WordCamp Boston 2013

Do you already have a self-hosted WordPress site? Do you know the basics, but want to harness the power of WordPress? Do you want to step up your skills, find out the capabilities of WordPress. Then this is the workshop for you.

You will learn:

• Plugins: how to select and test
• Review of some basic and advanced plugings
• Themes, how to choose and properly edit themes
• Theme evaluation
• SEO – on-site preparation and how to
• Security – how to protect your site from Spam, robot attacks
• Backup and Recovery – updates, how to implement your own process

Do you already have a self-hosted WordPress site? Do you know the basics, but want to harness the power of WordPress? Do you want to step up your skills, find out the capabilities of WordPress. Then this is the workshop for you.

You will learn:

• Plugins: how to select and test
• Review of some basic and advanced plugings
• Themes, how to choose and properly edit themes
• Theme evaluation
• SEO – on-site preparation and how to
• Security – how to protect your site from Spam, robot attacks
• Backup and Recovery – updates, how to implement your own process

When we create for the web, we participate in a kind of public art. We code, we design, we build for an audience, shaping digital experiences that provide a service, or that create joy, or that simply connect readers with words written half a world away. But in this session we’ll revisit what we’ve learned about responsive design, and ensure our content, not just our design, is readily accessible to them wherever and whenever they are. In doing so, we’ll look at some ways in which our audience reshapes the way we think about our medium, and see where they might be leading us—and the web—next.

Let’s face it: themes and plugins aren’t known for their excellent usability or user experience. In this workshop, we’ll go over some basic principles to help improve your products within wp-admin and explore how to use the Settings API, create custom UI elements following WordPress standards, and delve briefly into how you can test out your theme or plugin with users.

Imagine a world where your code is tested for bugs before each and every deployment. Where your code can tell if anything broke since the last time you shipped. Where your development environment points out any mistakes you made so you can fix them before a customer calls to complain.

That world exists. And you can get there today.

Unit testing isn’t glamorous, but it will save you time down the road and make your application more robust. I will introduce you to testing best practices and tools you can use in your WordPress development environment so that your themes and plugins are a leg above the competition.

Your Statement of Work should contain a line-by-line itemization of all tasks that are outside the native functionality of WordPress, without using plugins. By thoroughly documenting the features and functionality of your site up front and getting this signed off by the client, expectations will be set at a level that will bring easy success to the project and avoid simple miscommunications. When defining this before you start working, you are helping to facilitate an open and pleasant working relationship with your client while avoiding possible scope creep, and outlining who is responsible for what and by when. This session will walk you through the steps you should take when starting a new project to protect yourself using good documentation practices, while meeting the requirements set by your client.

When designing for WordPress, it is important to keep the needs of your target audience in mind with predetermined goals that are specific and measurable. In this session, I will talk about the principles of good web design for the broadest audience possible. I will show you how to use general composition, positive and negative space, scale, proportion and the use of color to convey a feeling, as well as resources for finding media that complies with licensing terms. I will also go over several sites and point out good and “can be improved upon” designs.

In this talk, I’ll show you how to keep attackers out of your site. During the first half of this talk we’ll go over the basics; talk about some common attacks, and talk about how you can protect your site with 5 simple tips that anyone can do to make their site safer.

In the second half, after we let the non-developers leave, we’ll dig a little bit deeper into coding best practices for WordPress and talk about the right way to build your themes and plugins to keep your clients safe.

WordPress is extremely powerful and flexible to structure content and data. The more you know, the more choices you have.

When approaching a new WordPress project, it can be daunting. You want to organize things the right way, and you don’t want to get too far down the wrong path — it’s as if there is no return without a complete do-over.

This presentation will focus on the decision process of how we approach organizing content and meta data. Why use Posts vs. Pages? Why use Categories vs. Tags? (more scary – when to opt for Custom Post Types, Custom Fields, Taxonomies). I bring the audience through a decisioning process to build common elements found on WordPress sites, and leave them with (literally and figuratively) a flowchart to make decisions of how to set up a project.

