October 11, 2024 — Last September, a small but nasty bug was added to the WordPress Core code base and remained undetected until 6.4 was released in November.

Once the severity was clear, Core contributors worked around the clock to determine the appropriate fix, getting a new release out to the world in less than 8 hours from start to finish. Let’s examine what happened during this moment in the project’s history before zooming out in a case study of release management. Lessons the project learned will be shared in a way that you can relate to, allowing you to use them in your own work.

This is a joint talk by Aaron Jorbin and Jonathan Desrosiers, two contributors with over a combined 26 years in contribution experience. They have each led multiple minor and major WordPress releases, are both core committers and members of the WordPress Security team.

October 11, 2024 — Explore the journey from content creation to monetization within the WordPress ecosystem, giving you actionable insights to design, market, and sell online courses effectively.

October 11, 2024 — iOne Digital was created to democratize publishing by showcasing and empowering Black-owned businesses. Leveraging WordPress, iOne has launched over 70 platforms, including BlackPlanet, the original social network predating Facebook. This extensive use of WordPress underscores their commitment to creating accessible and cost-effective digital spaces for the Black community.

Join Markus Robinson, the SVP, Product and Technology, to gain a deeper understanding of iOne Digital’s journey and impact. This session will explore the history of iOne, their vision and significant achievements. It will delve into their choice of WordPress, how their approach has evolved over the years and the technical decisions involved in managing such an extensive multisite network. This discussion will provide insights into the strategic and technical lessons learned, highlighting the thoughtful planning behind their expansive digital footprint.

October 11, 2024 — WordPress isn’t just for websites and blogs. It’s a powerful CMS that can serve as the backbone of complex web applications, portals, and intranets. Using WordPress saves development time on the backend, allowing you to focus on crafting front-end experiences that guide users through complex processes like applying to receive government services, requesting medical records from a doctor, or requesting a nurse to start an IV at a hospital.

In this session, speakers Amber Hinds and Steve Jones will share lessons from building multiple enterprise WordPress portals and present a case study of designing and developing a portal for Nurse Pro Plus, an on-demand IV services company fulfilling requests at hundreds of hospitals across 12 states.

The portal leverages WordPress’ data structure, user management system, and key plugins to power its backend admin. The front end is an accessible Vue.js application that enables hospital representatives to order IV services, notifies available contract nurses, and allows one to pick up and fulfill the order. Essentially, it’s Uber for nurses.

Attendees will leave inspired to reimagine WordPress as more than just a website builder, but as a key tool for building sophisticated web applications. Takeaways will include helpful plugins when building portals, specific considerations for accessibility, security, and UX, and ideas for overcoming challenges when building WordPress-powered web applications.

October 11, 2024 — The Wikimedia movement is the global community of contributors to the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit that supports these contributors and projects. For the last four years the Foundation’s Communications department has built and supported an open – anyone can edit – style blog using WordPress. It’s called Diff (diff.wikimedia.org) and it’s a multilingual blog that anyone can edit…or well, at least submit a post to be published.

Along the way we’ve learned some important and interesting lessons on how to allow anyone to submit a post, review and publish, while allowing for unique voices and perspectives. We’re using a mix of some off-the-shelf plugins, a bit of custom code, and bending WordPress and multilingualism to the extreme ends of how it’s “supposed” to work.

This session will introduce you to how we pulled this all off, some of the ways we’ve given back to the WordPress community, the challenges we’ve faced, and ideas on how you can run an open community blog.

October 11, 2024 — Join us for a fireside chat featuring Burhan Hamid, CTO at TIME, and Tim Hossain, VP, WordPress VIP Growth and Demand Generation. They’ll share insights on how the TIME Product and Engineering teams replatformed time.com, focusing on building user-friendly, scalable components to enhance the customer and editorial experience.

Learn how they created reusable components for major topics, like Taylor Swift’s Person of the Year, House of the Dragon, and political news, such as the Trump shooting, allowing editors to control when and where these patterns appear, with the flexibility to update once and apply those changes site-wide. Discover strategies to streamline editorial workflows and maintain engaging, consistent user experiences.

October 10, 2024 — When building WordPress websites, the front-end presentation, back-end functionality, and visitor experience seem to always take priority. But what about the editing experience for website owners and managers — the people who must work within the websites we build? Their experience using WordPress, completing website-related tasks, and managing their website content affects not only how they feel about their website and the partner who built it but also WordPress as a platform.

As WordPress professionals, it’s our job to set clients up for success, empower them to fully use their websites, and ensure the highest levels of satisfaction. This means being intentional throughout the strategy, design, and build process, to simplify their workflows, prioritize ease and speed, and optimize for their editing experiences.

In this session, we’ll look at key questions to ask clients upfront to better understand who will be interacting with the CMS and what tasks they will need to complete, as well as which WordPress editing options best align with their preferences and needs, and which nightmare combinations to avoid. You’ll also gain insight into considerations for your client education and offboarding processes to make sure you equip clients to thrive as website owners.

October 10, 2024 — In the WordPress Speed Build Battle, participants have 30 minutes to recreate a famous website. This high-pressure competition tests participants’ ability to quickly adapt, think creatively, and demonstrate their technical skills within a limited timeframe. The website to be recreated is kept a secret until the start of the challenge, adding an element of surprise and excitement.

Audience members will gain valuable insights from observing the challenge. They will learn innovative techniques for using WordPress, discover new ways to approach web design under time constraints, and see firsthand how expert builders tackle unexpected challenges. Additionally, viewers can pick up tips on improving their own WordPress skills and get inspired by the creativity and resourcefulness of the participants.

October 10, 2024 — The architecture of the WordPress Playground provides unique opportunities to build new development and product flows that take WordPress into new domains: powering offline apps, normalizing testing and development environments, providing isolated containers in which to stage updates, and integrating WordPress with complicated software projects.

This talk will survey several exciting projects built on the Playground and discuss the ways in which it might power your new tool or product. Come learn how it might revolutionize or dramatically simplify your existing development flows.

October 10, 2024 — In today’s ever-changing landscape, digital marketers face unique challenges. Economic uncertainty has businesses tightening budgets, and the rise of AI brings robust DIY tools into the mix. How can digital agencies remain steady and even achieve growth in these uncertain times?

In this session, we’ll explore key strategies for staffing, including how to retain top talent, empower professional growth, and efficiently manage remote teams. We’ll talk about the importance of building recurring revenue streams for financial stability, even when new projects are scarce. Discover innovative ways to leverage AI and other technologies to enhance your service offerings and compliment staff, without losing the human touch that sets your agency apart.