November 24, 2020 — His topic will cover about the power of WordPress in an enterprise level. He will talk about, flexibility & editorial workflows for publishers with WordPress. He will also delve into capabilities and management for large teams, and will share more details about guiding enterprise businesses, online publishers, and eCommerce stores towards all-around web solutions using WordPress.

November 10, 2020 — In this workshop, participants will learn how to find help in fixing problems, along with various resources that can be helpful, when you are stuck trying to implement a feature, plugin, or theme.

November 3, 2020 — Speed matters. People are impatient. If your website or a client’s website doesn’t load quickly – within a just a couple of seconds – many visitors will abandon it completely. A slow site means lost time & revenue. But figuring out how to speed up a slow site can be HARD. Everyone’s got a suggestion and an idea for how to fix your performance issues, but most are just guesses, and not based on real data. STOP GUESSING. If you have a performance issue, or just want a faster site, you need to KNOW exactly what is slowing things down, and how to fix it. This talk will show you how.

November 3, 2020 — This talk will include:

lessons learned from our personal experiences looking for work at everything from partnerships to VIP agencies
when to work for yourself and when to hire on with someone else,
and then job trends in 2019 that open up opportunities for people interested in moving away from the traditional opportunities in development and design.

Presentation Slides »

November 3, 2020 — Come learn about how you can use WordPress to power and amplify your voice online, and reclaim the web from the walled gardens for the user!

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2020 — WordPress is often used to build websites for nonprofit organizations. Nonprofit needs are slightly different in that they usually require online giving solutions, and they are often trying to address several distinct audiences such as donors, volunteers, clients, and the general public. Today we’ll tour a few nonprofit websites that are built on WordPress, learn about an online donation form plugin called Give, and talk about helping multiple audiences navigate your website along with some other capabilities often needed by nonprofits.

October 30, 2020 — WordPress is powerful software with a large, diverse community — even if you know how to use WordPress, it can be hard to know how to get started in the community! In this session, Angela will share lessons learned from one year of participation in the WordPress community, including key terminology, an overview of the teams and skills that build WordPress, and tips for cross-discipline communication, all with the goal of helping you get involved.

Presentation Slides »

October 30, 2020 — Learn how Newark Public Schools (NJ’s largest school district – 40,000 students; 70 schools) cut their annual web site technology budget in half by migrating to WordPress from a closed-source, proprietary, expensive, vendor-controlled SaaS CMS. Hear stories from the trenches about budget battles, angry/clueless technology vendors and frustrated administrators from one guy with a vision to disrupt the market and bring better web site technology to our public schools.

October 26, 2020

October 22, 2020 — An update in WP 5.6 is going to remove support for very old jQuery. I am a Senior Front End Developer for an agency that builds and supports over 40 WP sites a year. Our custom theme, Gesso, does not use older jQuery, but we do use a range of plugins based on the technical requirements of our clients. The jQuery version leap is quite large, and we are trying to account for all the plugins and different versions of these plugins that we use that may have flown under the radar utilizing now deprecated code.

We are currently using the jQuery Test Update plugin and jQuery Migrate on new builds, but we needed a more programmatic way to analyze sites that are currently deployed. First we want to get a comprehensive view of all the plugins we use and their versions. Then we are investigating the plugin code to determine if it uses old jQuery. If it does, we are either, updating that plugin’s version (see Custom Post UI), or taking it out completely if we can’t find a version that complies with the new requirement. Many of our clients are non-profit and government sites that are updated monthly. This WP update requires more rigor than usual, so we need a tool to help.

Enter PyGithub. PyGithub is a Python library that accesses the GitHub API. It allows you to run robust searches throughout all of your repos, when you need to do something more complicated than the GitHub search function will allow. I will demonstrate how to connect to the GitHub API and then drill down to the composer.json and pull out the plugin names and versions. Then I will show how to search within the code for offending jQuery.

I hope to have everyone using this simple tool to do all kinds of analysis on their WP repos, and provide people some confidence in updating sites to the latest version of WP without fear of breaking things. I will also cover some of the typical issues that we ran into regarding plugins, and older theme code.