December 7, 2017 — Just over a year ago, Washington State University received a complaint through the Office of Civil Rights that some of our web pages were not accessible. This talk will cover the steps we took to address the complaint, how we started to grasp where 5 million URLs were published, and what processes and open source tools we have in place to ensure that web accessibility is our top priority.

August 7, 2017 — Multisite is often treated as a dark corner of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover a brief history of multisite to give context to some of the early decisions. We’ll walk through the structure and load process to show how straightforward multisite really is. We’ll go through the brand new WP_Site_Query and WP_Network_Query class introduced in WordPress 4.6. And we’ll cover some common solutions to things people frequently want to do with multisite.

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August 7, 2017 — One of the things that makes WordPress as amazing as it is is the vast community of people who give so freely of their time and expertise to make it that way. And there are all kinds of ways, beyond being an ace coder, to make a contribution and become part of the ecosystem. Come listen to a panel of regular folks talk about the ways they are involved in supporting and growing the WordPress community and WordPress itself. If you’ve benefited from this generous community and are ready to pay it forward, this promises to be a fun, inspiring panel and will give you ideas on ways you can contribute, too.

July 3, 2016 — Multisite is often treated as a dark corner of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite to give context to some of the early decisions. We’ll walk through the structure and load process to show how straightforward it really is. And to help you work with multisite, we’ll cover some common situations and solutions.

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November 21, 2015 — It sounds cool when you hear a university is powered by WordPress, but what does that really mean? A website is a website, content is content, and WordPress is really just another way to manage it all.
Why WordPress? Sometimes because it’s the right answer. Sometimes because it’s free.
The true power is community. And if you can apply that community to how content is managed, you may find yourself with a solution that can carry change throughout an organization.

October 2, 2015 — Multisite is often treated as one of the dark corners of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite from its early days as another b2 fork. We’ll walk through the structure and the load process to show how things really are straight forward. We’ll cover situations to be aware of and code to use when you are developing something for multisite.

And! We’ll cover the future of multisite and allow for some good Q&A, so bring your questions!

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May 6, 2015 — This panel is comprised of the project managers and developers behind three complex and highly-trafficked WordPress sites. They’ll briefly discuss how they use WordPress at scale and the challenges they had to overcome. and will then take questions from the audience.

November 2, 2014 — So much good work is done at universities and while that work is often done with open source software, it can also be a forgotten tool. Promoting the usefulness of open source software and the responsibility of universities to contribute back to open source projects can only help the community as a whole.

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August 9, 2014 — Four accomplished WordPress developers will talk about their experiences with WordPress development, answer questions, and share tips on how they keep sharp.

August 2, 2014 — Large projects often change scope rapidly, hence the use of ambiguous words like scale and platform. This session covers general strategies around approaching your project with an incremental mindset. Version control, environment, collaboration, and deployment all play key roles when pushing a platform to serve big needs. By laying out a strategy at the start and making consistent small changes, your platform will scale before anyone realizes.

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