August 10, 2017 — This talk walks through the highly performance-focused (and WordPress-based!) approach we took to Bocoup.com—from tinkering with the built-in responsive images functionality, to asynchronous font application, to fully automated CriticalCSS setup.

August 10, 2017 — pend time talking with a group of freelancers and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most freelancers have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any freelancer can take to contain the impact of a bad client. In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.

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August 10, 2017 — AccessibilityOz has just released the Rooted in Rights web site, a fully accessible WordPress site which won the Australian Web Award for Accessibility. Gian Wild talks about how to make a site accessible to people with disabilities and compliant with US regulations, including WCAG2. Incorporating accessibility into your web site build is important and can often mean the difference between an accessible and an inaccessible site at launch. Specific stages require accessibility intervention, including design, template, and final site launch. Suitable tasks and training is also covered.

August 10, 2017 — Learn the basics of functional programming and how to apply its principles & techniques to WordPress code. Referential Transparency, pure functions, first-class functions, currying, and partial application will be explained clearly, without unnecessary buzzwords. Examples in PHP code will show how small, well-tested units of code combine to make powerful functions.

August 9, 2017 — Keynote

August 9, 2017 — Your WordPress site really loves to be updated! Be it core, plugins, or themes there is a LOT of code that you need to update for every site. However, even with tools like wp-cli, updating your site is hard work.

You need to apply updates, test updates, and deploy updates. And do it for every single site for which you are responsible every single time an update comes out. Enter “Automatic WordPress Updates” and making the robots do your updates.

This session will talk about how to use a Continuous Integration and Visual Regression solution to automate WordPress updates with confidence and at scale.

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August 9, 2017 — Making an interactive app using WordPress can sometimes be a headache. WordPress was designed primarily for blogging, and WordPress themes don’t make a lot of assumptions about how you should write client-side code. There are many fantastic Javascript frameworks that help developers write solid, maintainable front-end code, and provide compelling, interactive experiences for users.

Using React.js, we’ll show how you can build a simple, stateful, single-page app using the WordPress REST API as a backend.

During this talk, we’ll explain:
– What the WordPress REST API is, and why you should use it.
– Examples of single-page apps built on top of WordPress (including one for higher-ed)
– A quick tutorial / demo of how to integrate React in your WordPress development environment to create a simple app

August 9, 2017 — A case study of how the Harvard Chan School is leveraging Amazon Web Services to power a high performance, elastic and scalable hosting environment for 1900+ websites, on one WordPress Multisite installation.

This session will introduce how the ever-growing panel of Amazon Web Services can be used to perform load balancing, auto-scaling, content delivery, caching, backups, continuous integration and monitoring for WordPress.

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August 9, 2017 — If you ask a WordPress contributor what the project’s goal is, chances are we’ll say “to democratize publishing.” However, for over a decade the community that has grown around WordPress has been doing something even more important: our community is democratizing software itself. By creating one of the only web communities to include everybody from writers and photographers to interaction designers and senior software architects, WordPress has done what often seems impossible in Open Source software: we have built a product not just for ourselves, but for everyone. The future of WordPress rests on our ability to recognize and celebrate the spectrum of our community.

August 9, 2017 — Panel discussion on Design