As a bonus (time allowing) I can talk about what to do if you DO go down the wrong path and find you need to restructure your data later. What’s easy (e.g. Categories and Tags Converter) and what’s more difficult (e.g. merging Custom Post Types to Posts), to what’s not possible without SQL intervention (run away!).

Not everyone can be the next Daily Beast, Smashing Mag, or Daring Fireball, but with a little bit of time and effort, you can make the most of your blog. This session will cover farm-league blogging basics like defining and refining your message and voice, presenting a consistent brand/image, networking with others, getting traction, and even earning a little something in return (not necessarily monetizing, but other benefits like bartering, affiliates, and complimentary products/services). I’ll use examples of personal experience from mapandmenu.com and a few technical tips and tricks.

Ever wanted to set up an online shop? Thought it would be too difficult and complicated? For some time that was definitely the case, but not anymore. With the introduction of Woocommerce last year selling just about anything online has become more accessible than ever to any semi-experienced WordPress user. In this session we will take a basic installation of WordPress and install and completely configure a basic setup of Woocommerce so that by the time you leave the session you will have everything you need to get online and start selling your products!

The Customizer is great, but there’s very little knowledge out there for building advanced controls with it, since its JavaScript API is currently undocumented.

I’ll share lessons learned building advanced controls for Custom Design on WordPress.com for how you can take the Customizer to the next level.

Oh man – e-commerce. The scourge of many developer’s existence. Where do you start? Where does it end?

E-commerce is a massive topic. So many options and use case scenarios make settling on a final platform for building your shop overwhelming. You wind up wasting days installing and testing existing plugins to see if it will work for your specific use case many times to find out that there is one important feature missing. Other times you settle on a solution only to find that there is a feature you didn’t even think about that is necessary for your shop that doesn’t exist in the option you chose – after days (hopefully not weeks) of developing.

In this talk I will go over the currently existing plugins and their features and talk about how each use case affects your store’s requirements and ultimately your choices. We will walk through the types of questions to ask your clients (or yourself if you are a store owner) to get the best possible picture of the store before you even start, and how to filter through the useless to find the best solution for you.

WordPress 3.6 includes version 1.0 of Backbone.js, the JavaScript library that powers the new WordPress media uploader. It can be intimidating to get started with a library like Backbone, but it is a powerful tool for developers of WordPress plugins, themes and web apps alike. In this session we’ll look at several ways to begin integrating Backbone into your WordPress themes and plugins, including a step-by-step demonstration of how Backbone can improve the quality of your existing jQuery code. There’s no reason to stop there, though—to close we’ll walk through other exciting ways to use Backbone alongside WordPress, including how to make a standalone Backbone application that only uses WordPress for its data!

The introduction of Custom Content Types was one of the core tipping points where WordPress went from a solid blogging platform on which you could do some simple CMS-style sites to a full fledged CMS which was capable of driving more complex content-centered web applications.

In this talk I’ll briefly cover the “blobs vs chunks” distinction popularized by Karen McGrane and why content modeling matters in the CMS world.

Then we’ll cover custom post types, custom meta fields, custom taxonomies, and other ways of doing structured content in WordPress.

With the (virtually) limitless power of custom meta and post types we can transform the sleek and user-friendly blogging tool that is WordPress into a custom CMS comparable to enterprise level publishing and eCommerce platforms. Getting your installations or projects to that level takes more than organized code; it takes planning, information design and architecture.

I have found that partnering with a designer in the preliminary stages of project requirement discovery, user experience and information architecture, to be a real asset to our team’s workflow and process. Creating early infographic documentation of site maps, navigation, and post types – meta, relationships, and logic – during the discovery phase leads to faster client approval and sign-off as well as catching issues, conflicts and misunderstandings early in the process. Benefits can also be seen with theme development as coding can begin earlier with a clear set of objects/properties/relationship well before a UI/UX design is ready. Designers also benefit from having a list of necessary elements that must be accounted for in the design.

