August 11, 2019 — In 2018, WordPress will modernize, streamline, and simplify the content creation experience with Gutenberg. It represents the biggest change to the WordPress user experience in several years.
This session will teach just enough React for theme and plugin developers to start using Gutenberg today. Colour palettes, meta boxes, reusable blocks: all the new features, made easy.

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August 11, 2019 — Everyone knows their site needs to be secure. But, just what does it take to make sure your site is optimally secure from compromise? In this workshop, whether you’re advanced or just starting out, we will help walk you through virtually every step it takes to make sure your WordPress environment is secure. We will start out with basics like what is security and general concepts about security. From there, we will walk you through selecting a secure hosting provider and choosing a secure password. Finally, we will go into more specific configuration details and the do’s and don’ts when securing your WordPress environment. By the time you walk out of this workshop you should feel like a WordPress security pro.

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June 27, 2019 — Building your freelance business starts with a purpose and a focused plan for getting there. This workshop is designed to help you set your business goals, and develop the concrete steps you need to take to hit them. By focusing on a few strategic goals, you’ll be able to prioritize your time on the areas that will bring the greatest impact to your business.

June 23, 2019 — Nearly a decade ago I started working in support at WPMU DEV, right on the front line. Our team wasn’t big, it was less than 10. Sometimes it could feel somewhat isolating. James, our CEO, would check in from time to time to see how I was and even provide some feedback. It didn’t take too long until I was promoted to Head of Support and it was then my job to find incredible people. I had a decision to make at that point, what kind of a manager did I want to be?

June 14, 2019 — Data centers in the U.S. use more than 90 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year. That requires roughly 34 giant coal-powered plants. What can a single developer do to make more energy efficient code? I will go through a series of not-so-serious experiments showing how various implementations made with Raspberry PI web server and power meter affect power consumption. How much energy does enabling WordPress caching save? What about optimizing queries? I will tell.

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March 27, 2019 — Explore what a “living” style guide is and how you can use one to drive the creation of your WordPress themes. Looking at where this helps with things like collaboration, testing, maintenance, and reuse. From the perspective of an implementer rather than a designer so will contain technical details (so how to implement, not so much how to design for, and not just why you should).

March 18, 2019 — This topic will be an overview to the leg work to do before you jump into the design and development stage of building a website. Whether you are designing your own site, are a designer working on a client site, or you are looking to work with an agency to build your site, doing some planning will help ensure a smooth process and great site. We will cover the basics of site maps, user personas, content guides, and other questions to consider about your websites functionality before you start designing or developing your site.

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March 8, 2019 — WordPress’ minimum-supported version is still PHP 5.2 (gasp!) but that doesn’t mean you should let that hold you back from leveraging modern PHP features in your plugins and themes!

In this talk, we’ll take a deep dive into ways you can start leveraging modern PHP features today to bring new life to that old plugin or theme. We’ll cover how to code partial plugin activation for old versions of PHP, use autoloaders and namespaces, setup group aliasing, use return type declarations, leverage traits, and much more.

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February 28, 2019 — Ο Αλέξανδρος στην ομιλία του θα επιδείξει σύγχρονες πρακτικές ανάπτυξης με το Gulp και πώς θα βελτιώσετε μια υπάρχουσα ροή εργασίας. Ταυτόχρονα θα μας δείξει από την αρχή πώς να χρησιμοποιήσουμε το Gulp για να δημιουργήσουμε ένα επιτυχημένο έργο και πώς να διατηρήσουμε ή να επικαιροποιήσουμε ένα ήδη υπάρχον.

Alessandro at his speech, will demonstrate modern development practises with Gulp and how to improve an existing working flow. At the same time he will show from scratch how to use Gulp to build a successful project and how to maintain or update an existing.

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January 24, 2019 — “Let’s explore the benefits of thinking in re-usable blocks. Modular
Development improves productivity, enhances UI and empowers authors.
Leveraging the WordPress templating system and Advanced Custom Fields
we can achieve modularity in our WP themes.”