May 25, 2015 — Fear is a powerful force that stalks us through most aspects of our lives. Kirk works full-time as a developer, but not a day goes by without having to face feelings of inadequacy, Imposter Syndrome, and making a commit that takes down one of the highest traffic sites on the Internet. He shares the power of fear in his life (past and present), give some fun disaster stories along the way, and share tips to ensure we all wake up raring to code every morning.

May 25, 2015 — Plugins are what make WordPress extra-awesome and enable you to make your website do pretty much anything you want it to. Need to add collapsible sections to a page or make your gallery images circular? There’s a plugin for that! How about making your widget titles into links, or duplicating pages at the click of a mouse? Yep, plugins can help you do that too. Whether you’re just getting started with WordPress or use it everyday, there are over 30,000 plugins to choose from and finding the right one for the job can be tricky. We look at how to choose an appropriate plugin and I’ll introduce you to a few I just couldn’t live without.

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May 25, 2015 — This presentation talks about getting out of the Photoshop mindset, embracing the tools that the modern web has provided us in order to streamline our development practises and get real-live sites up and running fast. We’ll start with talking about how to use style tiles to reduce the amount of time spent on mockups, and then we’ll move on to discuss how to leverage available tools in order to quickly get a site running: skeleton themes, CSS precompilers, version control for quick deployment, icon fonts, browser development tools, grids, and CSS frameworks. Whew!

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May 24, 2015 — Add_meta_box(); is great! It allows us to extend any post object with additional information, moving beyond a simple post with an author, date, excerpt, and image. But it can do so much more. This talk is a case study of using Custom Post Types and Meta Data to populate navigation structures and ‘category’ archive pages of a enterprise level site which easily has 150,000+ views per day and strict publication requirements for the client’s editorial team.

May 24, 2015 — A discussion on how (and why) to ensure that your plugins are safe and conflict free.

May 24, 2015 — This session aims to enlighten the audience about some attack vectors and how to counter them with the current security best practices for WordPress plugins. Topics covered include: Plugin security best practices, data sanitization, action authorization, and permissions.

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May 24, 2015 — This talk walks through setting up a professional, powerful, and efficient local development environment. It discusses how to get set up, why, and the different things you can do with a great set up.

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May 23, 2015 — This session introduces a framework for approaching your WordPress project’s situational analysis from many perspectives, to create success goals that resonate with everyone on your team—including your client’s wallet-bearers.

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May 23, 2015 — Whether you’re starting a personal blog to share your thoughts and ideas, or blogging to promote your business, storytelling is the most effective way to engage your audience. Recitations of facts or personal journal entries might convey meaning, but stories provide your audience with a relatable entry point into your subject matter. Story inspires, teaches, and stimulates discussion. The well-told story is memorable and unique, positioning you as a trusted voice. This presentation looks at all the elements of creative nonfiction storytelling so you can create the most compelling content for your blog, one 400-600 word post at a time.

May 22, 2015 — With the rapid popularization of web fonts over the past few years, type on the web has never been more exciting! Learn a bit about basic typographic principles, review techniques and services for integrating web fonts into your WordPress sites, and finally conclude with a bit of speculation on where type on the web is heading.

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