In my session, I want to show examples of this workflow – from the design of information architecture, to the creation of the custom content scaffolding. Examples to be shown include projects from local businesses and non-profits such at The Foodery, ‘Hearing Modernity’ at the Harvard School of Music and Boston Magazine’s The Shoes We Wore Project.

Last year, I started building what I like to call “Dynamic Web Environments”, which are way more than just websites. My idea was to create a web environment that changes and molds itself, much like how responsive websites mold to a device, but this time to a users needs. The trick is to change the website before the user asks for it, or even before they know what they want. An experienced marketer can isolate and leverage patterns through good user data. It’s often easy to predict marketing trends around user interactions. If I buy a pair of jeans on a website, it’s likely I need a pair of shoes to go with it. Web designers, developers and marketers have been “up-selling” for a while now. This is not enough; we need to push ourselves to the next level. With a good developer, some great data and a little imagination you can start delivering impactful, intuitive, personalized websites. Websites, that bring content to users rather than making them hunt and peck for it.

In this workshop I’ll give developers and front-end designers an overview of how Twig templates can super-charge theme development, encourage collaboration and cut-down on debugging. Twig lets developers write WordPress themes using super-clear HTML that makes it easier to create beautiful, manageable code. I was planning on dividing the workshop between:

• Overview of Timber
• Some specific Timber/Twig concepts (includes, filters, child templates)
• Project time for people to work on their own themes

Please bring WordPress themes you’re working on so you have something to follow-along with. You can read more about Twig and Timber (the WordPress plugin that integrates with Twig) at http://timber.upstatement.com

In this session, we’ll be looking at how plugin and theme developers can use progressive enhancement to take advantage of Jetpack if it’s active. Whether extending Jetpack’s image gallery classes, hooking into Omnisearch, or routing your assets through Photon, WordPress.com’s free CDN, there’s a lot of power to be leveraged, and we’ll review some of the best ways to do it.

WordPress themes have a tendency to do too many things. This “creeping” into new areas makes them fat, unmaintainable, and hard to break away from. This breaks WordPress’s inherent flexibility, but it can be dealt with. We’ll discuss the problem, its root causes, and what you as a developer, theme user, or anyone related to WordPress can do to help.

Tips, Tricks and Tools used by Blogger ITProGuru (Dan Stolts) to become one of the top Microsoft bloggers. Dan will share his secrets to amassing an audience of more than 65k unique visitors every month. He will share how to get content ideas, how to bring those ideas to life in a compelling way, how to get people that visit your blog to act while they are there, and how to be relevant in search. Need more than that? No problem, these great tips are less than 10% of the value gained from the information in this presentation! If you want to grow your reach, this is a must attend session!

WordPress has been using jQuery for over six years, but jQuery just recently moved all of their public websites onto WordPress! In this talk I’d like to give you an overview of the infrastructure tools jQuery built, which are used to deploy content to WordPress from GitHub commits using Node.js. This presentation will cover a little bit of the Node.js code, some server configuration in Nginx, and a whole lot of links to the GitHub repos you can use to set up something similar yourself.

The web is no longer a fix medium, and is rapidly changing daily. In the past month, more smartphones have been released than digits on my feet and hands. The past year? What’s next to come?

For just a moment, forget about screen resolution, size, and all the devices that allow web browsing. Take a deep breath. Feels good?

Stop designing around devices, and begin designing around content and prepare for the future by designing for a continuos flow of screen resolutions.

Let’s talk responsive design and how to ease the pain a bit, of being a web designer of today (the future).

SEO is changing every day and with the most recent Google updates, tactics that used to work are resulting in site penalizations. Learn what these updates means to your business, how to keep your WordPress site SEO friendly, and what tactics you need to focus on in 2013 and beyond.

