November 21, 2016 — Too often vital information is locked away in somebody’s email in box, personal or office shared drive, or often hard to find on a SharePoint site. For the US Department of State, it is only compounded when over 25% of the entire diplomatic workforce transfer to another country every year. When they transfer their knowledge often goes with them. So the Department of State is making an effort to make knowledge management priority #1. Over the last six month, the Office of eDiplomacy has been crafting a new knowledge management collaboration environment harnessing power of WordPress. We have been using WordPress Multisite, BBPress, BuddyPress, Gravity Forms combine with open source and commercial plugins and theme, to make a cost efficient KM portal. The system is currently in the proof-of-concept testing. We have a road map that will include Mobile Deployment, Elasticseach, integration with other tools such as SalesForce.

November 21, 2016 — Every complex development project has dependencies, and WordPress is no exception: While the core codebase takes the worry out of managing many JavaScript libraries, you still have to manage all your plugins and themes. If you’ve just got one site to worry about, manually taking care of tracking and updating these dependencies is easy, but as soon as you’re managing multiple sites it starts to become cumbersome — and managing dependencies is especially hard when you’re working with in Multisite.

There are several ways to approach managing your dependencies: You can have a zip folder of them; keep them all in a Git repo; use more advanced Git techniques like submodules or subtrees; or use something like TGM Plugin Activation library. You can also use a Composer — the standard PHP dependency management tool — to manage your WordPress site dependencies.

This session will walk you through managing your WordPress dependencies using modern tools like Git, WP-CLI, and Composer, making maintenance easier and decreasing the amount of third-party code you have to store in your repo or code management tool. You should come away knowing a few different approaches to make dependency management both less work and less prone to problems and mistakes.

November 21, 2016 — The Child Theme concept is well known to many theme developers. Sometimes people ask, if there is something similar for plugins. Unfortunately, no.

At least not exactly. There are many ways to customize a plugin without modifying the plugin’s original code. In this session I would like to present some of there techniques and talk about the advantages and disadvantages of each approach.

November 21, 2016 — One can have many reasons to form a WordPress agency. At required+ we didn’t think about becoming an agency in the first place. Initially we teamed up to build an online platform that scratched an itch in all of us, we simply wanted to try and prove a point with the idea we had. All of a sudden we were running a thriving job board for the Swiss web industry and had a beautiful side project to work on. In order to keep our creative freedom and sovereignty, we didn’t want to take money from venture capitalists or investors. Therefore we came up with a concept to keep us going while allowing space for our individual lifestyles. We started to take on interesting client projects, this way we continued to build interesting sites & apps.

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November 21, 2016 — I was a newbie to WordPress three years ago and I had little or no technical experience at the time. In a nutshell, I made a lot of mistakes using WordPress my first year, but my knowledge has grown exponentially since then I work in WordPress everything. For people just starting out and trying to use WordPress for a small business, startup or blog, I think there is a lot of misunderstanding out there about how to use WordPress, how to get over the fear of using WordPress and what the expectations should be.

November 21, 2016 — For the serious individual, non-profit or company that is serious about content marketing, one of the key challenges is developing and managing an efficient process to create and publish content on a frequent basis. Attendees will learn how to develop an easy step-by-step process to plan, research, write, edit and distribute content. We will also review some popular tools to integrate with their WordPress instance to boost productivity and efficiency.

November 21, 2016 — Now that you’re publishing with WordPress, it’s time to get your posts in front of the right people. This session will explore the benefits of content promotion and amplification methods like email, social media, ads, and more. We’ll also look at how you can figure out which marketing method best matches up to your blog, business, or budget — because no one likes ineffective strategies.

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November 21, 2016 — Brittney Moffat resides in northern Ohio in the US and has been using WordPress for one year.

We talk about her experiences at WordCamps, the WordPress Community and her involvement in the local WordPress Meetup group.

November 20, 2016 — Do you know that if you have a picture of a duck having it face left or right can increase your conversions by 40%?

Think this sounds silly? It is, but backed by research. Spend some time to learn about what a/b testing is, what things to test, testing methodology and the best tools to use for your Joomla site.

Everyone will get a handout of the very same checklist I use when A/B testing our client’s sites. One of our clients, an insurance company, increased leads by making just a small 2px change.

Want YOUR site to be tested live? Please tweet me your URL @MPMIKE with the hashtag #TESTME. Selected sites will get live feedback and examples.

When you launch a website, you are guessing. Sure the guesses are educated based on experience and data, but you can maximize your ROI with good A/B testing.

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November 20, 2016 — Learn how to customize the look of your website with nothing more than your brand identity. I’ll show you how to integrate all the elements of your branding (logo, favicon, colors, fonts, typography, design elements, etc.) in WordPress to create a custom-looking site without having to know a lot of code. Using a child theme, some custom CSS and a few tried-and-true plugins, you’ll have a custom-looking website in no time!