WordCamp Boston 2014

A new JSON REST API is slated for WordPress 4.1 core integration. I am one of the key contributors to this project and the lead contributor for the client-side Backbone driven app. I want to show everyone why this new API is awesome, some cool things you can do with it, and how you can start using it now!

With so many plugins out there this discussion will talk about some of the most popular plugins, my favorites, and how to look at the information given on WordPress.org about plugins to help you decide which ones to use. Open discussion on other’s favorites and some tips for finding plugins.

WordPress is fast out-of-the-box, but is your theme or plugin slowing it down? We’ll start with a sluggish site, systematically identify the slow points, and do what we can to speed it up. In the end, we’ll have our site running like the Road Runner without having to add any performance-enhancing plugins. Meep meep!

Local news is crucial to communities, but many newspapers, including the Boston Globe, now limit their coverage of small town issues and events. Citizen journalists can offer a powerful antidote by providing interesting and accurate local stories and information.

Since July, 2012 The Bedford Citizen (TBC), a blog devoted to news about Bedford, Massachusetts, has shared more than 1,700 articles with more than 1,000 subscribers, 750 Facebook friends, and nearly 300 Twitter followers. TBC uses Vigilance by Theme Foundry on a self-hosted site.

Questions to raise:
Why create a local news site?
Crowd sourcing: Surfacing and motivating reporters?
Free, or behind a pay wall?

From the ease and free access of WordPress.com to more complex but still easy to manage self-hosted themes, WordPress offers an optimal platform for sharing local news

Making changes to your WordPress theme used to be as simple as updating an PHP or CSS file and clicking save. Now we have CSS preprocessors, image minification, javascript minification, script concatenation, and much more.

That’s where Grunt comes in. It will do all of this, and more, for you automatically.

In this session we’ll discuss what exactly Grunt is, what it can do for you, and go over setting up Grunt so you can begin using it in your WordPress themes.

We’ll give attendees a behind-the-scenes look at building a publications website from scratch using our recent work on the acclaimed Harvard Law Review website. We’ll look into the design systems that publications need and the WordPress tools to make a complex publication come together.

In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

Project management is not most creative or development professionals’ favorite topic. You want to get through the administrative work and on to the fun of design and/or coding. But that administrative work is critical. Not only is it key to the success of most gigs, but it’s also key to growing your career.

Perspectives from a veteran project manager will help creatives and dev stop dreading the “project management” part of projects. We’ll learn strategies for managing clients, setting timelines, and managing people. We’ll share our favorite tools (hint: not spreadsheets) and great ways to make management more egalitarian. We’ll even prove project management can be fun!

In my agency, we handle a couple of 1,000+ site multisite networks for the mortgage industry. This talk will go over the challenges we’ve faced, both technical and business.

My talk will be to take a completely fresh install of WordPress and walk the audience through how quick and easy it is to setup a basic ecommerce shop using WooCommerce. I will setup the whole site build in a product, discuss marketing tools and show how easy it is to get setup and processing transactions. Then I will also discuss some of the more complex features and options the system provides and how far you can push it if you want to by sharing some real world examples my company and I have created and launched for our clients recently using the same tools.

The session would define the life cycle and infrastructure for larger projects such as enterprise or corporate platforms. We will cover the process of setting up version control (SVN/Git), tests with PHPUnit/Grunt/Behat, dependency management with Composer, deployment with Capistrano, using Vagrant, Travis CI, collaborating in GitHub. I would provide examples from the WordPress Core, WP-CLI, Easy Digital Downloads. It would outline the benefits of using various systems to improve the collaboration, deployment and forming a community around a project/plugin for more stable and robust work when the codebase gets larger.

Website security is important to everyone who has a website, as well as everyone who uses a website. Whether it gets five visitors a day or five-thousand, hackers are looking to compromise, break, infect and virtually own every website that they can for monetary and social purposes.

While the topic seems mysterious to most users, website security is actually a set of simple principles that everyone can adopt to keep their risk at the absolute lowest. Be on the lookout for pitfalls, keep malicious users out, and avoid The 7 Deadly Sins of WordPress Security.

The focus of this presentation will be on making a WordPress theme more accessible for those with disabilities. This presentation will be programming specific, and cover various HTML and CSS requirements to ensure any WordPress theme is accessibility-ready. I will cover accessible images, media, link text, headings, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, skip links, and forms; and how a developer can program these aspects to meet WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

Going Global – Building WordPress Multilingual Websites covers creating multilingual website with WordPress – how to do it, what are your options and has a comparison review of what plugins you can use. We go over good and bad examples, Google’s directives for multilingual sites and a tutorial on creating multilingual WordPress sites. Attendees will leave knowing how to turn their WordPress sites into full multilingual sites.

In theory transferring a WordPress website should be a straightforward process that involves few well-defined steps like: export your database from the old host, import it on the new one, move your files, reconfigure WordPress and change the DNS records. In reality though the migration process has some challenges that, if not addressed properly, may cause serious downtime and data loss. Needless to say how this could affect your business – revenue stream loss and bad reputation being just some of the implications.

I plan to walk the audience of the presentation through the different steps in the migration process with examples how each step can be optimized so that the risks are minimized. The following will be covered in details:

1. How to plan the migration

2. How to perform each step of the real website move, dry run migration

3. How to handle the domain propagation issues once the migration is over

4. What to do if you noticed missing data after the process

Ever handed over a site to a client, only to return a month later and find it barely recognizable? Tired of calls asking you to add a link or replace a logo? Stop those calls—and protect your design—by using core WordPress features (and a few select plugins) to create a modular theme anyone can edit. You’ll also learn how to document these features within WordPress, so help is always at hand for forgetful clients.

Designed to help bridge the gap between the creative and the technical, this talk is all about strutting and selling your stuff in the tech industry. From one-man blogs, to freelance developers, to big ol’ agencies–-This session is meant to get the geek-inclined started in the wonderful world of marketing, and help the artsy-inclined gain some confidence in tech. Some of you may be wondering:

How can I get more people to read my blog posts?
Wait, I should be writing blog posts?
Which plugin is best for SEO?
I hate talking to people! Do I have to talk to people?
Don’t worry. We’ll get to that.

Shortcodes and Widgets are each powerful in their own right. They give the developer control over the content and presentation while allowing the user to control their location (and possibly specify which content as well). We will talk about the pros and cons of creating shortcodes vs widgets and walk through a simple version of each. If you know PHP and understand WordPress, then creating these great tools is easier than you think.

WordPress is amazing, flexible software, but it doesn’t do everything. Facebook, PayPal, MailChimp, Basecamp, slideshare, and Google Maps are just a few examples of places that are already doing something well, and you can integrate your WordPress site with them through their APIs. However, there are right and wrong ways to do this, especially if you want to distribute your solution to others. I start from the beginning, introducing people to the WordPress HTTP library helper functions, then bring lots of code examples from my plugins show start to finish how to integrate the right way.