December 26, 2015 — Marketing yourself or your business can be really scary when you’re an introvert who is more comfortable in front of a computer than in front of real people.

There are a lot of introverted folks in the WordPress community looking for freelance jobs, employment, or quality contractors to hire, yet many of us feel scared, directionless, isolated, overwhelmed, and hungry for work.

I’ll share my experience growing from a timid one-person freelance shop to a more confident team of nine great people, including practical tactics for in-person networking, working with freelancers, finding the right fit, and community participation.

December 24, 2015 — Contact forms are a huge part of the online world. Contact forms provide a way for your potential clients and customers to reach out to you without displaying your email address publicly. So which contact form plugin is the best? We’re going to put the popular contact form plugins through a series of challenges. In the end, you will be able to determine which contact form plugin is the right one for you and your business or blog. We’ll be testing Gravity Forms, Formidable Forms, Contact Form 7 and Ninja Forms.

December 24, 2015 — Anyone who has a plugin or theme up on the WordPress.org repo has likely faced them: user reviews about your product, running the gamut from gushingly enthusiastic to barely-masked rage. Whether you’re a plugin developer watching new reviews flow in without any idea how tackle them, a support person tasked with keeping the community happy or a user who has left reviews without a clear understanding of what the plugin team does when they read it, this session should be a useful overview on making reviews work for everyone.
In this session, we’ll walk through:
Why every WordPress.org review deserves a reply in a timely fashion
Strategies for turning negative reviews around (1-star to 5-stars, baby!)
How to develop a scalable system for replying to reviews that minimizes growing pains, making the task easy to delegate/share among team members as your user base and support team both grow

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December 23, 2015 — Google, Firefox, and the IETF are currently engaged in major initiatives to convert the web to be secure by default. Page ranking, new browser APIs, and HTTP/2 are all pushing websites to require HTTPS. An HTTPS only web is imminent. Unfortunately, according to SSL Pulse, 75% of the top 1 million websites that use HTTPS are not actually secure because of misconfiguration. Do you know how to configure HTTPS properly? In this talk, we will discuss the key aspects of HTTPS to empower developers to deploy truly secure HTTPS sites.

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December 23, 2015 — Work faster, not harder. You’ve probably heard of WP-CLI, but do you know everything you can do with it?
We’re going to take a deep dive into WP-CLI, from installation, to configuration and automation of your common WordPress maintenance tasks. It’s you don’t want to miss this!

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December 23, 2015 — This talk will introduce you to WordPress actions, filters and hooks. We’ll cover what they are, how to use them and a few examples in action. Get ready to get more out of your site by powering up your themes and plugins with hook magic!

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December 23, 2015 — Josepha will take a brief look at the Digital Divide as it stands today and what current technological trends mean for it in the future. The talk will mainly be focused on what it takes to be literate in the digital landscape our students find themselves in and how WordPress can be used to build and perfect those skills.

December 23, 2015 — I’ll talk about stress, anxiety and self-doubt that I personally and many freelancers, business owners and everyone can feel in our Open Source community. We are harsh on ourselves when we don’t kill it like Pippin, or build a world-renown agency like 10up within our first few years of opening our doors. I talk about my journey, the mental toll it’s taken and how I’ve tried to cope.

December 22, 2015 — Most sites use some form of caching to improve performance, whether it be popular plugins like WP Total Cache, drop-in plugins, or even custom solutions. While these solutions can significantly improve performance for most of your visitors, they can’t guarantee that your custom code will be properly cached and updated seamlessly. The good news is that WordPress’ event-driven architecture of hooks and filters makes it a simple process to cache and intelligently update content only when you need to, for the best possible visitor experience. We’ll cover some code examples to illustrate how to leverage event-driven caching, and de-mystify this powerful and often-overlooked part of WordPress.

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December 22, 2015 — I knew there had to be a better way. I went on a mission to find the ultimate development and deployment setup. Thankfully there are tons of options out there now (Vagrant, Docker, Capistrano, Ansible, etc) — but it’s still tricky getting them up and running smoothly. Save yourself hours of exploring tools and technologies by learning from my successes and failures. I will present a brief overview of the current state of deployment tools and then walk you through two of my favorites, followed by an open discussion for individuals to share what works well for them and ideas on best practices for the WP community.

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