Check out the folks who attended WordCamp Birmingham 2012:
You can mark yourself as going to this camp in your account settings!
Jane Wells
Mitcho
Relate all the things!
So your new site’s launched: great content, beautiful design, and SEO’ed like whoah. But when a visitor comes in for one particular page, how do you encourage them to engage further with your content rather than leave? The Yet Another Related Posts Plugin for WordPress—aka YARPP—was built exactly out of this concern. YARPP offers your visitors a number of “related posts” which may also interest them. These “related posts” are chosen automatically by a unique algorithm which compares the current post or page with other content on the site.
Advocated by the likes of Matt Mullenweg (WordPress) and Matt Cutts (Google), YARPP is by far the most popular content recomendation plugin for WordPress. Learn about the past and future of YARPP straight from its author, mitcho. I’ll talk about YARPP’s internals, share some advanced tips for using and customizing YARPP, and will debut YARPP’s custom post type support.
Karla Archer
Blogging and Dating: Not so Different. What your business or brand needs to know for attracting visitors.
The thrills and perils of dating have a lot in common with blogging and building a presence online. Using some common dating tips, this presentation will lead bloggers to begin to think through various aspects of their sites, from content to layout. *No flowers required.
Ryan Imel
100 Plugins You Need In Your Life
Ryan is the Editor-In-Chief of WPCandy, a blog all about WordPress. He’s tried a lot of plugins. There are a lot of places where you can find different plugins to do one job, but in this session, Ryan will go through a big list of plugins that just work. One job, one plugin. Rapid fire.
Stephen Burge
Dougal Campbell
CSI: WordPress — Getting Into the Guts
WordPress has tons of features that can make life easier for developers and designers. This talk will look into some of the nooks and crannies that you might not be familiar with, and we’ll also explore creative uses for features you probably already use. Discussions will include some established plugins as well as code snippets for fine-tuning sites.
George Ortiz
Stop creating content for the sake of creating content
Description: 14% of the web uses WordPress. That’s 70+ million blogs delivering content to users, who in turn are responding with even more content. All of this content, or data, is going untapped as we stumble around and keep asking the same questions:
What makes a great WordPress theme?
What makes a great blog post?
How is WordPress being used?
When I attended WordCamp SF, these questions came up and I noticed a pain in pulling these answers out in an easy way. Fast forward 3 months and came PressTrends, a simple way for developers, designers, and WordPress users to gather trends and insights.
The goal of the talk is to bring into the light the amount of data being produced, how to get this data, and finally how this data can be valuable to building better themes and producing better content.
Vid Luther
WordPress for Business – You have an SEO’d website that’s fast, now what?
Over 85% of new WordPress sites are sites where WordPress is used as a CMS. You’ve probably attended tons of sessions telling you how to optimize WordPress for speed, and how to use some SEO plugin. I’ll talk about things businesses need to do, to make sense of their site AFTER they have traffic coming to their site.
Topics covered will be:
– Analytics : You’ve installed Google analytics, now what? Analytics are just numbers, unless you know what they’re telling you.
– Beyond Google Analytics – Other packages besides Google Analytics that can help you understand your visitors.
– Add a live chat .. seriously, live chat on the internet isn’t just for horny co-eds, you too can make money chatting with strangers on the internet.
– Test your messages – You’ve heard of split testing, now use it.
My aim by the end of this talk is to be able to give you ideas on how you can use your website to learn more about your visitors, without them entering a form.
Stephanie True Moss
Scan it! Incorporating QR codes into WordPress
Move over social media, making room for QR Codes in your WordPress site enables quick scanning of key topics and features. It can be as easy as a vCard, a coupon, link to an event, or something else. Understand the do’s and don’ts in using QR Codes to enhance the user experience on your website. Learn how to create QR Codes, use QR Code plugins and how others are already leveraging this new technology.
Nathan Ingram
WorryProof WordPress: Backup Strategies for your Web Site
It’s a dangerous Internet out there, and your WordPress site needs a reliable backup. In this talk, we will discuss why a backup is so important, the 5 musts of a solid backup strategy, a comparison of free and premium backup plugins, and 2 bonus backup tips.
