WordCamp Albuquerque 2018

Join Ashleigh Axios for behind-the-scenes insights into how communication design and community building were developed in-house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the Obama administration. Ashleigh will show-and-tell how her small design team transformed daunting challenges into successful digital campaigns. Behind the projects, hear her team’s scalable tactics for tackling limited resources, overcoming impossibly quick timelines, and experimenting while in the public spotlight.

It’s easy to install an eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce and then wait for the sales to come in. In reality, there’s a lot of designing that goes into a high converting store – and it’s more than great photos.

Another topic on REST? Yes! In fact, URLs and JSON is only the beginning of what we can learn about building APIs for use in our web applications.

In this talk we’re specifically going to look at how a combination of REST principles and modeling our processes and dialogs as state machines can dramatically simplify our client applications and API exchanges.

Why would you want to hear more about this subject? As we all start working more in the browser and communicate back to WordPress via API calls it’s easy for the complexity to start stacking up and overwhelming us! In fact, API design isn’t necessarily intuitive and the web is full of noisy advice.

We’ll use an example Gutenberg plugin to walk through a very common scenario dealing with interactive processes and we’ll see how a few design principles can save us the headaches of race conditions, code bloat, and changing requirements. We’ll examine how “state machines” can guide us and simplify complex business logic and we’ll explore how “HATEOAS” and REST pair with these machines to simplify complex application and UI logic.

Whether you are just starting to write your own APIs and API clients or you have been churning them out for years I invite you to join this design session; we’ll stay away from nitty-gritty code details and instead focus on general principles we can apply in any coding environment.

It’s my hope that after participating in this session you will be able to confidently work with: indicating loading states; testing and debugging forms, processes, and uploads; untangle complicated business rules dealing with things like authentication, limiting, validation, and triggering related activity; and end up with well documented means of doing so.

An excerpt from Sakin Shrestha’s post about WordCamp Albuquerue.

“I will be sharing my experiences in the theme business sector and the ways to succeed on it during my speech. I will be presenting many ideas, views, concepts, and strategies to elongate one’s Theme Business by emphasizing my own personal story. I, like any other person, have had many ups and downs in my professional life and I have had to make many changes within myself to be where I am today. So, I will be sharing all my life’s work amongst all my colleagues in the crowd.

I will not be just talking about myself though. I will also be enthusiastically introducing the businesses that I currently am involved in, using WordPress, like DevotePress, NepalBuzz, ThemePalace, ThemeReview.co, etc., along with my theme site – Catch Themes. Most importantly, I will be telling people that theme business is a fun and innovative business to be in. With just a little bit of perseverance and dedication, one can have a fun and financially sound life ahead of them.”

Come one, come all! Grab a cup of coffee and join Automatticians Konstantin Obenland and Michael Cain for a morning show-style WordCamp talk that’s buckets o’fun for anyone and everyone. We’ll break the session into three segments: news from around the WordPress world; a special guest interview with a WordPress “celebrity”; and a “shop talk” segment about a design or development topic that we’re hoping to learn more about by pretending to be experts in front of you, our audience. There will be laughter (hopefully?), there will be tears (regrettably?), there will even be some awkward silences (definitely). But most importantly, there will be plenty of that whole-grained, balanced-diet WordPress that you just can’t get enough of.

Come one, come all! Grab a cup of coffee and join Automatticians Konstantin Obenland and Michael Cain for a morning show-style WordCamp talk that’s buckets o’fun for anyone and everyone. We’ll break the session into three segments: news from around the WordPress world; a special guest interview with a WordPress “celebrity”; and a “shop talk” segment about a design or development topic that we’re hoping to learn more about by pretending to be experts in front of you, our audience. There will be laughter (hopefully?), there will be tears (regrettably?), there will even be some awkward silences (definitely). But most importantly, there will be plenty of that whole-grained, balanced-diet WordPress that you just can’t get enough of.

WordPress can do so many things – amplify your voice, sell your widgets, transform leads into customers… the list goes on. What WordPress can’t do is build, grow, or maintain itself. That’s why you hired a developer, right? Finding the right developer or agency to help you realize your website dreams is no easy feat. How do you tell the difference between “good” and “bad” developers when you’re not speaking the same language? If you’ve ever: worried that your developer would take down your site if you complain; had a project last for 3+ months more than you originally expected; sent the same question to your developer multiple times without getting a straight answer; been abandoned once a project is over, the You need a better strategy for choosing a development partner or rehabilitating your relationship with your existing developer. Her talk will cover strategies for choosing a development partner or fixing an existing dysfunctional relationship, supported by lots of cute animal gifs and practical tips for finding your Forever Home and keeping your developer happy.

