December 11, 2015 — Building things is one of the most powerful kinds of learning experiences a person can have: so what do people learn when they build websites using WordPress? The answer depends on what’s in their toolkit.

Content development tools can be designed to help people understand the technical infrastructure of the Web while they build compelling content. One example of such a tool is our WordPress Plugin, Snowball, which helps people build immersive WordPress articles that integrate data and media while exposing them to basic computational features of web development like tagging, nesting, and CSS. We have developed Snowball to support journalistic presentations inspired by the New York Times, including their interactive article “Snowfall” and the more recent “Greenland is Melting Away.”

Our team includes members of Drexel University College of Computing and Informatics, Mozilla Foundation, and University of Nebraska at Omaha and is based at the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center in West Philly.

December 11, 2015 — WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, recognized website platform available in the market. Dominating over 25% of the market, it’s no surprise that it’s the preferred technology by marketers, sales professionals, small and large business alike, and those intent in nefarious actions.

It’s popularity is often attributed to it’s flexibility, usability and of-course, community. With all the positive though, there is and continues to be an overarching security shadow that gets introduced into every conversation.

In this presentation, we look to educate and bring awareness to the real challenges the platform faces when it comes to security. We will also dispel rumors and myths, while providing a realistic, objective, overview of the current state of security affairs in the WordPress ecosystem.

The web is a constantly evolving domain, making even the most skilled security professionals faint at the idea of staying ahead of the latest and emerging threats. We will provide perspective, and educate the masses around the things that really matter and the things being done to improve the online experience for millions.

December 11, 2015 — What are the ingredients needed to create a committed WordPress Community in your city. Learn secrets to choosing topics, getting speakers, creating comraderie and keeping people active and involved. Then ask your questions!

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December 11, 2015 — Communities—like the one we have in WordPress—don’t just happen overnight. For them to be successful, they take people to show up, contribute back, grow with it and most importantly to incorporate new people into the fold. It is ongoing, it requires attention and it needs people like you and me to speak up. A small fraction of people carry the weight of helping it thrive, but the great thing is that despite all that, we all benefit from the community no matter who contributes. In this talk I will cover some known, and unknown tips and tools for making the community work for you and your business, and also help to put back more into the community than what you take from it.

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December 11, 2015 — We want code that is easy to understand, re-usable, and flexible. But we are always up against deadlines, so we rush, and end up with code that is messy, buggy, hard to maintain, and makes us go slower even though we’re trying to go faster.

What is clean code? In this talk I’ll provide some answers to this question, and introduce you to 10 good habits that will help keep your code clean, such as the use of meaningful names for your variables and functions, and following the “Boy Scout Rule” (leave the code cleaner than you found it). I will even try to persuade you that using a lot of code comments is a sign that there are problems with your code. I’ll also discuss the particular challenges of applying some of these techniques in the WordPress environment.

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December 11, 2015 — Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asynchronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

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December 11, 2015 — Page caching doesn’t work for everyone! Sites that handle a large number logged-in users like Membership sites, Multisite networks, BuddyPress sites, or bbPress forums need special treatment to scale effectively. I’ll share my experience in building and managing large Multisite networks to give tips and tricks to speeding up your dynamic websites and coding for scale.

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December 11, 2015 — What’s going on with e-commerce. How hard is it to set up a store? What needs to go into a store? Is it mostly technical knowledge, marketing, or product knowledge? What are the WordPress options and how do they differ from some of the bigger hosted services on the market?

December 10, 2015 — Delivering a fast, performant website is one of the most important elements of building websites and web applications today. The first few seconds of load time can determine whether a user engages with or leaves a site. In this talk, we will look at advanced techniques for optimizing the front-end performance of a WordPress driven website. Including ways to defer and async JavaScript; lazy load images, videos, and other types of content; prioritizing the critical rendering path css for multiple content types; and testing performance.

December 10, 2015 — This talk will cover a few key “Aha” moments that you should have about the way WordPress works. We’ll talk about things like the template hierarchy, what’s going on in wp-config, where WordPress content is stored (the database vs. the file system), how posts and pages and custom post types are represented in the database, what folks are talking about when they talk about hooks and filters, and just generally review the “behind the scenes” mechanics of how WordPress works. We’ll also touch on a few “tricks of the trade” that you might not realize are out there (version control, staging sites, caching, Vagrant, and other fun tools to make development with WordPress just a little bit easier).

This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still haven’t figured out some of the details behind the scenes.

If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this talk will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. And if that’s you, you should be able to walk away with a solid mental model of how WordPress works “behind the scenes” and be in a much better position to do development with it

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