Micah Wood
Doing Ajax in WordPress
WordPress makes AJAX easy and all too often developers write their own code for handling AJAX. The purpose of this presentation is to walk developers through the process of implementing basic AJAX functionality in themes and plugins. Topics covered will include best practices, client-side AJAX requests via jQuery, server-side processing of requests with WordPress action hooks, proper inclusion of scripts, localizing data and implementing nonces. Sample code will be made available for download.
Ryan Roenigk
5 tips for success when the project team involves more than just you
Designer, information architect, content producer, developer, tester, systems administrator, project manager, sherpa, shepherd, client… Which roles do you play? Who plays the other roles? How do your fellow cast members affect your happiness, compensation and overall success?
12 years after the dot-com bubble burst, technology projects are approached very differently than before. Today, fewer people hone their craft as part of a large company, particularly in the world of WordPress. Individuals and small shops account for a great deal of the awesome work debuting every day. This means that any project team will likely involve people who don’t “work together” in the traditional sense.
This session will share five tips for succeeding in a multi-person project. The idea is to communicate more clearly and reduce friction so you can have more fun.
Christopher Reding
Beyond the browser: Creating a restful webservice with WordPress to power an app or act as an API
Joel Norris
Using Theme Frameworks for rapid development and sustainability
Developing WordPress themes from the ground up is time consuming and costly to sustain, as version iterate. Using a theme framework such as Thesis or Genesis can speed up development time and drastically reduce site maintenance over time.
Cliff Seal
Empowering NPO’s with WordPress
In an age of social justice, social causes, and social media, the quintessential non-profit has to be a dependable source of constantly-changing information, spearheaded by tech-savvy people creating engaging content for blogs, print media, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, text messaging, and infinitely more.
The problem? How does the staff (if there is one) get the time and, more importantly, the energy to do all that when they’re, you know, busy trying to get a non-profit off the ground? On the other side of that same coin, how does a long-standing NPO inject itself into internet culture without immediately seeming stale and forceful? The general consensus seems to be that successful organizations such as charity:water simply blitzed social media, created a good-looking website, and magically blew up. Yet, most NPO’s will (or need to) face the fact that they don’t have the same perfect storm of passion, resources, and engaging content. How do you do the best you can with what you do have?
My answer: WordPress.
The incredible power of the WordPress platform combined with the easy-to-teach-and-use interface of the admin area allows you, as a developer or project manager, to start an NPO off on the right foot while allowing for scalability- not only in a website context, but in all forms of online media. My presentation on ‘Empowering NPO’s with WordPress’ would include such things as:
1. Using Custom Post Types to make web updates easy for clients
2. Using social plugins to help a NPO appropriately scale engagement in social media
3. Customizing the admin area with branding to give administrators the feeling of ‘ownership’
4. Using Custom Fields to allow for future extensibility of features, such as #5
5. Creating a native iOS application using RSS feeds from WordPress
6. Bottling the excitement of a NPO from the possibilities above and using it to spur them into further innovation
The last point is the best. When you’re able to consider the fact that you can not only code useful features for a NPO, but take the fear out of them being creative by building in extensible features that will deter the costs of future projects, you get clients who are:
1. Excited about their web presence
2. Excited about WordPress
3. Excited about the open-source community
4. Able to focus on what they do best
5. Excited to give you MORE future projects and refer you to others without hesitation
Everyone needs successful NPO’s to bring social justice to the world, and you, as a developer, need more work, more references, and more excited clients. And wouldn’t you like those same clients to be excited by WordPress?
Marna Friedman
There’s A Plugin For That
Exploring the WordPress repository for the right plugin can be frustrating and exhausting. And then once you find a WordPress plug-in, you might find that it’s outdated, conflicts with other WordPress plugins, or just plain doesn’t do what you thought it would. Understanding what a plugin can do and how it can expand the functionality of your site helps you to explore the possibilities and push your site further. Test the boundaries to see what’s possible and then venture forth in your quest for just the right fit.
Carol Shepherd
3rd Party Plugin Integrations and Signup: Can we improve the user experience?
Companies with existing services are attracted to the WordPress plugin repository because of the exposure it offers to new eyes. In return, these companies build — on their dime — some really nifty plugins that integrate their API’s into the WordPress ecosystem.
In this presentation will will example three case studies plugins currently in the the WordPress repository. We’ll look at their registration process and how the plugins integrate with the sponsoring company’s API. Analyzing their signup and integration process ,can we help these plugins improve the user experience?
