November 9, 2014 — There are over 20 options for membership plugins available to people trying to build a membership site with WordPress. Come hear my six-point framework for evaluating them, and how to determine which is the right plugin for you. We’ll also leave a decent amount of time for questions, as decisions about membership plugins are always specific to your purposes.

November 7, 2014 — In this session we will go through ‘common’ problems with WordPress and what to do about them. Common is way too vague, but what we will cover is the best way to troubleshoot when your site is not acting the way it is supposed to. We will aim this talk at the beginner, our goal is to stay away from code and error logs to show you what you can do to troubleshoot your site if problems arise.

November 6, 2014 — Using Ajax and JavaScript in WordPress plugins. JavaScript is an incredibly powerful tool to make your website and or web app more powerful and interactive. See the full power of integrating right into your WordPress with wp_ajax and taking advantage of client side scripting.

Presentation Slides »

November 3, 2014 — Finding the right plugin can be a Herculean task, and choosing the wrong one can lead to security problems, bad UX or a complete breakdown of your site. This talk goes over how to group plugins in meaningful ways to identify which would be the most useful. From there, we review how to evaluate plugins for performance, functionality and usability by setting up a complete test environment to stretch plugins to their limits. We end with an overview of red flags and useful signs to look out for, such as support and frequent updates. By understanding the ways in which plugins integrate with the WordPress API, and what to look out for, you’ll be able to find the exact plugin you need, every time.

Presentation Slides »

October 31, 2014 — New to the world of WordPress? Wondering how best to jump in? Intimidated by all the stuff you “don’t know”? Come join the party for an action-packed flash talk covering LOADS of goodies including: simple steps to getting involved, experience-based insights for developing your skills, plenty of useful resources for your bookmarks tab, and lots more. The talk will also cover some of my own adventures in WordPress land, including some of the projects, plugins, and people I’ve been involved with. So if you’re newer to the WordPress community and want to up your game (build a plugin, code a theme, get involved, etc), come join us!

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — I this presentation Susan Ramsey discusses best practices for choosing and understanding how best to extend the functionality and design of your WordPress site using themes and plugins.

Presentation Slides »

October 28, 2014 — When many of us take the dive to set up our first WordPress site, whether it’s for yourself or a client it’s easy to lose enormous amounts of time. For many veteran WordPress developers it is very easy to forget that first experience of stumbling through the dashboard, or sifting through countless plugins. Marc walks through the process of getting a domain to launching a basic site.

Presentation Slides »

October 12, 2014 — “Don’t dig latrines with a swiss army knife”
An antidote to Kimb Jones (inevitable and great) Wow Plugins talk. Not every plugin is a “wow” plugin most just do a single job and some do them really well, often not glamorous but essential these plugins are the backbone to millions of site but how do you find these day to day plugins? How do you work out if they do what they say? How do you check if they will slow your site down or even harm it? Good Questions, guess we need a talk on sourcing and evaluating plugins to answer them?

October 10, 2014 — Website security is important to everyone who has a website, as well as everyone who uses a website. Whether it gets five visitors a day or five-thousand, hackers are looking to compromise, break, infect and virtually own every website that they can for monetary and social purposes.

Presentation Slides »

October 9, 2014 — Awesome Plugins Everyone Should Be Using