December 23, 2016 — The WordPress community is wonderful, but working with and in it can be a very frustrating experience. You can come to feel that no good deed goes unpunished, that no one listens to your opinions, or that all the hard work you’ve done just gets ignored. This is true whether you’re a multi-year core contributor, a business owner, or just a passionate user trying to make your site do things which feel like they ought to be simple, but turn out to be unexpectedly complex or confusing.

Often in such situations we fall into bad patterns of miscommunication and misunderstanding, faulting others in the community for ignorance, rudeness, or outright hostility.

The Four Agreements, a self-help book published to great acclaim nearly 20 years ago, actually offers a surprisingly helpful and accurate set of tools for helping you navigate your way through these waters. Matt Mullenweg himself recently called it “an excellent book” and said he had “enjoyed it.”

We’ll review the four agreements:

1. Be Impeccable With Your Word.
2. Don’t Take Anything Personally.
3. Don’t Make Assumptions.
4. Always Do Your Best.

We’ll also cover how to operationalize these in the context of working with an open source community.

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December 23, 2016 — If you’ve scoffed at using a page builder plugin in the past, it may be time to reconsider. Over the last year or two, we’ve seen the emergence of some players that prove drag-and-drop page builders *can* be well coded and fast. See some of the pros and cons of creating layouts using a page builder plugin, and learn how these plugins can be a real boon for small teams or solo web designers.

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December 23, 2016 — For many years, the dual diagnosis of anxiety and depression kept me from sharing my knowledge, experience, and voice with others. Despite this, I started speaking publicly (at WordCamps and WooConf) at the beginning of 2016. I want to share a few tips and things I learned with others who feel like they have something important to share, but are scared or might be held back by similar conditions/illnesses.

December 23, 2016 — WordPress’s famous 5 minute install doesn’t mean 5 minutes until site launch. Setting up a new site can be time-consuming, tedious, and downright confusing that’s why new user experience (NUX) has been a recent focus at WordPress.com. Through A/B testing, usability testing, and constant iteration, we’ve made gradual improvements to WordPress.com’s NUX. Come learn some of the key insights discovered over the past year and how we can use those them to improve WordPress NUX for everyone.

December 22, 2016 — WordCamp AMA

December 22, 2016 — Why the Panama Papers leak should never have happened.

Who wants to get into your website? It’s not about what you have, it’s about what they can leave behind. Security is about making life hard for hackers. The biggest lie in WordPress security – automating your security will not keep you safe. Security is a mindset – it’s all about doing simple things, over and over again.

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December 22, 2016 — The presentation looks at the current social media marketing trend (which is here to stay) – video marketing (included throughout the presentation are statistics and case studies). I look at how video marketing can help you achieve your bigger business goals. I look at current and projected statistics of video marketing and what every business can do now to get ahead. I look at how search (Google) will be affected by video and why we MUST have video content on our website. I look at how social is being affected by video and ways to maximise efforts in this area (including how to amplify the content, how to repurpose video to reduce content creation time and how to leverage video within different social media networks to increase brand presence). I also have a list of tools and plugins for WordPress users to make the process simple.

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December 22, 2016 — Having a good development environment is crucial to pump out good code consistently and efficiently. You will find a multitude of “How To’s” for developing on Mac but not so Much on Windows, even those do not fully utilise all Windows has to offer, like Hyper-V. Let me show you how to build a complete WordPress and Web dev environment, running in a Hyper-V Linux VM on Windows in less than 30 mins.

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December 21, 2016 — This presentation is a case study of an innovation in our business, our ‘website in a day’ product that initially came to life when we kept on encountering businesses with next to no budget for their website, and kept having website projects we were working on blow out to weeks, months and even years – not good for us or the clients! Some people called us crazy to offer this service. Others regularly tell us ‘it just isn’t possible to create a website in a day’.

Most people take 4-6 weeks minimum to build websites and there is always scope creep! Startups, SMES on a limited budget and people needing a website in a hurry for a tight deadline are our perfect audience and we’re going to share what we do at WordCamp!

Presentation Slides »

December 21, 2016 — Cath Beaton (Phase Creative) and Troy Dean present their ideas and experiences of how they have developed and grown as individuals in their respective businesses by being prepared to get out of their comfort zone.

The amazing online community spirit that is synonymous with WordPress has allowed them to feel supported whilst they navigate the tricky terrain of growing up as business owners. WordPress truly is unique in that it unites people and allows niche communities to develop very quickly. This sense of belonging fosters collaboration and nurtures relationships which quite often result in new friendships, business partnerships and enormous self-development. Their talk will inspire other WordPress users to find support in their own online communities so they too can evolve and develop in whatever field they choose. They will also touch on some of the technology behind this growth (BuddyPress and bbPress).