John Housholder
WordPress Ecommerce: Not so scary anymore!
John will briefly demonstrate a WordPress ecommerce theme and then go through the steps in creating a storefront using WordPress and the FoxyShop plugin. If he has time, he’ll also show us how to make the store responsive.
Sheri Bigelow
Crackerjack CSS: Basics & Best Practices
This talk covers the very basic things you need to know to get started with CSS and a brief overview of the best ways to add CSS to WordPress themes.
Kelly Housholder
Running Your Freelance Business: a workshop
Freelancing allows you to create your own hours, work at home in sweat pants, work from a cabin in the mountains, work anywhere you’d like! Freelancing lets you do things your own way, when you like it and how you like it. The market is wide open for web developers – especially WordPress. So what’s holding you back?
In this freelancing workshop, I’ll touch on taxes, becoming an LLC, budgeting time and money, proposals and contracts, managing projects, obtaining work, and hiring other freelancers. I’ll also touch on the key to success in freelancing – managing clients.
Since this is a workshop, I’ll bring some example proposals and contracts, project scopes and contacts for local resources to help you with your own taxes and legal questions. I’d love for you to bring anything you’d like to discuss or ask questions about – your own proposals, portfolio website, company descriptions, sticky client situation and questions about your own freelance career. If I can’t answer your question, I’ll point you in the direction of someone who can!
Michael Fields
Extendable Extensions
Code is Poetry. You may have noticed this phrase in the footer of WordPress.org or printed on a t-shirt or sticker. It’s a beautiful metaphor, but what does it mean? During the course of this talk, I’ll be looking at “Code is poetry” from a couple of different view points. I’ll also be taking a look at a select group plugins and themes that put these ideas into practice.
Bill Robbins
Using a Network Installation to Distribute Content to a Family of Sites
Ever needed to send unique content to dozens of related sites? Would you like to skip the hassle of maintaining all those unique websites? Using WordPress’ network features you can use one WordPress installation to keep all your sites updated and full of fresh content. It’s easier than you think.
Wade Kwon
How to Win Awards and Influence Readers in 439 Days and 668 Posts
Birmingham’s Best Blogger Wade Kwon reveals the secrets to developing a content strategy. It’s a plan that took an unknown site from just another URL to the Best Website of 2011, according to readers of the Birmingham News.
This session is for intermediate and advanced users, business owners and publishers who want to not only blog more often, but more effectively and with a defined return on investment.
Tammy Hart
Enqueues, Includes, and Defines, Oh my! The foundations of plugin and theme development
Brian Krogsgard
WordPress for Beginners
In the WordPress for Beginner’s session of WordCamp Birmingham, Brian will take you through and explain the steps you took in the “5 minute” installation of WordPress, and break down what it means. He’ll walk you through the different settings your website has, describe how things like widgets and menus work, and even lay out a base understanding of just what makes WordPress so much more than a blog these days.
You might hear scary phrases like “custom post types”, “the loop”, “taxonomies”, “queries”, and “templates” come up, but it’ll all be laid out in a way that almost anyone can understand. And come with your questions because he’ll have the answers.
Dan Gavin
Responsive Web Design
How to become responsive. We will go over the various methods & styles used to make your site responsive. We will discuss CSS media queries, FitText.js, FitVid.js and responsive slideshows.
Mike Schinkel
Hardcore Custom Post Types
Hardcore WordPress Post Types
Custom Post Types were a watershed feature added to WordPress 3.0 in 2010. Since then there has been an explosion of WordPress use for all types of sites, not just for blogs. But as with most powerful new features the reality is that taking Custom Post Types to their limit can take thousands of hours of trial and error.
But why spend all those hours with a sore forehead when you can bypass most of the effort by attending this presentation/workshop? This will be a DOUBLE LENGTH workshop and EVERYTHING will be done in PHP code in WordPress theme’s functions.php file while at the end we’ll convert to a plugin.
Here’s what you’ll learn how to do:
– Define a Custom Post Type in PHP
– Configure the edit screens for Posts and Pages
– Set up Custom Columns in the post list admin screen
– Set up Custom Sorts and Filters in the post list admin screen
– Create Custom Meta Boxes with custom form fields
– Add Custom Meta Boxes for parent/child Post Types
– Query Custom Post Types within Theme files
– Create Custom Taxonomies and Assign to any Post Type, even Posts and Pages
– Add a Parent Post Field in a Metabox of the Post Editor
– Create Hierarchical URLs for Hierarchical Custom Post Types
– Recognize and Bypass the various gotchas you’ll run into,
– AND maybe a few other things that come up as questions during the workshop.
