December 19, 2015 — Freelance Business Panel Discussion with Shane Powers, Andy Stratton, Drew Poland and Bill Gadless

December 18, 2015 — If you’re not already using the customiser to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customiser action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls for more advanced input options.

December 18, 2015 — How can you improve on the default WordPress dashboard; and make the post editing toolbar less cluttered, more intuitive and relevant for your users? All it takes is a bit of forethought and a sprinking of code in functions.php. Why do this? To make life easier for content editors, help them avoid some common mistakes, and put some useful new options on the editing toolbar.

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December 18, 2015 — WordPress doesn’t live in isolation but’s sits as part of a stack. From the operating system, to the web server each aspect of the stack should be carefully chosen. In addition WordPress can be enhanced by using other application in tandem. Tim takes a look at the eco-system that WordPress lives in, to help people create a very modern WordPress stack.

December 18, 2015 — Development process is a critical part of making a WordPress project a success. Defining a workflow and establishing development tools can help you code more efficiently. This session is intended for developers looking to fine tune the tools they use to code more efficiently.

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December 18, 2015 — Testing process is very important as it helps to speed up your development workflow, keep your source code away from bugs, improve user experience and build high quality products.
In this session I talk about:
– Testing tips and tools
– Automated tests
– Usability tests and how to get the most out of users feedback

December 18, 2015 — So you’ve got a blog, chosen a great-looking theme, added some plug-ins. Now you “just” need to write some content that people are going to want to read and share with their network. That means having a content strategy. It doesn’t have to be complicated but you need to think about that strategy every time you sit down to write a blog post. I’ll be drawing on journalistic skills to help you devise your own content strategy including:- – Deciding what to write about. And when. And where. And how. – Making it easier for people to find your content. – Engaging with your target audience

December 18, 2015 — The WordPress codebase contains thousands of functions, including many hidden gems that are often overlooked, virtually unknown, or just not talked about. We’ll cover a variety of WordPress core functions that you may not know exist. Regardless of your experience as a developer, you’ll learn a variety of new gems you can use every day. If you’ve enjoyed the “Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist” sessions in the past, come back to explore even more new functions.

December 17, 2015 — Do you walk the line between designer and developer? Are you more comfortable using a Graphical User Interface (GUI) and find the black screen that is the command line a bit intimidating? This session will look at some of the basic commands needed to get comfortable using the command line. Though designers may need the command line for little more than version control or compiling SASS, having a basic understanding of the command line can help speed up your workflow.

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December 17, 2015 — One of our goals as WordPress developers should be to build user friendly websites and admin interfaces. In many cases once we’ve added custom post types, taxonomies, plugins, and other features required by a site’s design and structure, the WordPress admin panel can become unwieldy and may be confusing to site managers. In this session we’ll explore a number of strategies and techniques that will help make site administration an empowering experience for your clients. We’ll discuss modification of the admin panel, strategic use of custom fields, managing permissions, use of labels and help text, and more, all with the goal of making hand offs to non-technical website managers stress free.

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