July 28, 2015 — CSS preprocessors make developing clean and semantic stylesheets effortless. My talk takes someone through a basic structure for organizing Sass within a WordPress theme, using the Bones theme framework as an example. I go through some of the benefits and cool tricks you can implement with this structure including breakpoint includes, variables, functions, nesting, and mixins. Finally I address perhaps the greatest hurdle to immediately implementing Sass in your WordPress theme — compiling. I take people through the common methods of doing this including Grunt, Compass, and WordPress plugins like WP-SCSS.

Presentation Slides »

July 28, 2015 — I’ve built a lot of sites, and it seems that the final 20% can be the hardest to complete. I want to teach designers and developers about the 80/20 principle and how it applies to their project workflow. Then I will talk about tools and tricks that I use to finish a project strong, particularly when building a custom theme.

Presentation Slides »

July 28, 2015 — This talk covers the ideas behind content migration, and introduce development strategies and examples that you can employ in your projects if you’re migrating from something other than WordPress, or if the built-in WordPress WXR import/export tool misses or mishandles important content on your site. With this in your toolkit, you can speak confidently to clients or employers about your ability to get them onto WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

July 28, 2015 — (How to stop ignoring that thing on your website called a blog.)
In this session we discuss the purpose of blogging for business (versus blogging as a business), how to make sure you are talking to the right people, how it can actually save you time in the long run, creating an editorial calendar, tips for using categories and tags, and easy ways for coming up with topics that will save you from staring at a blank screen wondering what to write about.

Presentation Slides »

July 28, 2015 — Have you ever put code into your functions.php file to change your site? Ever lost that code when you changed themes? Topher will show you how to move that code into a simple plugin so you’ll keep it no matter what theme you use. Then using this as a base we’ll look at how to build more complex plugins.

July 28, 2015 — Panel discussion on the WordPress development process.

July 28, 2015 — Many developers do not have backups of each commit they make to their server, which will cause a lot of headache when you get into a situation where your site goes down due to a coding error. The solution to this problem is version control, which saves a version of every code change you make to your server. In this talk, I will cover the basics of version control and how to use it on your next project. In addition, we will also be coving how to use Version Control with a team and debug code with it.

July 28, 2015 — Konstantin and Scott, the release leads for WordPress 4.3 and 4.4, are going to be on stage to share some of their thoughts on the immediate future of WordPress, and to answer all the questions you may have around everything WordPress. They have over 1500 commits to WordPress Core between them, and share big media and big blogging experience from their work at the New York Times and WordPress.com.

July 27, 2015 — The focus of my presentation is on WordPress and website accessibility; from a front-end perspective. First, I will explain what web accessibility is and why it is important. To continue, I will discuss AODA and Section 508 regulations for Canada and the United States. Then, I will go over some key WCAG 2.0 compliancy requirements a developer will need to ensure the websites they develop are fully accessible. From there, I will showcase a few web accessibility tools, then some WordPress accessibility tools and tips.

July 27, 2015 — In this talk we explore what goes into a TandM contract, how to persuade a prospective client to sign one, and how to live up to the expectations you create in the persuasion process, to deliver a successful project.