December 27, 2019 — The BigCommerce WordPress plugin uses headless ecommerce to create a hybrid of a SaaS and WordPress. It’s powerful, fast, easy, scalable, and inexpensive. This is not a deeply technical talk, but rather a discussion about how the ecommerce landscape is changing in WordPress.

This is not intended to be a sales pitch for BigCommerce, but rather a plugin overview, similar to an “Introduction to WooCommerce” talk. Obviously BigCommerce must come up, but this is more about the evolving landscape of ecommerce in WordPress with the move to SaaS based plugins.

March 11, 2019 — The combination of WordPress and WordCamps spreading throughout the world has created a global network of friendship. These relationships form bonds that are deeper than nationalism, and could someday advance World Peace.

This talk will use a case study of WordCamp Crazy, a group of Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi WordCampers who’ve formed a bond of friendship despite the fact that their countries have been at war. Their story of learning and compassion could change the world.

November 20, 2018 — In past 14 years I have seen many technological shift in WordPress.

I would share with example and best use guide what I feel the best Local Development Environment for WordPress in 2018.

This will be a very helpful session anybody looking to drive deep into WordPress and who are already working in WordPress, they will be able to explore other better ways to improve their workflow.

December 15, 2016 — The WordPress REST API is one of the most fundamentally important new aspects of WordPress, yet it’s rarely explained to people who aren’t developers. In this talk we’ll explain what this thing is, and why you should be excited about what it can do for you, even though you’re not a developer.

Presentation Slides »

December 11, 2016 — This is a talk about the people of WordPress, intentionally showcasing diversity in as many ways as possible. Location, culture, gender; we’re a cross section of humanity. We’ll talk about some of the stories that have been published on HeroPress.com as well as some that have not.

July 25, 2016 — Interview with Topher DeRosia

July 28, 2015 — Have you ever put code into your functions.php file to change your site? Ever lost that code when you changed themes? Topher will show you how to move that code into a simple plugin so you’ll keep it no matter what theme you use. Then using this as a base we’ll look at how to build more complex plugins.

July 12, 2015 — Lessons learned and technologies used in the HeroPress Kickstarter project. (note, this kickstarter will be closed by the time WordCamp comes, I’ll get no financial benefit from this at all. Also, at this point I don’t know if it’ll be a success or not, so it might be a look at what we SHOULD have done)

June 20, 2015 — This talk is about getting started making plugins. The only requirement is some knowledge of PHP. This talk is ideal for people who have put PHP into functions.php and then been sad when it was lost when changing themes.

Presentation Slides »

March 23, 2015 — This talk covers the theories and functions dealing with validating input and sanitizing output. It starts at the very basic, and wind up with some discussion of the trickier parts of how different kinds of data should be filtered.