December 20, 2015 — Follow along as I explain how I managed to pivot my WordPress development business from being an hourly/project-based WordPress developer with a plate full of different clients and projects to one with exclusive clients who all go through the same funnel and process month over month.

December 18, 2015 — WordPress doesn’t live in isolation but’s sits as part of a stack. From the operating system, to the web server each aspect of the stack should be carefully chosen. In addition WordPress can be enhanced by using other application in tandem. Tim takes a look at the eco-system that WordPress lives in, to help people create a very modern WordPress stack.

December 12, 2015 — Today, developers are well into embracing WordPress to enable the next generation of applications: creating rich native applications, powering home automation devices, supplying data to video games, and powering the data behind 3D applications.

With very few exceptions, much of these applications are widely unknown to a site owner in 2015. Similar to how custom post type functionalities are now well-known among the masses, what does the world look like when clients begin demanding these new possibilities? When developers start building them?

December 11, 2015 — WordPress is coming of age as an application platform. Plugins like WP-API 2.0 and the JSON REST API have arrived, opening up new opportunities for how websites and applications are constructed with WordPress as a CMS. More and more developers are discovering the benefits of “decoupled” development for websites and applications, where the front-end client (website, native mobile, desktop) is built as a separate system from the CMS itself.

December 10, 2015 — Advanced Topics in WordPress Development

November 22, 2015 — How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Despite the varied and plentiful choices for WordPress hosting that are available, there is still something liberating about running your own servers. Providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services have reduced or removed most of the barriers for those that want to take the leap, but Systems Administration remains an art of its own. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances. My session will introduce Ansible, touch on vagrant and cloud hosting, show how to deploy WordPress using Ansible, and demonstrate how we can re-use these tools across multiple environments.

October 28, 2015 — Like many in the WordPress world, I started as a cowboy coder. Editing .php files right on the FTP server? You betcha. This is a great way to develop – if you don’t mind potentially catastrophic fatal errors, and unhappy stakeholders.

I’ll share some strategies from our team at Fusion for integrating quality checks into a WordPress-specific product development process, plus some tips on keeping it fun.

This talk will introduce you to the following concepts (including easy steps you can take to followup):
– Product requirements document (PRD)
– Github workflows and code review
– Linting
– Test-driven development (TDD)
– Hackdays and team culture

October 21, 2015 — User’s of today’s web expect the sites they visit to be smooth, interactive, load quickly, and run well. The focus and priority of the Front End Developer, should be optimization of the front end experience for every site we create, for every device, and for every user.

In this talk, we will cover how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.

October 3, 2015 — Web designers and developers are each specialists with their own priorities, needs, and focus. Sometimes there can be a communication gap between the two, leading to misunderstandings and frustration. How can you learn to speak each other’s language and ensure your projects run smoothly and without hassles?

Presentation Slides »

October 3, 2015 — Today, are you a WordPress designer, developer, marketer, user?

What about tomorrow?

Available technology and visitor demands are raising expectations for sites. Collaboration can help us tap into specialized knowledge to get our projects done more quickly, with better results. Understanding your role and the roles of others can make you a great collaborator, can help you find resources, and can show you a path to grow in the WordPress community.

Come learn about the World of WordPress and meet your neighbors from many lands each with specialized languages, cultures and funny customs. Find a role, find a collaborator, find your place in The World of WordPress.