April 18, 2019 — The web has a dirty secret. Its carbon footprint is larger than that of global air travel. And the immense energy consumed by the Internet from non-renewable sources makes it the largest coal-fired machine on earth. For the first time, Mozilla’s 2018 Internet Health Report highlighted this growing problem, and stated that sustainability should be a bigger priority for the industry. This talk is about the practical steps that those in the WordPress community can take to reduce the environmental impact of their work and promote a better future.

Presentation Slides »

April 17, 2019 — In my talk I will cover a wide range of interesting WordPress API features. We will start with the basics like pulling dynamic content from pages and posts, moving onto using featured images and custom fields to a build a reusable banner as a chunk of php to call into our theme templates.

If any of that sounded worrying please remember I am not a PHP developer, WordPress just makes life easy for all of us if you know to to use it. We will also cover topics to give your end user move control like custom shortcodes, widgets areas, menus and author bios.

We will then dig into creating custom post types and advanced custom fields, all made easy with Toolset Types plugin. Then we will focus on how to pull post types into templates using wp-query.

Finally we will look at WordPress customise features giving your end user control over all the content we have built so far as well as the colours, logo image and style of the site. This will wrap up into a dynamic theme with a user friendly interface… and there might even be some free DLC resources I have been working on.

Please remember I’m going to keep this talk in a language and terminology that everyone can understand, I am not a backend PHP robot, I’m an experienced developer and trainer. Hope you see you there WP Devs!

April 17, 2019 — The session will introduce best practices of website security and how to implement them.

The goal is to help webmasters effectively identify and reduce risks or website compromise.

April 17, 2019 — Simon will be sharing his experience of helping some of Europe’s largest enterprises which have adopted WordPress, the opportunities for individuals and agencies in the WordPress ecosystems, and his own WordPress story.

April 17, 2019 — Hooks and filters are critical part of WordPress.

They are used by the core product and they are what theme and plugin developers use to provide the massive range of add-ons for WordPress.

They are easy to use and let you access the internals of WordPress.

April 17, 2019 — Taxonomies can give you product categories, or city tags, but did you know with the right tricks they can massively boost your sites performance?

Follow Tom down the rabbit hole of private taxonomies, learn the common data storage mistakes that cripple your sites performance nobody’s talking about

April 17, 2019 — The web sites and apps we create, both for ourselves and for our clients, need to collect user analytics for a range of reasons ranging from workflow to user experience to security.

However, user tracking can cross the line from insightful anonymised data collection to intrusive personally identifiable monitoring. GDPR, Europe’s revamp of its data protection and privacy regime, becomes enforceable on 25 May – the day before WordCamp Belfast.

The incoming ePrivacy Directive revamp also renews rules on analytics. This double overhaul creates refreshed obligations for you to inform your site users about any counting, tracking, and monitoring you carry out on your web sites and apps, to provide users with options over your counting and tracking, and to ensure that your data collection respects your visitors privacy.

In our talk, we will help you to achieve a healthy balance between data collection and privacy which respects your business, your users, and your refreshed legal obligations.

Our talk will cover:
How to understand your audience so that you can understand their data
Why minimal data collection and retention makes sense from an ethical perspective
What user tracking is and is not permitted under GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive revamp
How to explain your use of analytics and tracking in your privacy notices
How to provide your visitors with an opt-out of analytics and tracking
How to collect analytics with the greatest respect for user privacy
How to ensure information is not personally identifiable to an individual (Deaggregation/anonymisation/pseudonymisation)
How to determine a data retention and deletion period
Dealing with third party tools: Google Analytics as our example
What other forms of tracking cross ethical and legal boundaries

April 17, 2019 — In January 2017, I set 5 big business goals for the year. By May, I accomplished 3 of them… And then everything ground to a halt.

I didn’t move forward for six months as I battled depression, doubt, jealousy, imposter syndrome, shiny object syndrome, not-invented-here syndrome, and so much more.

You’ll hear about how I was finally able to identify what was stopping me, move past it, and what I’ve done to prevent a lot of this ever happening again. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!

April 17, 2019 — Open Source is an incredibly powerful concept that can be seen at the heart of progress and advancement in many spheres of life. The idea that people from every corner of the globe can come together to exchange ideas and build products that profoundly affect our lives is as crazy as it is exciting.

I’m fascinated by the fact that people who have never met can come together to form a community that produces software and/or hardware products like CMSs, cars, building equipment, AI appliances and apparel that help to enable whole swaths of people with limited financial, physical or other resources make meaningful contributions and improve their quality of life.

I talk briefly about the concept of Open source and specifically about how WordPress has played a significant part in taking this Nigerian university dropout around the world and exposing him to a community of the most incredible human beings at the forefront of democratising publishing and why Open Source should be near and dear to your heart.

April 17, 2019 — Doing manual code reviews is boring. People keep on making the same mistakes.

Ulrich will be showing how you can improve your code by using automated tools and what the positive effects of it are.

We will be looking at a few different examples how automation has improved the code quality in a team, and also in open source projects.