September 24, 2014 — The VIP division of Automattic (makers of WordPress.com) works with large content publishers to deploy and scale custom code on a high performance web environment. I cover some of the challenges that developers for VIP clients face and how we help them mitigate the challenges. Even though most developers out there aren’t developing sites for WordPress.com, many of the problems VIPs face are transferable to other environments. I’ll also cover some best practices that we encourage — tips, tricks, and tools we share with VIP developers that you can use to become a better WordPress developer no matter your skill level (though chances are that much of this will be beyond the reach of beginner developers).

September 24, 2014 — The purpose of this presentation is to give a very basic introduction to the creation of a new plugin. The audience will learn about using the Codex, actions, filters, shortcodes, custom settings, and some best practices. The resulting custom plugin will be able to add custom css, insert fancy horizontal breaks, link to existing posts, add color to text, and find and replace content in WordPress posts and pages on display. An existing understanding of some PHP is required to get the most value from this presentation.

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September 24, 2014 — Web developers are often faced with challenges that require a basic knowledge of the Unix command line. This topic will break down the basic commands needed to navigate and perform basic functions within the command line.

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September 24, 2014 — Awesome WordPress plugins that can help small business owners take their websites from basic to bada$$, including content development, e-commerce, and customer relations.

September 19, 2014 — This talk is a primer on responsive design. It covers a lot in a short period of time but you’ll walk out knowing the basics of how to put together a responsive layout, hear about some new tools for you to learn on your own, and get a little glimpse into the future of responsive websites.

We’ll briefly mention making or choosing a responsive WordPress theme, but we’re mostly talking HTML and CSS here. And we’ll try to keep it simple. In the world of design, simplicity is a beautiful thing.

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September 19, 2014 — WordPress is built with PHP. It helps to know the basics so you can understand and make changes to your theme’s templates. This session will not make you into a programmer, but will explain a lot of what you will see when you look at the code that powers your site.

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September 19, 2014 — WordPress is a powerful CMS that allows us to create websites that are relatively simple for our clients to manage on their own. However, there are ways that we can custom tailer our WordPress dashboards for the users that will be managing the site’s content.

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September 19, 2014 — Did you know that WordPress is great for blogging!? I’ll be discussing some easy tips to boost your blog from good to great. Topics include enriching your posts with images and other media, sharing your posts via social media, and a few tips to supercharge your site.

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September 18, 2014 — This session gives an overview of Jetpack and talks about the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. It dives into popular features such as Stats, Widget Visibility and Contact Forms, and discuss the available Social and Media options. And an overview of the other settings you can use to power up your site using Jetpack.

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September 18, 2014 — In this talk, we’ll look at version control using Git. We’ll use a nice GUI so we need deal minimally (if at all), with command line stuff. We’ll find out how becoming comfortable with version control will empower us to make all the dumb mistakes we want, which can enable better design, better code, better writing.

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