February 15, 2016 — WordPress in Africa

Presentation Slides »

February 15, 2016 — eCommerce panel discussion.

February 15, 2016 — In this session, Drew will be sharing insight into how a WordPress release happens, including an overview of all the moving parts, teams, organization, and execution. A lot of people have this idea that the core team is solely responsible for new versions of WordPress getting released, which couldn’t be further from the truth – it’s an intricate ballet of multiple contributor teams coming together and executing a broad vision.
He will talk about how a release cycle is structured, how and where the decision-making happens, as well as all of the various contributors and teams that play their own part in a successful release. It’s very much opening the black box of how a release works.

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February 15, 2016 — Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of WordPress core development philosophy. It is, unfortunately, not something nearly enough plugin or theme developers take seriously. When a plugin or theme project gains 10s or 100s of thousands of users, backwards compatibility can be crucial to the overall health of the project.

Ensuring backwards compatibility is more of a mental mindset than anything. Developers have to mentally make the commitment and say to themselves “I will NOT break installs during upgrades”.

February 15, 2016 — In a world where poverty, hunger and unemployment are rife, where we are constantly reminded that we live in a time of turmoil on a planet that we are slowly killing, can we actually make a difference?
We take a look at some of the people and organisations who, along with the local WordPress community, are using technology to make a real difference.

February 15, 2016 — A talk on how Anthropology and other human sciences can be applied to identifying customer journeys and improving customer experience as a whole. Marcela will focus on behavioural principles and how these are applied to marketing and user research projects.

February 15, 2016 — Whats coming next in core, cool community projects, and future innovations for the industry.

February 15, 2016 — The open source community works because of the amount of knowledge that is shared between people. Although everyone has knowledge and experiences to share, many do not feel they have anything worthy of saying.
In this talk, you will learn that everyone has something to share, how to generate talk topics based on conversations you have every day with your peers, and discuss the different methods of sharing – not all of it is on a stage.
We will also review the impact of the share mentality and how it is helpful even for your business.

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February 11, 2016 — The WP REST API is slated to be included into WordPress this year. This is one of the most drastic shifts (if not the most drastic) in the WordPress landscape. Companies like Wired.com, the New York Times and Rant Sports are using the API today to craft incredible experiences on top of WordPress. We often talk of vanity metrics, ideas like “WordPress runs 23% of the web”. Once the WP REST API is in WordPress, these become meaningless. WordPress will eventually be running parts of 100% of the web. This talk outlines the history of the API, the differences between the current stable version and what will likely be in WordPress, as well as paradigms and patterns within the project and some practical examples of how it might be used.

Presentation Slides »

February 10, 2016 — This talk will introduce the concept of website personalization, and walk through some of the many ways available to provide personlised content to your visitors, from the simple to complex machine learning approaches. The talk will have a specific focus on WooCommerce sites.