Composer has gained a lot of popularity and momentum in the past year. This session will be a brief crash course in PHP dependency management using Composer. We will explore how to install dependencies as separate packages and as WordPress plugins or themes. We will also look at how this can be used to speed up dev environment setup times.

This workshop is geared to new users of WordPress. In this workshop, I will walk the audience through the wp-admin dashboard, focusing on the Settings, Tools and Users sections, Categories and Tags in Posts. I’ll also talk about the difference between a page and a post, and introduce basic content management.

How often have you heard the phrase, “WordPress is great, but I need more than a blog.”? Well, much has changed in the past decade. With the blog market cornered, WordPress is both able and eager to meet new challenges; as the platform has matured, so have its APIs and functionality. The performance that is delivered in each new iteration of WordPress opens the software to an ever-expanding array of possibilities–Wikis, code gists, application documentation, customer management systems, and software services can now be easily (and enjoyably) conquered. This session aims to explore many of these unconventional applications of WordPress, as well as to encourage exploration into the many possibilities offered as the platform continues to advance.

Git, the utility for managing and sharing your code, has gone from a bleeding edge tool for only the most hardcore developers, to something that is now being used by even the most beginner of developers and designers.

But trying to learn Git is a daunting task. In this session we’ll look to understand Git from a high level overview before diving down into some specific commands and applications that will get you up and running. All of this will, of course, be focused on using Git on a WordPress site.

There are countless examples of individual PreK-12 and Higher Education teachers and professors using WordPress for course websites, along with a long list of institutions that use it as a universal platform for their staff to share course information and resources. Some universities and districts have large IT and web development departments or may use outside developers. But can a school district or college with a lean IT/web department and even leaner budget still implement a reliable, professional, and effective WordPress infrastructure for course websites? In this session, we will look at guiding philosophies and specific ways in which educational technologists can use WordPress Multisite and a series of plugins and customizations to accomplish these goals.

Over the last few years, I’ve hired more than 30 WordPress developers, and have considered over 100 applicants.

There are about 20 questions I consistently ask most serious candidates, from philosophical – “Tell me about something that really frustrates you about WordPress right now”- to big picture – “Tell me about the two fundamental hook types in WordPress, and the difference between them” to granular – “What’s the best way to prevent posts in a specific category from showing up in the blog home?” Sometimes there’s more than one right answer, sometimes there’s really one right answer. There are plenty of *really* bad answers.

These are 10 questions that range from developer basics, to advanced WordPress development, to developer philosophy that help me suss out just how “expert” a candidate really is.

Whether you’re contracting a developer to build your site, hiring a full time engineer, or just want to see if *you* can pass the 10up test, this talk is for you.

Whether you provide computer or web services, or manage, write or commission a blog, 2013 has seen a number of developments in the laws that impact your business. We will discuss two of these developments with an emphasis on practical steps to address the issues raised by each. First, in May of this year, the FTC released additional guidance on “Dot Com Disclosures” updating the 2009 FTC Endorsement Guidelines that introduced standards for blog posts promoting or reviewing consumer products. We will discuss the implications of this new guidance –as well as recent FTC enforcement actions – and practical steps that bloggers (and those that hire them) can take to protect their businesses.

Second, we will discuss the current state of copyright law on the web. The “Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy” green paper published by the U.S. Dept. of Commerce this summer raises important questions about copyright law online. We will discuss current day-to-day copyright compliance issues for businesses as well as the legal landscape going forward.

Creating a website using WordPress is easier now than ever, but how do you make sure your design isn’t hideous to look at? To non-designers this can feel like a daunting task, but you don’t have to be a professional designer to create something of beauty.

By learning the basics of design, you can make your WordPress websites more usable and attractive.

In this workshop we’ll take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly, and we’ll discuss basic design principles and guidelines you can use to keep your work out of the “ugly” category.

