September 20, 2015 — How to create a website that doesn’t suck (using SMART objectives, personas and wireframes).

Set S.M.A.R.T Objectives for your personal or business WordPress site
Creating personas to represent your target and existing customers
Researching competitors and samples and creating a swipe file
Sketching a wireframe
Creating a wireframe using online tools

Prerequisites:
A clear idea of what you are trying to achieve and for whom. Both advanced developers and beginning bloggers can benefit from setting an effective website strategy to make sure their website achieves the intended objectives.

September 20, 2015 — This session teachs developers how to write custom WP_Query loops, the different functions available for interacting with WP_Query objects, and how to use each function appropriately. We discuss the cases where WP_Query doesn’t fit your needs, and how to deal with the global $wpdb object directly. And we look at the most useful methods available with the $wpdb object, and discuss responsible usage and implementation there of.

September 20, 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 very 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 via both plugins and code, adding your own help documentation to the admin, and current best practices.

Prerequisites:
This talk is for individuals who are developing sites for other editors. The focus is directed at intermediate developers who wish to create their own WordPress admin customizations, but will touch on appropriate plugins to mimic the same functionality.

September 20, 2015 — Jetpack has a lot of features for users, but did you know that it can make your life as a developer easier, too? With infinite scroll, featured content, and various custom post types, Jetpack can save you time in creating commonly requested features. Use a CSS preprocessor for easy-to-use customization options. In this talk, I’ll explore all the secret developer features in Jetpack that can give you a head start on your next site, and how to use them in only a few lines of code.

Prerequisites:
This talk will be most beneficial if you’ve dabbled in WordPress code before – themes, child themes, or plugins – and know what Jetpack is.

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September 20, 2015 — Come and learn the secrets to designing a WordPress site (or a mobile app) that your audience will love. What do you need to include to ensure that visitors experience not just a user-friendly site, but one they actively enjoy? How do you create something they immediately want to share with their social networks? How do you satisfy repeat visitors, and keep them coming back for more?

Understand the business case for delight so that you can convince your team of it’s value and prove it’s worth to your clients.

Prerequisites:
Open to all levels: beginner to advanced. Designers, Bloggers, Businesses and Developers are all welcome.

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September 19, 2015 — You never discuss rates with a plumber. You never try to pay them in visibility. You would never let your 13 years old cousin fix your leaking pipes. But your clients do that all the times with you. My presentation analyses why this happens and how a WordPress consultant can become a better marketer, more professional, more profitable.

Prerequisites:
It will be the natural evolution of my last year’s presentation about elements of growth. The presentation targets all the WordPress Freelance who are in the professional market.

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September 19, 2015 — We’ll be talking specifically on how to utilize WordPress to further your nonprofit’s mission. This includes theme selection, donation collection/management, event registration/management, email marketing, e-commerce, Customer Relations Management, and finding a champion.

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September 18, 2015 — WordPress now powers nearly 25% of the web, but the vast majority of those websites use WordPress as a CMS. In our transition from a plugin to a hosted platform with OptinMonster, we decided to use WordPress as our application platform. This talk gives a practical overview of how we use WordPress as the application backend and the obstacles we had to overcome to make it scale to serve 10s of millions of API requests every day.

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September 18, 2015 — This talk walks through a fictional case study that illustrates how one might go from “adding code to the functions file” to creating an original plugin. It begins with a specific solution that applies to a single site, and ends up with a generalized piece of functionality (i.e. a WordPress plugin) that can easily be ported from site to site regardless of the theme being used.

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September 17, 2015 — The art of debugging code requires a good understanding of the codebase and logical deduction skills. A good debugging tool is like a code mentor that can walk you through the code and help you better understand what is going on, but the deductive reasoning is still up to you. In this session, you will learn how to use Xdebug, a PHP debugging tool to.

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