October 22, 2020 — Ever wondered about how to contribute to the WordPress Project? We’ll run though the WordPress teams and explain what they do and how to get involved. Then we’ll break up into smaller groups and get started!

*People of all skill levels are welcome to attend and participate*. There are a wide variety of ways to contribute to WordPress, and there are lots of ways to participate without having technical experience.

October 22, 2020 — Bash can unlock the true potential of any machine. Besides gaining more control of your device, Bash lets you leverage hundreds of power tools like WP-CLI, Drush, npm, composer, and Behat, to name a few.

Leave this session understanding:

How to stop being afraid of the command line
A brief history of Bash and how it does what it does
The basic commands for manipulating your files and folders
An overview of tools that are only available through the command line
The basics of scripting to automating anything

Presentation Slides »

October 22, 2020 — In this lighting talk, I’ll go through 10 tips for designers, developers, and marketing gurus how to run their WordPress projects effectively. Some will be knowledge and expertise, some will be tools, some will just be common sense 😉

October 22, 2020 — You picked a web host and set up your WordPress site – everything is cool! Until it isn’t. Maybe your site isn’t loading. Maybe your theme looks all kinds of broken. Maybe some jerks graffitti’d over your latest travel adventures! Now what?

Step one is determining whether your WordPress config is the reason or if you’ll need to contact your web host for a deeper dive into your hosting environment.

Different companies may offer different levels of technical support, but there is a basic and universal approach to getting your WordPress site back up and running again as quickly as possible. You’ll learn who to contact and why if and when your WordPress site ever runs into trouble.

October 22, 2020 — This lightning talk discussed a process of creating a custom news vertical for WordPress.com

October 22, 2020 — This lightning talk was a journalism-focused walk-through with the founder of a hyperlocal Local Switchboard NYC podcast.

Presentation Slides »

October 22, 2020 — BigCommerce for WordPress is a brand new way to do ecommerce in WordPress. With a hybrid of local content and processes running over API the BigCommerce for WordPress plugin can help your store operate at micro-scale, enterprise scale, and everything in between.

This talk is a review of features and capabilities.

October 21, 2020 — Anyone who has experience with WordPress Multisite knows how it works: Each site exists as a separate silo, and all content and tags stay within each particular site. But what if this compartmentalization didn’t have to be the case? What if the WordPress Taxonomy system could be used to create categories and tags that span across many sites? And what if related content from other sites in the network could surface no matter where in the network you happen to currently be? This talk will look at a plugin, developed at the Harvard School of Public Health, that does just this. It will discuss how this plugin allows many thousands of articles across the school’s some 2,000 websites to be tagged according to subject, indexed, and made easily available to users looking for further reading on any given topic. This system has wide, potential application for other settings in which WordPress Multisite is used.

October 21, 2020 — While you use the internet and web every day, you may not have ever stopped to consider how all of it works. When managing your website, there are lots of components and systems working together to keep your site working. Understanding how all these work together allows you to make changes to improve your site as well as better communicate with the developers that you may get support from.

In this talk, we will be exploring:

What exactly is the internet?
How do servers and hosting work?
How do domains work?
How do browsers work?
How does the page cycle work?
What do all the acronyms you encounter (such as FTP, DNS, JS, and more) mean?
How does all this make your WordPress site work?

Presentation Slides »

October 21, 2020 — “What could I have done to avoid being hacked?” is a question you’ll often hear after a site is hacked. In some cases the answer is complicated, but a lot of the time it’s relatively simple and there are many checklists and guides online outlining the ways sites can be hacked, plus how to secure them. However, a lot of people learn better from seeing and doing than reading (often boring) checklists. So rather than look at checklists on slides for 30 minutes, we’re going to hack into WordPress instead!

Presentation Slides »