Today’s web developers can have a wealth of data at their fingertips on who site visitors are, how they find a site, and what they do once they’re there. Using that data, you can optimize a site to better meet your goals, be they longer site visits, more product downloads, or higher ecommerce sales. Web analytics data is among the most powerful tools in a web developer’s arsenal to prove the value of a site, and drive more value for clients.

In this session, we’ll walk you through how to implement web analytics on your WordPress, using the most popular tools and plugins. Going beyond that we will look at how to apply the data web analytics uncovers to create the best site possible—based not on gut instinct, but on pure, hard data. Want to know whether blue or green buttons make people more likely to buy? Whether you should put the logo on the left or the right to make the site friendlier? Whether people find it easier to navigate with a Home icon in the side navigation? Web analytics and site optimization data can point you to the answers. Learn how to improve existing sites, build a new site already optimized from the ground up, and continuously optimize your site for SEO, e-commerce, nonprofit, and marketing goals.

This session will go through examples of several common attacks, vulnerabilities that allowed them to happen in core, how they were fixed, and how our community can work together to stay safe. This session involves brief code snippets and discussions, but is generally a higher level overview of the types of security problems that affect the WordPress community and how we can continue to fix them.

At Google, a 500 millisecond delay (just 0.5 seconds) resulted in a 20% decrease in search traffic. 74% of mobile web users will leave a site if it takes longer than 5 seconds to load. Meanwhile, web-enabled devices and user bandwidth are getting more varied and less predictable. In this talk, Chris Ferdinandi shares tips and techniques that will dramatically increase your site performance.

Design is not just about themes, graphics, or the look-and-feel of a website. We will discuss “design thinking” as a problem solving strategy, including why the most beautiful sites are not always the most successful. We will end with some ways for you to start applying “design thinking” principles to your own projects.

This session will provide a short crash course in registering a CPT and meta boxes and then dive into the CPT loop and all the fun stuff you can do with CPTs.

Live code examples will be shown, along with other applications such as listing employees, address lists with jQuery filtering, image sliders, and WooCommerce additions.

Whether you use it locally or remotely, the command line is a powerful tool to aid development. This session will go over some tips for becoming more proficient with the command line. It will also include some of the more useful command line tools that I have come to think of as invaluable parts of my toolkit.

Let’s face it: themes and plugins aren’t known for their excellent usability or user experience. In this workshop, we’ll go over some basic principles to help improve your products within wp-admin and explore how to use the Settings API, create custom UI elements following WordPress standards, and delve briefly into how you can test out your theme or plugin with users.

Charles’ website has been popular from day one, and he’s had the means to back it up via a VPS. With a WordPress expert on tap, he’s grown his site to be a beautiful resource for anyone who wants to learn more about Charles Dickens.

Sydney started from GeoCities, bought inexpensive shared hosting, and has struggled with plugins and caching, but manages to keep his community site, discussing the social injustice found within Dickens’ work up and running.

Both men are now looking to the future, to expand their sites, and are considering Managed solutions. Follow their journey to determine if Managed hosting is right for them.

In this session, I’ll talk about all the secret functions, actions, filters, and generally awesomely powerful stuff that’s packaged in bbPress, how we’re porting all of it to BuddyPress, and how you can use bbPress as a starter plugin for your own projects.

Understanding different caching tools and techniques available to WordPress developers such as the Transient and Object Caching APIs and how/why they can make or break your site.

In this session I’ll deliver the strategies that some of the most successful WordPress entrepreneurs have used to build their business. Folks who have joined me on the MattReport podcast have shared the stories of success and failures in the WordPress marketplace.

We cover the broad brush strokes of an entrepreneur, building a team, developing a product, marketing your idea and scaling your business. All that while enjoying a healthy work/life balance.

Learn from the likes of Cory Miller of iThemes, John Saddington of 8bit, Brian Clark of Copyblogger and Adii Pienaar of WooThemes.