August 3, 2015 — There’s a lot of information out there on making WordPress as secure as possible. Some of it is great and some of it, well, not so great. My session will walk users through numerous tips and tricks for securing WordPress the right way from the start. In addition we’ll look at a few security misconceptions in an attempt to sort the good information from the bad and keep you from becoming the next victim.

August 3, 2015 — The Principles of Effective Technical Communication – This talk summarizes things I’ve learned over the past 18 months writing WordPress tutorials at WPShout, as well as co-writing an e-book and screencast series on WordPress development. It describes principles for communicating technical knowledge clearly and effectively.

August 3, 2015 — In this session we discuss some of the history of open source software, look at how subdivisions take hold, how we can all be better about working toward the common interests of all, and the all-important nature of treating one another with kindness and not leaping to conclusions.

August 3, 2015 — In this talk, we look at the parallels between being a musician, and being a developer. I’ll share my story of how I transitioned from music to development, and how the skills I learned from being a musician helped me succeed in the development world.

August 3, 2015 — Make your blog a go-to resource. Compelling content is a mix of vivid storytelling, offering new facts, sharing a novel viewpoint, and evoking emotion from the reader. Learn from the strategies of Pulitzer Prize winning writers and fuel a faithful readership.

August 3, 2015 — This session introduces the use of WordPress to support a fully-online graduate class in Library and Information Studies.

August 3, 2015 — Come hang out with me for a while, and I’ll tell you everything you ever wanted to know about running multiple WordPress sites, multiple networks, and the past, present, and future of these crazy cool hidden WordPress features. If there’s time, I’ll tell you where the free money is.

August 3, 2015 — When I started making websites 7 years ago, WordPress was the hip new thing all the cool kids were using. So I used it too.

But then time went by, and the web changed. The tools and techniques that I used changed too. I moved away from WordPress.

Now I’m back. Let me show you why I’ve returned, and why I believe that what WordPress has become over the last 7 years has ensured its continued success.

August 3, 2015 — I recently replaced a proprietary SaaS CMS for the largest school district in the state (Newark, NJ). We launched our 70+ schools sites on Aug 29, 2014 on top of WordPress. Our district site is 30,000 pages and 300,000+ media assets. In the end, we cut our annual web site management budget in half and have beautiful new web sites powered by WordPress that ease the pain points our content owners, administrators and technology coordinators have when managing their school websites. This presentation covers how this was achieved using WordPress, how it has solved many of the problems we were facing with our vendor-controlled proprietary system, and how we have embraced the concept of WordPress as an Application Framework, allowing us to create all kinds of sites, applications, and mobile apps directly from WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

August 1, 2015 — Sam was the creator of BruteProtect, a WordPress security plugin acquired by Automattic in August 2014. He now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic, with the goal of bringing killer features and functionality to WordPress blogs everywhere.