December 12, 2015 — 10up open sourced their WordPress Best Practices (PHP, JavaScript, tools, and workflows) in late 2014. As the Director of Engineering at 10up, I drove this project and am the lead contributor to the docs. These Best Practices allow developers to build sites that scale, perform, and are secure one sites receiving millions of page views per day. They also standardize development practices in such a way that facilitates team collaboration. This talk will highlight some important parts of the Best Practices and reveal some valuable tips about how we (10up) engineer some of the most complex and most viewed WordPress sites in the world.

December 12, 2015 — Three years ago, WordCamp Europe was held for the very first time. But besides bringing together thousands of people from all over the world, this international event had another unforeseen result. WCEU gave a few local WordPress communities unexpected momentum as a consequence of the unique environment it created. As a co-organizer of WCEU 2015 and a member of the Italian WordPress community, I will trace the extraordinary journey from stalling local community to thriving ecosystem of meetups and enthusiastic members, using real case studies from the German and Italian WordPress communities.

December 12, 2015 — As one of the first museums to fully digitize its collections and make them available online for the public, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian has embraced open source tools to empower its audience and staff to discuss and experience art. We are counting to leverage this open attitude by working with a small group within Automattic to research, plan, and design the Freer and Sackler site. As a team, we are developing custom plugins and code in-house that will be made available to the public and other cultural institutions on GitHub in hopes of furthering open source within the cultural environment.

During the presentation, we will briefly discuss the democratization of art, review our planning and design process and how we are working to make sure the tools we develop are usable by others. We will finish with an open discussion on how cultural institutes can maximize their use of WordPress. While the case study will focus specifically on a visual arts museum, the lessons learned and tools used can be applied to any WordPress-driven website rollout.

December 12, 2015 — Integrating Accessibility (a11y) into the project process can be downright scary. In this session, I’ll cover basic web accessibility principles for web designers, developers, and site owners, then show how to turn seemingly daunting and confusing accessibility requirements into understandable, actionable tasks and techniques. The talk will cover some of the accessibility-specific WordPress plugins and themes available, as well as some quick, easy tests to integrate into design and development workflows.

December 12, 2015 — How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances.

Presentation Slides »

December 12, 2015 — From the basics of using a simple membership plugin to evaluating several premium courseware plugins, we’ll look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of courseware creation.
From the technical “know-how” of creating online courses, to the business angle on possibilities and what to teach, this session will provide the details to help create a successful training course.

December 12, 2015 — This session will cover the severe need for low-tech access to WordPress, but for content production and consumption – a problem somewhat unique to the developing world. It will cover use cases, user groups, and a few proposed techniques for making both content and publishing tools available to those without high-speed Internet, 3G connectivity, or traditional desktop publishing tools.

Attendees will achieve a deeper understanding of potential, unreached user demographics and the tools/techniques they can use to reach these groups.

December 12, 2015 — WordPress and open source software have powered Penn Manor School District’s websites for 7 years. But can WordPress, and open source principles, help teachers transform classrooms and inspire kids to build remarkable learning communities? The answer may surprise you. Discover how our schools use WordPress, open source software, and a unique student technology apprenticeship program to prepare the next generation of writers and hackers for careers, college, and beyond.

December 12, 2015 — Posts & Pages might have some obvious differences to you but to new users, they seem exactly the same. When teaching WordPress, the goal is to make sure the user feels comfortable, so never assume! In this talk I’ll go over some of my tried and true methods for introducing and training people on WordPress

December 12, 2015 — Documentation can be one of the most challenging things for a developer. You can write the most amazing code that’s incredibly easy to use, but without a good set of documentation no one beside you will use it! But times are changing. You can have the robots write the documentation for you! Or at least very nearly.

The WP_Parser project has given birth to the incredibly useful developer.wordpress.org/reference site based on the massive amount of internal documentation work that has been going on in core over the last years. This is an exploration of how other developers can take that work and leverage it into their own reference site taking advantage of all of the internal code docs they have already written.