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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December 22, 2015 — WP-CLI is a set of command line tools for managing your WordPress site. It allows you to perform many tasks much quicker than you would be able to by other means. In this session, I will teach you how to get WP-CLI running, and show some of my favorite time saving features. Once you’ve started using WP-CLI, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it! This talk is appropriate for developers, designers and server administrators of all skill levels.

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December 22, 2015 — A slow website has serious business impacts. Period. 40% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than three seconds to load. Many “Creative Responsive Multi-Purpose” themes are beautiful and flashy with their demo content, but have speed indexes of more than 50 times* what is recommended. How can you tell good themes from bad ones without buying them? Never fear! There are several ways to vet a theme before shelling out the cash.
In this talk, we’ll cover strategies for evaluating themes’ code quality and performance, and creating healthy, content-oriented websites. In many ways, this is a call to action to the WordPress end user community: let’s shift our values from flashy effects to rock-solid content and fast websites. Scroll-jacking and parallax are over!

December 21, 2015 — This session covers how to deliver a clear call to action (CTA)–whether that means nudging users toward a product/service page or teaching them how to grow gladiola bulbs. Strategically scale down your users’ choices, and you’ll boost site usability and quite possibly your bottom line.

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December 21, 2015 — When you work in WP-Admin every day, it’s wicked easy to navigate. But for users who are new to WordPress or only update their sites occasionally, the admin area can be full of WordPress-centric-lingo and not intuitive. If you’ve created a customized front-end experience, why not take a few extra moments and tighten up the admin? It’s not difficult to make users happier and reduce the number of questions you get! We’ll cover customizing primarily via code, adding your own help documentation or metaboxes to the admin, and current best practices.