Target audience: WordPress website owners who outsource some or all site development & support.

Amnesty International USA launched a website redesign in May 2017 based on a six month journey of defining a design pattern that would reinforce our branding and making it easy to implement on any page of our website using WordPress, Bootstrap 4 and Advanced Custom Fields. We’ll take a look at the journey of defining the design patttern and why it’s important for every website to have one. Then we’ll explore how ACF uses Flexible Content and Repeater fields to create an infinite amount of design possibilities while still remaining within a brands aesthetic design guidelines. Code, design and process will be shared.

https://www.amnestyusa.org

Homepage

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielschutzsmith/

Many non-profits don’t realize that they have a problem until a volunteer half-finishes a website and disappears. Whether you create WordPress sites for others or as a non-profit employee or volunteer, this session will help you use WordPress to engage donors and volunteers, represent the organization as a good steward of donors’ money, and protect its security and reputation. Non-profits also have unique project management and maintenance needs, and we will discuss these as well.

Balancing life as a freelancer in the real world. From surviving to thriving in business, relationships, and health.

I have a workflow that begins with my blog posts, which I aggegate into eBooks and paperbacks, and then into audio books, and from there I use the audio to strip movie segments for YouTube and online courses. It has worked well and I would like to share the process.

You may have heard about React.js and the WordPress API, but how do you get started using these new technologies? We’ll cover a simple, practical example of how to start using React.js with the WordPress API in a traditional PHP templated WordPress Theme.

I’ll start this off by saying that WordPress has been the tool which has allowed me to build a marketing agency that does 7 figures in revenue, while still attending high school full time. That’s why I want to speak at WordCamp – to pay my share back to the platform which gave me a future. One of the first things I learned about WordPress and client work was that clients don’t always find it easy to use. For that reason, it wasn’t uncommon for my *lovely* clients to completely destroy their websites. Instead of managing crises in between class periods, I started building WordPress sites with uniquely designed client backends – ones that only have the features my clients need for core management, and nothing more. This attention to the client’s user experience saved me time and headache of the blank white screen on countless occasions. *I’ll never miss that darn blank white screen.* Fast-forward two years – I now have dedicated employees who manage the client experience, and a primary role is to ensure website management is as easy for administrators as website use is for visitors. It’s a core value at my company, and I am confident that many other agencies and freelancers would find it massively beneficial. If I have the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Albuquerque in 2018, I will be highlighting the importance of refining the user experience for freelancer and agency clients. I will be covering specifics of how my team structures that WordPress backend and will be outlining the long-term benefits of paying close attention to the client backend structure. My presentation will be ultra-visual, and I will be exploring actionable changes that attendees will be able to make immediately to improve their client relationships as well as their launch/site management workflows. Finally, I will address the financial benefits of offering a better user experience – in other words, how much more money freelancers and agencies can make by providing a solid user experience for their clients.

It’s time to make the robots do all the things we can make them do. Machines can do just about anything as long as you give them the properly formed instructions. Fortunately for us WordPress allows us to give these instructions in an easy to learn and very robust manner called The WP-CLI. It is the fastest way to install, active and update any theme, plugin or just about anything else in your WordPress site. In this presentation I will demonstrate a simple install script that will have a fully functioning, customized WP website in about the same time than it normally takes download the WordPress.zip file. We will also look for how third party tools and hosts are leveraging the WP-CLI to make your life as a developer even easier. Walk away with: -A new appreciation for the command line. -The desire to script ‘all the things’ to save time. -Knowledge of serious time saving tools -Ideas about how to automate your processes to be more productive and profitable.

If you’re doing things right your website will be viewed all around the world. But what does that mean for you as a wordpress user and publisher? Internationalization is a buzz word among developers. We’ll talk briefly about internationalization, localization, and their various implications. In this workshop session, we will focus on talking about the basics of copyright and intellectual property, internet commerce, and best practices for website user and privacy policies when your website is being viewed around the world – we will address legal considerations for US, EU, UK, Australian, and Canadian based website visitors. This will not be legal advice, but rather offer general information.

