June 16, 2017 — Community. It’s what we make it. We have to put back into the community in order for it to grow and thrive. I talk a little about my involvement in the local WordPress community, how it’s evolved over time. Maintaining a community is everyone’s job and I give you the brass tacks on how to do it right.

June 16, 2017 — Do you have a plugin (or several) in the WordPress.org repository? Have you ever wondered how to turn your plugin development skills into a sustaining income-based business? Not sure how to go about it? In this session, Adam details his story of creating a sustainable plugin business. He shares actionable advice that audience members can put into practice immediately to grow not only a user-base, but also a customer-base. Adam also explains the techniques he uses to guide free-users to premium product. Attendees will learn everything they need to know to create a plugin that people will love and recommend to others.

June 16, 2017 — For BeerNC, Cardinal Media used WordPress for content management but served content and user data over a custom Express App. This provided a content management experience the client was comfortable with and the security and control of Express for the app’s internal-facing API.

Takeaways:

Using Express and an ORM can be better for some use-cases than the baked-in WP-API features.
Using WP-API methods and hooks can be used to create webhooks to keep an external API in sync with WordPress content, while giving content creators the ease-of-use that WordPress offers.
Shortcodes can be integrated into a front-end framework – we used Ionic2 to build BeerNC, but the methodology should be similar for most front-end frameworks.

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June 16, 2017 — This talk will discuss methods for optimizing your WordPress theme and plugins to improve your site’s score on Google PageSpeed and other testing tools.

We’ll go over various types of caching, look into debugging jQuery issues and render blocking as well as minification and CDNs.

Takeaways:

Types of caching
Tools for minifying
Defer render blocking js

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June 16, 2017 — Multisite is a powerful tool used to expand the capacity of WordPress while still maintaining all the things you know and love. Multisite allows site mangers to share a core codebase of themes and plugins but deliver different experiences to each website. With multisite domain mapper a company can white label their product for multiple clients while still using one main WordPress engine. Learn how a multisite works, how to set up a multisite, how it can benefit your business and how to development a WordPress multisite platform.

Takeaways:

What is WordPress Multisite and how I use it
How does WordPress Multisite handle data, themes and users
How to build plugins for a WordPress multisite

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June 16, 2017 — Let’s get real and talk about bad code, bad feature decisions, and embarrassing moments — in the hope that you will make smarter decisions. Three million downloads, 90 releases; it’s been a roller coaster and boy have we’ve learned a lot about providing plugins to the WordPress community. We’ll talk about some particularly bad coding mistakes, unreadable coding practices, managing changing feature sets & community expectations, and touch on a couple of strategies that we’ve used to turn things around, increase our footprint and nearly double our main plugin’s rating. Some of this talk will be very technical, some not at all.

June 16, 2017 — No offense, but most local development environments are overkill. Vagrant is great if you want to match your site’s production environment, but it can often be fussy, and slow to spin up. Docker runs faster and is more lightweight, but it can be hard to get up and running if you’re not intimately familiar with how containers work.

Laravel’s Valet project is a simplified, local, PHP development environment for minimalists that uses lightweight packages—not virtual machines— to speed up development time.

In this session I will demonstrate how to install Valet, show off some of the features that make it so useful for WordPress developers, and share some power user tricks that I’ve learned while using it.

June 16, 2017 — As a UX Designer for a voting company – one of the most challenging tasks I face is creating design tools which are accessible for those with disabilities. In this process, I have quickly realized that designing for those with disabilities goes far beyond following a checklist of government requirements – often, it simply requires some common sense. In many cases, thinking about designing for those with disabilities has improved my designs for a much larger (general) audience. During this talk, I will share some of my insights, lessons learned and experiences with user testing for voters both with and without disabilities. My goal is to provide those in attendance some inspiration to consider how discovering design solutions for those for disabilities can also improve user experiences for a much larger audience.

June 16, 2017 — *This is a 15-minute Lightning Talk*

Take a tour down memory lane as we explore the JavaScript files and features added to each version of WordPress: from quicktags.js in version 1.0 to wp-api.js in 4.7. We’ll look at the JavaScript/Backbone based features in today’s WordPress including media, the customizer, themes, plugins, revisions and the REST API client. Finally, we will learn about the exciting things happening now in JavaScript in WordPress core that will shape the WordPress of tomorrow.

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June 16, 2017 — *This is a 15-minute Lightning Talk*

WordPress the CMS, meets the Modular Web. We need to stop thinking about a website as a collection of pages and templates, but as a set of modules and a system to manage them. Modules, like Legos, are interchangeable and can be combined fairly quickly to create an infinite number of results all while both showing variety and remaining consistent. With this modular paradigm shift, our workflows improve, our websites improve and our very well-being improves. Let’s explore how to use WordPress to manage site content using modules. We’ll see what this does for our development process and programming as well for our content management via the admin. We’ll discuss how to build and maintain a module library, and use it for every site you build. These principles have been immensely helpful in each team or project where I’ve put them into practice, so we’ll even take a look at a few examples and point out where to learn more.

Takeaways:

Learn the basics of Modular design for web
Understand the advantages to building sites modularly
See how to do it with WordPress

Presentation Slides »