October 12, 2014 — I’ve recently had a few people asking me about bespoke WordPress themes – what you can and can’t do, what is ‘WordPress specific’, what starter theme to use, etc.
I would like to give a short demonstration on the basics of creating a WordPress theme from scratch, showing how it is much easier than people may think. I will also share a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up over the years that enhance and enrich bespoke builds, along with a few resources I’ve found invaluable. The talk is aimed at people who want to create a one-off theme for a single website (eg. a client project,
personal blog), rather than building a theme for distribution. It will require previous knowledge of WordPress, HTML, CSS and basic familiarity with PHP.

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October 12, 2014 — “Don’t dig latrines with a swiss army knife”
An antidote to Kimb Jones (inevitable and great) Wow Plugins talk. Not every plugin is a “wow” plugin most just do a single job and some do them really well, often not glamorous but essential these plugins are the backbone to millions of site but how do you find these day to day plugins? How do you work out if they do what they say? How do you check if they will slow your site down or even harm it? Good Questions, guess we need a talk on sourcing and evaluating plugins to answer them?

October 10, 2014 — This talk will give a brief introduction into the WordPress HTTP request API which can be leveraged to
request data from most APIs.

October 10, 2014 — Website security is important to everyone who has a website, as well as everyone who uses a website. Whether it gets five visitors a day or five-thousand, hackers are looking to compromise, break, infect and virtually own every website that they can for monetary and social purposes.

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October 10, 2014 — Between WordPress development, content production, editing, publishing and keeping your plugins and themes in order you’ve already got enough on your plate. This presentation focuses on how to optimize your WordPress site for search without adding another full time task to your schedule. We’ll take a beginner-friendly look at how to optimize your site, your content and manage the off page factors that all impact where you show up in the search ratings. We’ll also look at the fundamentals of how search engines rank content to lend a better understanding of how these optimization processes work. In the interests of keeping costs down we’ll take a quick tour through free tools you can use as you optimize your sites. The session will also touch on some of the dangers of getting carried away with your SEO, touching on Google penalties and how best to avoid them.

October 10, 2014 — Regardless of CMS or platform, web designers and developers have to comply with national and EU laws affecting our work. Most of the resources about these laws are written for lawyers, by lawyers, and these resources offer little insight for those of us who are obliged to implement the laws on client sites. So once again Heather has taken it on herself to translate the legal gobbledygook into practical insights that the web community can implement. A new EU law, The Consumer Rights Directive, takes effect on 13 June 2014, replacing the 1990s trading law that currently governs e-commerce transactions in the UK. All web sites offering goods or services online must comply, and failure to do so cancels the e-commerce transaction or contract. Heather’s talk delivers a plain English explanation of what web site owners need to do to bring their WordPress e-commerce operations into line with the regulations. Heather also gives an update on recent legal developments including domains, cookies, and databases which directly affect our work as web professionals.

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October 10, 2014 — Keynote WordCamp Maine 2014

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October 10, 2014 — Earlier this year, 10up and MaineToday Media worked together to re-launch PressHerald.com and launch CentralMaine.com on WordPress, delivering compelling, modern, responsive digital news experiences to the Pine Tree state. This talk goes over an extended case study of the redesign and replatform.

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October 9, 2014 — VVV is a WordPress focused development environment, giving you, the WordPress developer, a “default
server configuration … intended to match a common configuration for working with high traffic WordPress
sites”.

In this presentation, Simon introduces some techniques his team uses in their sites provisioning scripts to solve issues with private Git repositories and will also cover various provisioning methods (WP CLI, SVN, Git, Composer).

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October 9, 2014 — Underscores is a starter theme, but what does that mean? Why should you use Underscores, also known as simply _s? In this talk I’ll go through why at Automattic we use it to create our themes. I’ll also show you why and how you can too.

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