December 19, 2019 — Have you ever updated your WordPress site or plugins, and suddenly found yourself looking at The White Screen of Death? What you thought was going to be a routine update has just brought down your entire website, and the panic sets in fast. If this is your live website, that can quickly translate to loss of revenue, customer trust, and a lot of time and money down the drain. Not to mention the very bad day you are about to have.

It’s so important to keep your WordPress site, plugins and themes updated due to the many security threats that are constantly being found and fixed – but what happens when one of these updates breaks your site? In this talk I will cover tips and strategies for keeping your site updated safely, what to do if it breaks, and how to avoid breaking your live site in the first place through use of a staging site that runs alongside your live website. Fortunately, there are many options for creating and managing a staging site, ranging from the most simple click-to-push, to more complex solutions integrated into a developers’ workflow. I will show you how to set up your very own staging server in a few different ways, so you can push that Update button without putting your live site in jeopardy.

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December 19, 2019 — Solutions that solve real world problems start with an idea; but not just any idea, a good one. How you build and iterate upon that idea is what ultimately determines its success or failure. WordPress is an excellent platform for entrepreneurs. It powers close to 25% of the Internet, is flexible, and has a bright future. Thus, it serves as an excellent springboard to launch new, exciting, and profitable solutions. Whether it be in themes, plugins, or services, there’s plenty of room for innovation and disruption.

Learn how you can take advantage of WordPress’ popularity and flexibility to enter the market faster, with less investment, and more opportunity. The session examines our unique industry and how you can build a successful business creating solutions for WordPress. We will review real world success stories, how to take advantage of your strengths and weaknesses, and the basics of launching a successful product or service in the WordPress space.

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December 19, 2019 — Let’s explore the benefits of thinking in reusable blocks. Atomic design, Modular Development, and D.R.Y. methodology improves productivity, enhances UI and empowers authors. We will explore multiple methods to achieve modularity in our WP themes. Leveraging the WordPress templating system and Advanced Custom Fields or Using blocks in the form of Gutenberg. Regardless of if you are ready to learn Javascript deeply and embrace Gutenberg or set in your ways and sticking with the classic editor. You will leave this talk excited and ready to integrate this strategy into your workflow.

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December 19, 2019 — Gutenberg is a major change to how you will develop software for WordPress. It starts with the WordPress editor but is planned to slowly take over the entire admin interface.

If you already have existing plugin or theme code that you need to maintain and make ready for the upcoming Gutenberg update, you will probably face some architectural design challenges.

This talk will first provide an overview of the general concepts that govern development in the Gutenberg era, and then discuss the different tricks & techniques you can use to gradually move your existing code from here to there, in a clean transition.

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December 19, 2019 — Content lies at the core of search. The shift to blocks with Gutenberg opens the door to how search engines might see, read, and rank content.

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December 19, 2019 — With the new Gutenberg editor, the possibilities for visually striking and engaging storytelling in WordPress have grown exponentially.

For marketing content creators, journalists, and bloggers, harnessing the power of Gutenberg can improve the effectiveness of your messages, elevate your designs, and save you time!

In this talk, you’ll learn about current marketing trends, how to edit using Gutenberg, and cool blogging and page design hacks using the new editor.

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December 19, 2019 — Grant will walk you through an introduction to Gutenberg – the new editing interface coming in WordPress 5.0 – covering the short-term tactical changes you can expect in WordPress 5.0 later this year, as well as a conceptual exploration of what it means for the future of site building and publishing with WordPress.

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December 19, 2019 — The audience will leave with an understanding of why how a WordPress site is developed matters for SEO and the role their content and social media plays in search engine optimization and driving website traffic well beyond organic search.

Websites are the foundation for a successful online marketing system. WordPress sites, however, cannot exist as a standalone entity. Search engine optimization cannot be an afterthought, nor can the core content be. It is absolutely necessary for developers, content creators, SEOs, and business owners to understand this and HOW content and social media marketing are intertwined to create successful WordPress sites.

This can be a standard talk or a “hands-on’ session. In previous talks (including WordCamp Las Vegas 2017, discussion drove the presentation. Having the ability to walk through the process, as opposed to simply explaining it, increases the value the audience receives.

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December 19, 2019 — 11 years. That’s how long I’ve been using WordPress to create websites as a part of design and development teams. 2017 was the first year I started giving any real contribution back to the WordPress project. Before that I tried. I kept looking at this thing called Trac, I even created an account and followed some of the development tickets. But I felt blocked since my primary background is in design. I didn’t know how to get started.

All that changed last year when I was given a unique opportunity by my company to donate time to helping in the make.wordpress.org work. In this talk I’ll share the process I went through from not knowing where to get started, to jumping into a few tickets, to helping lead parts of the work being done in WordPress.

If you’re curious about giving back to WordPress, but don’t have a ton of development experience, then this talk will be for you. Let’s go through this journey together.

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December 19, 2019 — Malicious activity is an unfortunate reality when maintaining a web presence today. Most people involved in the web industry know someone who encountered the aftermath of a disruptive attack–if they haven’t themselves. Because of this, awareness of security best practices is at an all-time high. To many, though, it may not be clear exactly why these measures are important.

To remedy that, we’ll be taking a practical look at what’s actually happening when a website gets attacked, as well as discussing the hows and whys along the way. From understanding why small sites still get hacked, to why password reuse is really as bad as everyone says, we’ll explore the rationale behind the security principles you’re always being told to follow.

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