August 9, 2019 — Initially trained as a mechanical engineer, I spent 20 years in a non-IT industry. I then started some web projects, mostly PHP and various CMS, and mostly centered around SEO. This was a hobby in 2006, but 3 years later, and to this date, it became my full time job. I run a small company handling development and support for our open source CMS plugins.

Seeing how important Accelerated Mobile Pages was to become we developed an advanced WordPress AMP plugin at the end of 2016 to enable AMP pages on sites with both a lot of ease and high degree of customization.

The topic of Yannick’s presentation is “AMP: it’s getting faster!“.

August 9, 2019 — When you launch a website, do you know what works? You don’t; you’re guessing. Your guesses may be based on experience and education, but with good A/B testing you can also make decisions based upon data. For example, do you know that even the way a duck’s face points (left versus right) could increase your conversions by 40%? As a case study, one of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change. In this talk, we will spend some time review the A/B checklist I personally use to guide you on your journey to discover what things to test, testing methodology, and the best tools to use for your clients sites.

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August 9, 2019 — Have you ever needed to move your website from one URL to another, create a test site, or change from http to https? It’s a pain. There are plugins and services for this, but they’re often overkill, don’t quite do it the way you want it done, or may not be cost beneficial. There’s another way. The WordPress WP-CLI tool gives you a zero cost option for change your website URL and moving your website. If you’re comfortable using command line tools, or want to learn, this presentation gives a step-by-step process to copy a WordPress site from one host to another. At the end of session you’ll be able to create a test version of your website without buying or installing a plugin, and keep that site up-to-date. You’ll also be able to change the URL of an existing site. We’ll also touch on creating a local version of your website on your computer and installing WP-CLI, the WordPress command line tool.

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August 8, 2019 — The team at WordCamp Asheville is thrilled to announce our 2019 keynote speaker – Chris Lema. Chris not only brings expertise, talent, and skill to his work and the stage, he also brings strategic vision, authenticity, and straight talk. Get ready to learn and be inspired.

Read more about our 2019 WordCamp Asheville keynote.

August 8, 2019 — Project management at its best removes obstacles to doing great work by helping clients and teams collaborate effectively and providing great data for business decisions. At its worst, it’s a complex administrative system for reporting statuses on failed or failing projects.
It’s tempting to try to fix bad project management situations with software, since that’s what we make for other people-websites, plugins, blocks, or themes that solve various business problems. Before you spend that hard-earned cash on expensive software, though, let’s talk about some less spendy ways to provide value and focus on what we’re really here to do.
Takeaways:

Understand what you, your boss, and/or your team need from you before investing in software or other tools.
Tools for task management, process automation, invoicing and budget tracking, and project management.
How to learn from bad practices and bad data.

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August 8, 2019 — Caching can be tricky business. Fundamentally, the concept is simple: storing a temporary copy of data so future requests can be served faster. In reality, there are a number of different types of caching. Certain types of caching can effect our code in different ways. Data changes and the cache has to be invalidated. What happens if a caching layer runs out of memory or goes down?
This session will enlighten those new to caching as well as introduce some common misconceptions, pitfalls and strategies to caching in WordPress themes and plugins.
Takeaways:

What caching is
What types of caching exist
What developers should know about caching when developing on WordPress

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August 8, 2019 — How adding custom css and js to the WordPress admin can help mold the WordPress front end to better suit the individual client needs with the addition of controls and styles to both the Gutenberg editor and Advanced Custom Fields.
Takeaways:

How to create a more intuitive front end for clients
How to limit the possibility of site breakage by clients
Reduce the numbers of required plugins.

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August 7, 2019 — An introduction to registering custom blocks (via PHP) using ACF and implementing clean templating via Timber
Takeaways:

We can still create custom WordPress sites without having to dig deeply into JavaScript
We can keep our templates clean with Twig
ACF is still awesome and can help keep custom site building overhead low

August 7, 2019 — Whether it is for re-using the same code, experimenting with your code quickly and efficiently, or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system, or VCS. Since Git is the standard VCS over 80% of developers, lets roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.
This talk will briefly explore the need for git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.
Takeaways:

Basic know how of what git can even do
A history of online collaboration and what that means for Free and Open Source Software projects like WordPress
A path to better collaboration with any developer, or frankly anyone, in the world

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August 7, 2019 — Don’t you wish there was a way to write content faster without having to log into your WordPress site? Turns out there is and it is called Markdown, which can be written in any text editor you choose. Based on the basics of HTML and with a goal of making marked up content as readable as possible, Markdown takes only minutes to learn and is the most transportable way you can write your content. Sites like GitHub, Bitbucket and Reddit already expect it and now WordPress does too.

Takeaways:

A working knowledge of how to notate plain text to be rendered as beautiful HTML
A Cheatsheet for everything else
Strategies for content curation a storage using Git