October 11, 2017 — Slowly loading websites not only negatively influence the customer’s perception of your brand, but they also negatively impact your site’s search engine rankings.

A CDN, or content delivery network, is something that everyone can use to speed up their site for visitors all around the world.  CDN’s used to be expensive and require long-term contracts, but all of that has changed.

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October 11, 2017 — Often as bloggers, we get in our own way, slowing our blog’s growth. In this presentation, I will share 10 habits that I’ve developed – expanding on each one with real life examples of how these have worked for me and others.

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October 11, 2017 — Fourteen years after WordPress’ initial release, the platform is widely adopted and well-respected by major media organizations. Yet many industry leaders still view it exclusively as blogging software.

In this talk, Stephen Tiszenkel will explore why this idea persists and how to overcome it. He’ll take a comprehensive look at some of the tools you can use to meet all the needs of a progressive, digitally savvy, growth-minded multimedia publisher.

Intended Audience Type: Developers, Content Managers, Executives
Intended Audience Experience: All levels of experience

October 11, 2017 — WordPress 4.7 introduced the content endpoints for the REST API. This grants access to built in content like posts, pages and categories. However, the power in WordPress often lies in plugins and custom content.

In this talk Timothy Jacobs will explore how you can extend the WordPress REST API to access custom post types, custom taxonomies, metadata and custom fields. He’ll also touch on building completely custom endpoints using the built-in framework introduced in WordPress 4.7.

Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: Beginner developer with some experience with CPTs (custom post types) and meta boxes

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October 10, 2017 — Managing a large network of WordPress sites doesn’t have to be herding cats or playing favorites. In this session, we’ll talk about how at Tribune Media we manage more than 30 sites on WordPress.com VIP, with content produced by hundreds of producers across the nation. We’ll touch on how we manage breaking news, editorial workflow, author and content management, as well as communication, at scale. We’ll share what and how we borrowed from community plugins, and what we had to build ourselves to satisfy the needs of product and editorial, across a wide range of needs and wants.

October 10, 2017 — You know that Continuous something-or-other exists. Maybe you have even heard the terms Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment, but not much more than that. I was in your shoes just a few short months ago. I came, I coded, I conquered. Now I am breaking it all down so you too can feel confident with the basics of continuous integration and deployment. I will cover the basics of how to setup Github and Circle CI with WordPress and configure deployment to a staging environment. We will cover continuous-jargon and break down YML and script files to better understand how it works and how you can start to use it with your projects. Attend. Absorb. And you too can conquer.

October 10, 2017 — A great end-user experience starts with a great experience for web admins. Editor interfaces shouldn’t be an afterthought—the most sophisticated tooling quickly becomes useless if it’s counterintuitive. Let’s talk through principles behind developing editor interfaces, as well as concrete tips about how to leverage core and plugin functionality to build on top of the WordPress admin.

October 10, 2017 — As WordPress continues to represent a larger portion of the global Internet landscape, issues relating to web censorship, internet sovereignty and access for all people are becoming more common. With his experience working behind the Great Firewall of China, John will discuss how sites are often affected by web censorship in all corners of the world.

October 10, 2017 — The idea of building a business on open source software may be old hat for most technologists, but for many people in more traditional industries, the concepts around using and contributing to WordPress may seem quite strange. Can a program you get for free be any good? How does the licensing work and what the heck is a GPL? Who do we call if it breaks? Who’s in charge of this thing? Sharing technology with everyone, is that safe? Wait, you wrote some code for us, and now you want to publish it for anyone to use, for free? We’ll answer these questions and more in a discussion of how to get OSS buy-in from the whole newsroom — lawyers, executives, and IT departments included. Along the way, you’ll get a refresher on making the most of the open WordPress ecosystem, whether you’ve been a part of this community for 13 years or 13 hours.

October 10, 2017 — Mindfulness: “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (can’t) let that stop us from doing everything possible to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood.

In this session Adam Warner addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what audience members can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites.

After attending this session, audience members will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.