July 14, 2015 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district – 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS. Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors, frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools.

July 14, 2015 — This presentation gives a basic overview of what can you do with the WP REST API, even without knowing any PHP and offers theme developers a few reasons for why they may want to look into building themes that use the WP REST API.

Presentation Slides »

July 14, 2015 — Your theme accessibility-ready? Let me talk you through some crucial questions.
1. Why do you need your WordPress theme to be accessible for everyone?
2. How do different kinds of visitors use your site?
3. Why are links, headings, form labels and colours important?
4. Where to find the specs and documentation and how to test your theme.

Presentation Slides »

July 14, 2015 — This talk is about the advantages of using containers for WordPress. It compares containers and virtual machines.

July 14, 2015 — When we think about making our site, theme, or plugin welcoming to users around the world, we often focus on translation. While very important, there’s more to localization (l10n) and internationalization (i18n) than just that.
This talk covers some of the many cultural and practical differences that should affect our design choices, our code, and how we reach out to our global base of users and customers.

July 14, 2015 — What does a researcher have to say about the WordPress source code and the community behind it? Join us on this talk on unusual “WordPress analytics” and see what we can learn, and improve!, from the way WordPress (and the plugin and theme ecosystem around it) is developed nowadays.

Presentation Slides »

July 14, 2015 — Once you’ve installed WordPress, what now? For new users, that’s just one of a multitude of inevitable questions. What’s a post? A page? A theme? Where should I start first? In a short attention-span world, first impressions are everything, and WordPress is making it harder than it needs to be for new users.
There’s a case to be made for helping to guide users through the process of post-install set up. In fact, there’s user testing data that makes the case for us.
The goal of this talk is to examine that test data – taken against existing and potential wp-admin flows – and form conclusions about how WordPress can get out of its own way to improve the new user experience. We’ll talk about solutions that exist in the community right now, and opportunities to get involved in reshaping WordPress’ first impressions.

July 14, 2015 — Okay, so you have a blog set up.. now what?
What are the guidelines for Google?
How to get your readers to sign up.
What are dofollow links?
Ad what? Using Adsense and other sources to monetize your site.
Depending on the audience, either start with the basic setup and plugins needed to run a blog on your site or take things to a higher level with affiliate links, ads and sponsored posts.

Presentation Slides »

July 13, 2015 — This talk focuses on my five key tips and tricks to creating better product photos for social media, marketing, and website use. While we will focus heavily on the photography side of things, there will be social media tidbits thrown in along the way.

July 13, 2015 — In this session, I plan to solve the “pages vs. posts” mystery. Many new users of WordPress get confused by this. What’s the difference. When to I post, when do I add a page. We’ll dawn our best Scooby Doo hats and solve this mystery once and for all.