January 16, 2016 — In my travels, I have discovered that there is not much documentation on using CSS3 specifically in WordPress. While not many of the new CSS3 modules have reached official recommendation by the W3C, support is very good across all of the latest browsers.

This session will aim to inform, enlighten, and delight attendees with the right way to include CSS in your WordPress theme using child themes or a plugin such as Jetpack, and we will also cover some of the best new features of CSS3 that you can put to work right away.You should have a basic understanding of HTML and some familiarity with CSS.

Learning Outcomes

– Use the Chrome Inspector to inspect HTML and CSS of existing pages
– Create a child theme and add your own CSS to it
– Install a plugin to add custom CSS to your theme
– Enqueue your own stylesheet the proper way in functions.php
– Use the new CSS3 features to create gradients and animations on your site
– Use the new color specifications to specify colors of elements on your page

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January 16, 2016 — The rallying cry for WordPress has become an Apple take-off “there is a free plugin for that”. So the premium plugins have to offer substantial value to win over developers. Here are two image grid plugins, Justified Image Grid and Essential Grid, that offer just such value.

Responsive image grids that work well on mobile and desktop screens.
Ability to incorporate portrait, landscape, and varying dimensions images in the same masonry layout image grid.
Add styled captions, links, and shortcodes to images.
Use a variety of image sources including WP gallery, NextGen, FaceBook, Flickr, Instagram, etc.
Provide an image grid of feature Posts based on taxonomy, category, or date.
Provide a variety of lightboxes for magnification of images with captions.
Allow for page or load more infinite image scrolling.
Provide filtering of images displayed in the grid with buttons along the top for All, Tagged, Category, Etc filters.
Provide a variety of styling options for individual images and the grid as a whole.
I compare the best of the free image plugins with these features.
(Disclosure: I am not now nor will be in the future be an affiliate for either of these vendors or their representatives. The motivation: several times for $28 or less these plugins saved my bacon by lowering cost of development by hundreds of dollars while delivering advanced and winning features to clients.)

Learning Outcomes:

– Outline the key uses of image grids in WordPress development.
– Demonstrate the advantage of responsive grids in mobile design.
– Show how image grids can display mixed size plus portrait and landscape images well in a masonry layout.
– Create a visual sitemap for a website.
– Create an instant shopping cart grid for an array of products.
– Help answer the question when to consider a premium plugin.

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January 16, 2016 — Migrations can be a scary thing with so many things to do and think about. I’m going to talk about the common tasks to have on your checklist before moving from one host to another. Also, I’m going to discuss how to migrate your site from a local install up to a publicly viewable server.

Learning Outcomes

– Migrate your domain name, WordPress install, database, media files from one host to another.

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January 16, 2016 — If we had a dollar for each time someone asked us which plugin to use for a multilingual WordPress site, beer would be on us for everyone attending our talk. At this time, there’s no be-all end-all answer to the multilingual question.

In this talk, we will review the best practices involved in creating a multilingual site, then we will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we’ve (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you’ll feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

Learning Outcomes:

– Master the best practices in multilingual sites conception.
– Understand the different approaches and tools used in WordPress.
– Choose the best tools for each project.
– Work better with translators and external resources.

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January 16, 2016 — Managed WordPress is a vibrant category of web hosting that specializes in doing 1 thing only: ensuring your WordPress websites are reliable, secure and well-maintained.

In this presentation, Alex Sirota, Director of NewPath Consulting will describe the different types of hosting available for WordPress with a focus on the ever evolving managed WordPress hosting space.

This will be a non-vendor biased presentation but will help web developers, designers and their customers understand the value proposition that a Managed WordPress hosting company can offer.

Objectives:

– Describe the difference between shared hosting & Managed WordPress.
– Demonstrate some of the very cool features in several Managed WordPress systems including GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Solution (part of GoDaddy Pro), DreamPress from DreamHost, FlyWheel, Pantheon and WPEngine.
– Present a new survey of more than 20 Managed WordPress hosts across the world.

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January 15, 2016 — There is not much documentation on using CSS3 in WordPress, and while not many of the new CSS3 modules have reached official recommendation by the W3C, support is very good across all of the latest browsers. This session will aim to inform, enlighten, and delight attendees with the right way to include CSS in your WordPress theme using child themes or a plugin such as Jetpack, and we will also cover some of the best new features of CSS3 that you can put to work right away.

Presentation Slides »

January 14, 2016 — This presentation will cover the ins and outs of project based WordPress projects and how expectations if not set correctly can have a negative impact on the project scope, budget and future client relationships.

​We’ll cover:

– The importance of the discovery phase
– Setting project scope
– Identify and resolve failing projects
– The importance of project post-mortems
– Setting the stage for the next project

The audience that will gain the most from this presentation will be those who want to have a better way of handling projects that can earn them a profit vs being constantly feeling overwhelmed in the organizational aspect of a project. Beginners and advanced users both will benefit from this session.

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January 14, 2016 — In her presentation Sheila Hoffman will talk about her evolution from using free and premium themes and eventually working with frameworks including Headway, Pagelines DMS and currently Elegant Themes Divi. Sheila will talk about who should and should not use a framework and some of the pros and cons of this choice.

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January 14, 2016 — Has a client ever wanted complex functionality within a WordPress site that you just couldn’t find a plugin for? How about when a client’s needs could be fully met by WordPress except for one little part. Single-page apps (SPAs) are in high demand, and perfect for adding dynamic functionality to a WordPress site.

So, can SPAs be easily added to WordPress sites? Turns out, they can, and with minimal effort!

Daniel and David will talk about how to develop a SPA within WordPress, as well as how popular front-end frameworks such as React can be used with a Laravel backend or the WP-API plugin to interact with a database.

There will be demos, and there will be goats.

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January 14, 2016 — The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

Learning Outcomes

Set up Google Analytics in WordPress
Understand SEO basics
Understand how to read reports in Google Analytics
Know the meaning of metrics, dimensions, and filters
Create custom reports
Create custom segments
Identify important metrics for website SEO and diagnostics

Presentation Slides »