December 10, 2017 — As members of the WordPress community, we have a unique opportunity to contribute to making the news better. WordPress powers news sites of all shapes and sizes – from small investigative teams, to large national publications. What they share in common is a reliance on open source tools developed in the WordPress community. However you want to improve the news – whether that’s making it more trustworthy, more accessible, more engaging, or something else entirely – the journalism community would love your help!

We’ll take a look at plugins and themes used in journalism and the impact each has on readers. We’ll identify areas for improvement, and simple ways that everyone can get involved – from documentation, to translation, and (of course) development. Everyone has the ability to help build the future of WordPress, and I hope you’ll leave feeling inspired to get involved!

June 3, 2017 — We’ll start with an overview of what you can build with the Customizer and where to use it, followed by hands-on development building customizer controls. We’ll wrap up with a discussion on some of the more advanced ways you can leverage the customizer, with tips & techniques for your own theme.

December 13, 2015 — The plugin ecosystem and REST API push our creative limits for what we can imagine building with WordPress – and it’s time we looked at powering physical devices using open source platforms like LittleBits and Arduino. This talk will examine use cases and methods for building real-time physical displays powered by WordPress.

Presentation Slides »

September 29, 2015 — We all like to see stats on how our site is doing – but without context, the numbers don’t tell us very much. What we really care about are milestones – the story about what’s happening on the site and why. You want to know when a new blog post you’ve written gets promoted on social media and causes a traffic surge on your site. You want to know when a product in WooCommerce suddenly stops selling – and more importantly why it stopped selling.
In this talk we explore the types of meaningful data and context you want to harvest from your site, and discuss techniques for setting up intelligent alerts to give you not just data about what’s happening – but context to tell you why it’s happening, and why it matters.

August 5, 2015 — Lightning Talk by RC Lations

January 5, 2015 — This talk reviews how to get valuable data from your website using A/B testing, advanced Google Analytics, and other tools; and how to use that data to gain insight into how you can improve your website or blog.

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October 17, 2014 — There’s so much free data available to help us make decisions about the user experience. Surprisingly few people take advantage of easy ways to capture this data, and even fewer know how to use the data once they have it.
This talk reviews how to get valuable data about your website using A/B testing and Advanced Google Analytics configurations; and how to use that data to gain insight into how you can improve your blog or website. We’ll also explore how to implement these techniques in WordPress and review case studies of organizations who have leveraged their data to drastically improve their website performance.

Presentation Slides »