It’s absolutely possible to do all your PHP programming using a basic text editor, but is it wise? If you work alone (like in a basement) it might make sense to keep things simple by using a text editor and an FTP account to keep your WordPress site updated. But, if your site has a large (code base) or you work in a team, embracing more modern development techniques will help you get more done. In this topic, I will cover some of the most useful tools included in two popular PHP IDEs – Zend Studio/Eclipse and PhpStorm and one popular design IDE Adobe Dreamweaver. Subject matter will include; file management and site navigation, code generation and completion, refactoring, debugging, and integrative source control using Git.

Who’s ready to start using CSS grids in WordPress? Welp – I’ve got ‘em going in a couple Genesis child themes. Browsers are all in with support. They work with Flexbox, so we can use both at once. And they help make previously painful layout problems solve themselves. So let’s take a look at the hard work of the two engineers who have spent years getting these blocks stacking – CSS celebs Jen Simmons and Rachel Andrew. Let’s take a look at the simplest ways to use Grid, because at that level it’s pretty much indistinguishable from magic. For one thing, you can save floats for wrapping text around objects (and the swimming pool). For another, you can cut a whole lot of cruft from a style sheet. So what’re you waiting for? Let’s get our themes on the grid!

Website Accessibility has become a hot topic in the last couple of years. With millions of disabled internet users, it is critical that your website be accessible. We will discuss the importance and benefits of making your website accessible, including the legal issues. We will demonstrate navigating an audience member’s website using a screen reader. We will also provide very easy tips on how to make your website more accessible using WordPress.

From idea to developing a product delights you as a developer. But how do you get it out there for others? How do you market and sell your product? How do you know what to price it at or how to support it? Enter the world of product management and in any software business this is a fundamental necessity to making your new product into a successful venture.

Your website content has two audiences: Human readers and search engines. Writing website content that appeals to both is something that all writers and website owners should know how to do. Whether you’re a professional copywriter or a small business owner who writes for your own website, knowing how to write content that satisfies both of these audiences is an essential (and profitable!) skill. This presentation will teach you exactly how to do that, using modern-day approaches to semantic and contextual keyword optimization.

For one of our customers, we required variable length arguments to be passed into plugin configuration options. WordPress core only supports scaler (single variable) assignment. So, we modified the plugin itself to support this. This talk will be a line-by-line code review on the work we did. The talk will be split between PHP and jQuery. Proficiency at both is assumed. If we need to do this for another (paying) customer, we’ll likely take that opportunity to make these modifications to core. Until then, the actual code we display will be publicly available under a GPL license. The rest of the plugin code will not be displayed, and has an indeterminate license.

Has a client ever wasted your time in a consulting session? Ever had a one-hour consultation turn into 3? Have you experienced the sinking feeling that comes when you leave the consultation and realize you failed to ask a key question? This talk provides answers to these issues and more. Attendees will leave with a clear, memorable outline to manage the client consultation.

Mindfulness – “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (can’t) let that stop us from doing everything we can to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood. In this session Adam addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what audience members can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites. After attending this session, audience members will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.

WooCommerce 101

In this fundamentals course, we will be going over how to set up and configure WooCommerce.

Topics covered will be:

• Why WooCommerce?
• How to Install
• A walk through the settings
• Set up your store and add products
• And how to run your store.

You can’t fix what you don’t measure. How well is your WordPress site doing? How do you know? Google offers free analytics for all website owners. WordPress has several methods to set this up on our site. We will look at what you need to do to start collecting data, how to interpret what you collect and next steps for your business.

Security on a Shoestring: Kim will talk about a number of free WordPress plugins for increasing website security that folks are not likely to know about. These include IQ Block Country, NinjaFirewall and iThemes Security (free version – This one is well known, but worth talking about). Also included will be  a discussion of testing WordPress websites for vulnerabilities with WPScan. Kim will wrap up with a discussion of Let’s Encrypt for free SSL’s.

How To Get More Than 25 People To Read Your Blog Posts

It’s frustrating, isn’t it? You agonize over your blog topic, spend hours upon hours tweaking your design to make your website look as cool and original as possible, and you pour your soul into your blog posts…and on a good day, you might see 25 pageviews. It’s the inconvenient truth that all aspiring bloggers must face – just because you write a great blog post, that doesn’t mean anybody is going to read it. You could pay for traffic through things like Facebook ads and Google Pay Per Click, but is that really a viable solution to increase your readership? If you’re like most bloggers, simply boosting your posts on Facebook probably isn’t the answer. In this session, we’ll talk about how your blog can help you build a large, loyal following of interested readers, and then what to do with those people once they get to your website.