March 11, 2016 — More and more developers are using WordPress to build and sell online products (web apps, SaaS, etc.), and providing excellent user support is a skill certainly not to be taken for granted. The talk will touch on the benefits and challenges of a great user support and training. I’ll share the most common problems I encountered whilst dealing with support. It will also look at how I give the best support I can and the tools that enable me to do so.
This session is aimed to WordPress developers, marketers and product managers whose goal is helping their customers/users enjoy and get the most out of their product.

Presentation Slides »

August 1, 2015 — Sam was the creator of BruteProtect, a WordPress security plugin acquired by Automattic in August 2014. He now works on the Jetpack team at Automattic, with the goal of bringing killer features and functionality to WordPress blogs everywhere.

July 16, 2015 — Offering HTTPS is beneficial for site owners and visitors alike. Whether you need to protect your admin credentials, or just to raise the search engine ranking of your site. You can do both with HTTPS!
I show the pitfals and how to make your site HTTPS compatible while giving developers some hints on the most common mistake when creating themes or plugins which can break HTTPS.

July 16, 2015 — One of the newest tools on the market is an open source system called Vagrant. Thanks to this amazing application, you can quickly and easily create a new virtual development environment at a moments notice.

July 16, 2015 — I’ve used WordPress for prototyping for a while and it has been very useful. It solves the issue of having to choose between quick prototypes with low fidelity and high fidelity ones which take ages to make. I walk people through creating a prototyping framework from an HTML template by creating a theme.

July 14, 2015 — What does a researcher have to say about the WordPress source code and the community behind it? Join us on this talk on unusual “WordPress analytics” and see what we can learn, and improve!, from the way WordPress (and the plugin and theme ecosystem around it) is developed nowadays.

Presentation Slides »

July 12, 2015 — When you start to use WordPress as an application platform, one thing is very soon clear: WordPress defines very little base structure for your application code, where to put and how to write tests, how application is loaded, or for example how dependencies should be managed. Because of this, applications or just complex sites built on top of WordPress tend to get really messy.

There are application frameworks built on top of WordPress, but none of them seem to have wide enough use for to build any serious applications on top of. Until any of those gets wide-spread adoption, combining existing, non-WordPress specific PHP technologies as a custom solution probably is a more future-proof solution. We will be looking into one possible stack of technologies.

July 10, 2015 — Why web publishing is so broken. A short look behind the scenes of creating a new kind of editing experience of the web.

July 10, 2015 — Thousands of people around the world make a living with WordPress. Despite this, professionals in our ecosystem are poorly indexed. In this talk I present my take on creating a central platform for WordPress professionals, called WP Talents. I talk about the original idea, initial struggles and the future.

July 9, 2015 — I’m not the best developer. I’m not the best designer. But with WordPress, I, and you, can be anything. WordPress enabled me in less than 3 days to build a fully operational SaaS and solve a problem that pained many. With the introduction of the WordPress JSON API and plugin-specific APIs, there is no limit to what WordPress is capable of. You need only dream, and built it.