November 25, 2024 — The plugin review team handles hundreds of new plugin submissions every week. 90% of those plugins fall foul of the same mistakes, time and time again.

In this talk we’ll walk through the most common pitfalls, so that your plugin submission goes as smoothly as possible.

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November 25, 2024 — Some digital marketing agencies are broken, and can give the entire industry a bad rap. But there are certain stand-out agencies who are changing this. Together we can uplift and support each other to do better.

– Why do agencies have so much churn, and a bad rap?
– What clients really want.
– Examples of pioneering agencies in Australia.
– Why change? So that everyone wins!

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November 25, 2024 — I have been teaching PHP application development for over a decade to various organisations, government departments, and the public. In 2022 I officially became a teacher and joined a local college. Over the next 12 months I taught programming languages (PHP and others), frameworks and content management systems to different student cohorts. I’m going to share a number of exciting and concerning takeaways I learnt while teaching PHP (with focus on WordPress).

The goals of my session are to strengthen the link between the WordPress community and academia, to question a few educational institution stigmas, and to improve the way we as a community present WordPress to teachers and students.

I will touch upon important topics such as Artificial Intelligence AI (the good and the ugly), open source indifference, proprietary software vendor dominance, quality documentation, student reflection on real life projects, and how different content and context can change student perception of the technology.

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November 25, 2024 — Did you know that even if you think like the most common thinking profile, less than 20% of the world think like you? This is mind blowing when you think about it! Unlock the potential of your (WordPress) business with Whole Brain Thinking. Discover how to communicate more effectively with clients, improve sales conversions, and deliver exceptional service. Join me for this session where we’ll explore how leveraging the different modes of thinking can transform your client interactions, and those of your end client too! Key Takeaways: • Learn techniques to understand and communicate with diverse clients • Discover practical strategies to enhance your sales conversations • Gain insights into improving service delivery communication.

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November 25, 2024 — The term “sustainability” has evolved in recent years. In the context of this talk, when I mention sustainability I will be specifically focusing on emissions, particularly greenhouse gas emissions like CO2.

Together, we will take a look at some practical steps that can be taken during the design, development, hosting, and long-term management of WordPress websites to reduce their impact on the environment.

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November 25, 2024 — Using a design system approach, learn some useful principles and tools for creating and testing consistent, maintainable, reusable custom design and layout elements. Aimed at developers of custom themes.

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November 25, 2024 — Images are the heart and soul of many websites, especially those built on WordPress. They capture attention, tell stories, and enhance user experience. But did you know that images can also be a powerful SEO asset?

In this session, we’ll dive into the world of image SEO, exploring how to optimize your visuals to not only look stunning but also rank higher in search results. We’ll cover everything from technical optimizations like formatting and sitemaps to creative strategies for crafting descriptive filenames and alt text.

As a seasoned SEO expert, I’ll share insider tips and tricks gleaned from years of experience and the latest Google guidelines. Whether you’re a blogger, photographer, e-commerce store owner, or anyone else using WordPress, this session will equip you with the knowledge to make your images work harder for your website’s success.

Main Topics:
– Image Discovery and Indexing: How to ensure search engines find and understand your images.
– Responsive Images: Techniques for delivering the right image to the right device for optimal performance.
– Image Formats and Quality: Choosing the best formats for web and balancing quality with speed.
– Image Sitemaps: Helping search engines discover images they might otherwise miss.
– Descriptive Filenames and Alt Text: Crafting informative text that improves accessibility and SEO.
– Structured Data: Using schema markup to provide additional context to search engines.
– Page Titles and Descriptions: Optimizing the text around your images for better search visibility.
– Speed and Performance: Tips for optimizing image size and delivery for faster page loads.

By the end of this session, you’ll have the skills to transform your images from pretty pictures into powerful SEO tools.

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November 25, 2024 — The Gutenberg project has ushered in a new era for WordPress theme development, opening up many new opportunities, but also creating new challenges as well.

In the good old days of WordPress, things were simple. You had your theme, you had your content, and sometimes some custom fields.

Things aren’t so simple anymore.

One particular challenge is how the line between content and layout has been blurred so much that it might not even be there at all. Nothing exemplifies this quite as much as the humble post thumbnail.

Join us as we take a deep dive into the WordPress template structure as we try to untangle the layout from the content, and find a solution to the Post Thumbnail Paradox.

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November 25, 2024 — Cyber security (or lack of) has been covered extensively in the news. Hacker attacks range from bored school kids toying around to state-sponsored ransom-driven targeted strikes. As web developers it’s our responsibility to incorporate cyber security best practices into the development cycle.

In this talk I’ll cover:
– state of security of WordPress
– resources and guidelines from Australian government and The Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP)
– WordPress plugins and other services to secure your website

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November 25, 2024 — The Code Company has been working with global enterprise brands for a decade, and one of the keys to being able to share developer knowledge and efficiency across projects is by using a consistent project framework.

Our core framework at TCC, unofficially named “WPMVC”, is a basic, unopinionated PHP framework that leverages a basic Model-View-Controller structure that works for any project that we’ve encountered (so far).

As part of this talk we’ll cover:
Some background on how we developed this framework
Comparison to other popular PHP frameworks
Why we have chosen this specific approach, and the benefits we’ve seen
Some real-life use-cases
Upcoming features and improvements

In addition, as part of this talk we will be making our “WPMVC” framework open source and available for you to use in your own projects.

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