This is designed to be a FAST-paced workshop for people who are comfortable using PHP. We’ll take suggestions from the audience for what kind of post type to build so come with ideas. Then we’ll show a series of code snippets built from scratch for you to see how each one comes together. And we’ll make mistakes while we’re working so you can see how to get past the mistakes you will inevitably make.
If you are really saavy and have a local install of WordPress on your laptop you can work hands-on in real time and immediately see how everything work. But it you are not ready to follow along in real time we’ll give you access to a link at the end of the session where you can download all the code.
PRE-REQUISITES:
– Experience modifying PHP in themes and/or plugins.
PREPARATION FOR THOSE WANTING TO FOLLOW ALONG:
– A New Installation of WordPress 3.3
– An empty child theme based on TwentyEleven
– A high quality text editor/IDE (PhpStorm highly recommended)
– A local installation of WordPress (Apache + PHP + MySQL + WordPress)
See: http://www.google.com/search?q=setting+up+a+local+wordpress-install
DON’T FORGET:
– Come prepared with some ideas for a post type we can build.
Judi Knight
Oh My, So Many to Choose From.. . How to Pick a Theme
This presentation will give the scoop on themes. Specifically, What is a theme? What is GPL licensing? What is difference between free themes and premium themes. What are theme frameworks and why use child themes? And why certain themes are better than others depending on what your background is ie: coder, designer, beginner or intermediate skill level.
Samuel “Otto” Wood
These are the people that make this event happen. They work tirelessly for weeks and months to plan, coordinate, and execute the best event possible. If you get a chance to thank them, please do!
Sara Cannon (+ add me)
Details TBD.
Attendees (0 ratings)
Be the first attendee!Overall ExperienceHow would you rate the overall experience of the event? Overall Experience | — |
Topic CoverageWas there a variety of topics to choose from? Topic Coverage | — |
Session QualityHow interesting and polished were the sessions? Session Quality | — |
Speaker DiversityWas there diverse representation in the speaker lineup? Speaker Diversity | — |
Venue QualityHow was the cleanliness and layout of the venue? If online, how was the video platform? Venue Quality | — |
Food QualityHow would you rate the food quality? Thinks lunches, coffee breaks, and afterparty. Food Quality | — |
AffordabilityWas this event affordable for you? Affordability | — |
Networking OpportunitiesWere there networking opportunities? Think about parties, hallway track, and event attendance. Networking Opportunities | — |
Sponsor RepresentationWas there a variety of different kinds of sponsors in attendance? Sponsor Representation | — |
Speakers (0 ratings)
Be the first speaker!Overall ExperienceHow would you rate the overall experience of the event? Overall Experience | — |
Organizer CommunicationHow well did the organizers communicate about the event? Organizer Communication | — |
Venue QualityHow was the cleanliness and layout of the venue? If online, how was the video platform? Venue Quality | — |
Food QualityHow would you rate the food quality? Think speaker/sponsor dinner, lunches, and afterparty. Food Quality | — |
Session AttendanceWere the sessions well attended? How about your session? Session Attendance | — |
AffordabilityWas it affordable for you to speak at this event? Affordability | — |
Sponsors (0 ratings)
Be the first sponsor!Overall ExperienceHow would you rate the overall experience of the event? Overall Experience | — |
Organizer CommunicationHow well did the organizers communicate about the event? Organizer Communication | — |
Proximity to AttendeesWas the sponsor area in a high-traffic location? Proximity to Attendees | — |
Venue QualityHow was the cleanliness and layout of the venue? If online, how was the video platform? Venue Quality | — |
Affordability/ValueWas it affordable for you to sponsor this event? Do you feel like you got value in return? Affordability/Value | — |
Event AttendanceHow well was this event attended? Do you feel there were enough people to justify your presence? Event Attendance | — |
The WP World is generously supported by:
WordPress® and its related trademarks are registered trademarks of the WordPress foundation. This website is not affiliated with Automattic, Inc., the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress® open source project.
Though Marcus is employed by GoDaddy, this site is not hosted by, sponsored by, or affiliated with GoDaddy.