October 12, 2017 — One Sunday morning while reconciling my books during a slow cash flow month, I was shocked to realize that I was paying nearly $300 a month in subscriptions to run my freelancing gig! Things like invoicing, project management, contracts and growing – it was seriously getting out of control.

Sure $7-$35 here and there was harmless, maybe even unnoticed most times. But after seeing all the subscriptions categorized (especially during a slow month) and knowing there’s over 40,000 plugins available in WordPress, I couldn’t help but wonder “What can WordPress replace?”

And with that, I started a journey into creating (even though I didn’t realize at the time) an extranet that my clients and I both could use, all with the ultimate goal of reducing my monthly operating costs.

This topic is about what I learned while creating my extranet and what monthly subscription services WordPress could totally replace, what it might be able to replace (depending on circumstances), what it should not replace and the unexpected benefits and head bumps I uncovered!

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October 12, 2017 — After investing so much time, effort, and resources in developing your WordPress website and marketing your brand, it can be frustrating if you are not achieving a high number of conversions on your website.

Tom Shapiro will walk you through effective techniques to get more of your site visitors converting. Some of the techniques will focus on behavior-based data gleaned from heat maps, scroll maps, and A/B testing, while others will focus on messaging, neuromarketing, and human psychology, while yet others will focus on color, design, and UX (user experience) elements. Whether you are looking to sell more on your website, increase leads, promote an upcoming event, build your email list, or drive site visitors to another type of conversion event, you’ll walk away from this session with highly specific methods for increasing your website’s conversion rates.

October 11, 2017 — Having a solid backup strategy can save your life in times of an extreme website crisis. No one wants to lose any of the hard work they have put into their site and why should you ever have to if you are backing things up.

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October 11, 2017 — MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller, is a popular methodology used by modern PHP frameworks to separate the presentation (HTML) from the data and logic of an application. In this talk you’ll learn how to write plugins “the MVC way” while still doing things “the WordPress way.”

Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: Advanced

October 11, 2017 — A problem that gets out of hand easily, and is hard to come back from once you’ve gone too far, is CSS bloat. We will discover the importance keeping CSS bloat to a minimum, the benefits of using a CSS preprocessor, and the best-practices to avoid bloat in the future. While all of this may cause small delays in the present, it will help you immensely in the future and inevitably you will thank past-you for keeping things tidy and clear.

Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: All (beginner, intermediate, advanced)

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.