August 17, 2024 — Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? How do you make sure you understand scope and timeline? What do you do if sometime changes?

All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.

August 17, 2024 — Passwords are hard. Convincing non-technical users that they should be using strong or random passwords that are different for each site is a challenge. The recent attacks on LastPass show that even if we follow “best practices” we can still get bit. Luckily, Apple, Google, Microsoft and the W3C have been working for years on a plan to kill the password, passkeys!

Passkeys are simpler, faster, and more secure than passwords. In this talk we’ll go over how passkeys work and how you can use them on your WordPress website right now to position your brand as an innovator.

August 17, 2024 — I’ve been a website and consultant for decades for a client who hates technology. He hates tech so much that he has a bag over his head in his Social Media profile.

In this talk, I’ll share how I’ve learned to communicate the value of SEO and get the feedback I need

First, I will start with soft skills. These include building trust and considering the customer’s time and communication preferences. Then I’ll show examples of reports and strategies I’ve used to get a response from busy people. Finally, I’ll share strategies for reporting bad news or disappointing outcomes.

This is for anyone who has to share search data with people who are less excited to dig into that data than we are.

August 17, 2024 — AI meets WordPress,
In code, they both express,
Future of progress.
— ChatGPT, probably

Many of us have played with Dall-E or ChatGPT to create images, ask questions and even write haikus. It’s often obvious that the bland results are created by AI, which — for the time being, at least — can’t compete with the human brain when it comes to truly inspiring writing.

But could AI help you better showcase this writing, leaving your company’s creators, critics and copy editors with more time to hone their uniquely human talents?

At PMC, we are exploring different use cases for what we’re re-labeling assistive AI. We’re doing it on behalf of the writers and editors who excel at producing trenchant reviews and informative news stories but maybe find generating SEO to be drudgery. AI can step in to take on this and certain other responsibilities, including creating catchy headlines and doing certain kinds of editing.

This talk will outline the corporate policies surrounding AI and delve into why we decided to develop our own ChatPMC and how it is currently being used. We will also look at additional plugins currently available that can help you with SEO, titles and editing.

August 13, 2024 — Blocks have become integral to most WordPress projects. While Core blocks cover a wide range of content types and many third-party block libraries are available, you may eventually need functionality that doesn’t yet exist. If you’ve never had the chance to build a custom block or are unsure where to begin, this session is for you!

We explained how blocks are structured and defined within WordPress, giving you a foundational understanding of block.json, attributes, block supports, and more. You will learn the differences between statically and dynamically rendered blocks, along with the pros and cons of each. Finally, we introduced tools that will help you quickly start creating your own custom blocks.

Presentation Slides »

August 12, 2024 — In this lesson, we’ll explore the essential components of a WordPress template. We’ll take a peek under the hood of WordPress and delve into the structure of WordPress blocks, how they fit together, and how they function within a template.

August 12, 2024 — Discover the role of the theme.json file in WordPress, which defines global and block-based styles for your theme. Learn where to find it, how it organizes design properties like color and typography, and why using the Site Editor is a more practical approach for customizing your theme.

August 11, 2024 — As the web matures we develop new technologies and create new conventions. But still – there are things that never change. Our eyeballs are no different from those of Arkhimedes nor does our nerve structure differ from that of Sokrates. In the end we are what we are and that sets us limits.

Cognitive psychology studies individual-level mental processes such as information processing, attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, decision-making and thinking. From this science we draw the backbone of our user interfaces and usability. We introduce here the fundaments from cognitive psychology relevant to web site user interface design.

Our cognition is a complex thing. We can and should make known the difference between what are conventions that guide our cognition and what are the actual ”hardware” limitations. As the web evolves we gain new ways of controlling the appearance and behaviour of the content there. Conventions we can change over time, but some things are constant. In this presentation we discuss this difference through examples.

Our goal is to learn to
– Learn the basic principles of cognitive psychology.
– Identify how the principles of perception affect web usability.
– Improve usability and accessibility by making use of the known principles of human cognition.

August 11, 2024 — In this talk, I will discuss the current state of automated and manual accessibility testing. How much can we rely on automation and how AI tools can speed up manual testing. We’ll also discuss what tools are available that can be integrated with WordPress.

August 11, 2024 — WordPress is open source. Linux is open source. The internet was built on open source principles. An unpopular opinion and a bold statement: Open source has no downsides. Then why doesn’t everyone release their code as open source? There are many beliefs and fears regarding to the subject. Roni has been open sorcerer on GitHub for 15 years and now shares the benefits, tips and some treats of contributing things open source.