September 24, 2015 — With WordPress powering almost 20% of all sites on the internet, it’s a ripe target for cyber criminals. Brute force attacks, malicious code, and site defacements are concerns for even the casual user. Hey, but there’s no need for panic. With a few code snippets, one or two plugins and some common sense practices, you can make your website more secure and make the crooks look somewhere else for an easier target.

Presentation Slides »

September 23, 2015 — There is incredible power in knowing the story you’re in, and how to manage it. The brand you develop will impact your pricing, your positioning, and your prospective market. Come hear Chris Lema’s take on branding – specifically in the WordPress ecosystem – and how you can leverage the power of story in your marketing, sales, product announcements, and blog.

September 23, 2015 — Finding success as a professional freelancer can be a difficult and challenging journey! You have to know the right stuff and have the proper skills in order to survive in the freelancing economy.

James Dalman will share seven key strategies so that you’ll be better equipped to survive – and thrive – in your own freelancing career or business. All the lessons are based on his 27 years experience as a professional freelancer and are applicable no matter where you are at in your journey.

Eating crickets during this session is optional.

Presentation Slides »

September 23, 2015 — Developers should keep content editors and administrators in mind when making backend decisions concerning how content and settings are edited. We should also consider how the decisions we make now affect people who will touch our code after shipping – other developers, support staff, and our future selves. We’ll discuss the importance of making better decisions, as well as tips on how to do so.

Presentation Slides »

September 22, 2015 — Backbone (and Underscore!) are bundled with WordPress – explore how you can leverage their power to deliver complex user experiences while keeping your code organized and maintainable.
~ When and why should you use Backbone?
~ How can WordPress help?
~ Backbone fundamentals
~ Backbone in core
~ A sample Backbone project
~ Using the JSON REST API

Presentation Slides »

September 22, 2015 — This presentation is geared towards individuals looking to start or grow a WordPress design/development company. Topics covered will include:

When and how to hire help
Tools and services that help automate and streamline
Project Management
Time Tracking
How to identify what makes your company unique in a sea of competitors

Takeaways

Should you become an employee, a freelancer, or a business owner?
What tools are vital to the success of the business operations?
Mistakes and mishaps that you should try to avoid

Presentation Slides »

September 21, 2015 — This talk will explain the concept of internationalization and localization in plugins and themes and introduce theme and plugin developers to the necessary tools for the job. In addition to discussing the importance of internationalization, this talk will cover WordPress internationalization functions and best practices.

Presentation Slides »

September 21, 2015 — Ever wanted to make small changes to the look-and-feel of your site but weren’t sure how to go about it? Itching to change the colour of your site title, tweak the size of your paragraph text, or hide the date on your posts? Let’s go on a CSS adventure together! In this session you’ll learn some basic CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and we’ll look at some practical examples, using a browser inspector to customize our site’s design.

Prerequisites:
Some basic HTML knowledge is helpful, but not required. You should be open to looking “under the hood” at a site’s HTML and CSS.

September 21, 2015 — In this talk I will showcase some of the tools I use to speed up my development process and some of the reasoning behind the way I have things set up. I will touch on subjects like developing locally, using git, the benefits of Sass and why everyone should be using it, running grunt tasks to compress your css, js, and images as well as using autoprefixer. I can also briefly touch on using frameworks if time and interest allow for it.

Presentation Slides »

September 21, 2015 — If you want to make money designing WordPress sites, it’s crucial to know when to go custom and when to stick with a ready-made solution. In this session geared to designers looking to make profitable WordPress websites, learn how to assess when to use a premade theme, how to pick the right one, and when to start from scratch.

Prerequisites:
There are no prerequisites to attend this talk. This session is intended for designers, beginner WordPress users, bloggers and anyone looking to profit from designing WordPress websites.

Presentation Slides »