June 29, 2017 — Working with abstract things like the web can sometimes be demotivating. Remote work with no colleagues to talk to can make matters even worse. I’ve always considered myself a developer, but over the years I’ve also been a consultant, an agency founder/CEO and now a team leader. Even though I love development, with different roles and different clients and projects it sometimes has been a struggle to find motivation to continuously do my best. I will share what I have learned how to cope with the pressure, focus on stuff that matters, and finding meaning and motivation in my work.

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June 29, 2017 — Finland is one of few countries where website developers, more often that not, need to create multilingual websites. But what about multi-regional websites and what about the end user’s experience?

User experience and effective content are two aspects that keep users returning, yet these are oftentimes overlooked by both clients and developers.

This talk would venture into strategies for planning and building successful multilingual and/or multi-regional websites that maximise content and the end user experience, ultimately encouraging your clients’ customers to stay and explore their website.

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June 29, 2017 — This talk is about automatic updates of WordPress. They are brilliant for security and as far as I know core updates are really well tested and they don’t introduce breaking changes.

For plugins and themes it’s quite different story. Many of them are abandoned or completely changed over the years. This is the breaking point for so many users and inexperienced developers and they will just disable the updates. They are scared of breaking their sites just as we were. But if the updates are turned off the sites will get heavily exploited. So what should we do?

This is our story of how we disabled all automatic updates last year. Why we did it and the struggle we had. In the end we learned a few things about testing, automation and security.

We will visit topics like package management with composer, integration testing and continuous integration.

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June 29, 2017 — WP-CLI, a tool not too familiar by many developers, and that is a shame. WP-CLI can speed up your development and maintenance time a lot by just typing a few commands in the terminal.

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June 29, 2017 — There is a hype surrounding the WordPress REST API these days. People focus on how it will change the future of WordPress, allow developers to expand the range of projects they can build, make WordPress popular outside its own bubble.

What we rarely talk about are the challenges presented by the REST API especially for non developers. This talk focuses on them and gives you a checklist to make sure both your clients and your non-developers know what to expect from a REST API project.

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June 29, 2017 — “I thought a user-centered approach was going to benefit the users of my product. And then I realized how much users have given me back in the process. This presentation focuses on three ways in which users have made my life better, by giving me (at least) three gifts:

– The gift of building solid roadmaps
– The gift of teaching efficiently
– The gift of working in a happy team”

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June 29, 2017 — Moving data between environments in a tiered development workflow can be tricky and time consuming. It’s important to have content, options, settings and files synchronized across your tiers to ensure a stress-free development process. Understand how data is stored in WordPress and explore several different approaches to moving WordPress seamlessly from server to server for deployment.

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June 29, 2017 — With the arrival of the so-called European Union “Accessibility Directive”, there has been a lot talk lately about the accessibility of the modern web. The public sector is hustling to comply with the requirements to meet the directive as soon as 2020. Most common guidelines to comply with the requirements of the directive are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0.

The guidelines, while extremely useful and comprehensive, aren’t the Holy Grail of accessibility. G-Works undertook a large project with the national centre for accessible literature and publishing in Finland, Celia, to create a new user interface for Celia’s library system. The criteria was to push the boundaries of accessibility not only to create a accessible service but to take it to the next level. While doing this, we noticed that the WCAG is not perfect – and has, in fact, some contradictions.

The topic will focus on telling about accessibility in general, effects of the directive, what to take into account while designing accessible web services and some tips for the coders as well.

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June 29, 2017 — Evermade was founded in 2011 by four guys. Today we are group of 20 people – half of whom are developers. In the beginning we did everything from photography to USB-drivers. In 2012 we agreed that WordPress is basically useless and we decided to focus on ExpressionEngine. After a year – and some pain – we changed our minds and decided to focus on WordPress.

We lost a few developers during this hassle but but soon after our shift of focus to WordPress we started to grow. With new developers coming in we had to abandon our current way of working and really rethink how should we work together as a team.

In my presentation, I will talk about the pain of growing and the challenges we faced when doing so.

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June 29, 2017 — Daniel’s lighting talk covers how to create a better experience for your clients or users of your theme with the various core controls, custom controls and how to take advantage of selective live refresh and visible edit shortcuts (introduced in WordPress 4.7).