or teaching others, there is something for you.

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August 20, 2013 — This product development-themed presentation goes through a three-part process called The Hook that allows you to: Target a specific customer-set, learn how to design a product that will solve their problem and make the product a habitual part of your new users’ lives.

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August 20, 2013 — Permanence is an odd concept when talking about an open source project, a web application, or web content, where things tend to change rapidly and be more ephemeral. The first ten years of the WordPress project has taught us that change and adaptation are the keys to success.

Community lead Jen Mylo discusses WordPress changes past and future.

August 15, 2013 — Writing code is building a user experience, where the user is the developer, who is reading the code. There are rarely two programmers who have the same opinion on what is clean and readable code. In order for their code to be usable, developers need to take the same things in consideration as user experience designers.

August 15, 2013 — This presentation covers some of the more common and problematic errors made by commercial theme developers, and how to fix them. It analyzes what constitutes best practices in each instance, and the problems brought about by doing things the lazy way. Some of the topics included in this talk are …

* Why shouldn’t I just use Google Hosted Libraries like jQuery? CDNs are awesome and save on bandwidth!
* Why shouldn’t I just hardcode links to my theme’s CSS and JS files?
* Stylesheet Directory and Template Directory? Those are the same thing, right?
* Trust my users? They bought my theme! Why wouldn’t I trust them?

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August 14, 2013 — With more than 1,700 themes on WordPress.org and hundreds more premium themes from established companies and resellers, choosing a theme can be overwhelming. This presentation talks about the pros and cons of free vs. premium; what features to look for, and how to tell what you can and can’t do by simply looking at the demos. A simple, non-geek explanation of what frameworks and child themes are, as well as their benefits.

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August 14, 2013 — Three experts weigh in on building online communities through panel discussion led by Scott Berkun.