WordCamp Boston 2019

With the web ecosystem steadily moving towards JavaScript frameworks and JAMstack setups, let’s see how to get up to speed with those latest headless trends.

During this hands-on workshop, we will build a React front-end pulling content from WordPress with GraphQL, and using Gatsby as a static website generator. Some knowledge of WordPress Rest API, Node or React is a plus but not a requirement. We will go through each step following a homemade GitHub tutorial with concrete examples, including the initial setup and a deployment on a serverless hosting and continuous integration (CI) platform. As an extra, we will also explain how to easily make your Gutenberg layout work with your React website.

Bring your own bottle laptop (BYOL) and join us if you are curious about headless architecture.

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.

With the web ecosystem steadily moving towards JavaScript frameworks and JAMstack setups, let’s see how to get up to speed with those latest headless trends.

During this hands-on workshop, we will build a React front-end pulling content from WordPress with GraphQL, and using Gatsby as a static website generator. Some knowledge of WordPress Rest API, Node or React is a plus but not a requirement. We will go through each step following a homemade GitHub tutorial with concrete examples, including the initial setup and a deployment on a serverless hosting and continuous integration (CI) platform. As an extra, we will also explain how to easily make your Gutenberg layout work with your React website.

Bring your own bottle laptop (BYOL) and join us if you are curious about headless architecture.

With all the talk about the importance of making WordPress Accessible, how does someone with a vision impairment teach WordPress? Listen as I share the tools and techniques I have used for the last ten years as a WordPress instructor at Pratt Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology and Third Ward in New York. I will share with you 5 tools and techniques that aid me in teaching my students as well as my thoughts on my article published by Smashing Magazine on what it’s like to have macular degeneration. If you care about Accessibility, you don’t want to miss this.

Come hear how a small community of small businesses joined forces to combat the big box stores with their own eCommerce Marketplace shop. You’ll hear how they handle aspects like shipping, orders, inventory, all while running their own retail store fronts.

With the explosive adoption of Smart Speakers, the primary interaction with your content will become auditory instead of visual. On the world wide web, our brand revolves around a URL, logo, tagline, color palette, font, images, etc., but when your audience is no longer engaging with your content through a screen, traditional brand elements become invisible. In a voice first environment, when your audience just asks for what they want, they expect the answer to be returned verbally. In a voice first world, what does your brand look like, (I mean, sound like)? In this talk, I explore the components of a verbal brand, how to prepare for the shift from written content to verbal content, as well as the future of voice technology and how to prepare for it.

As part of the WordPress community we understand how daunting it can be going to a wireframing whiteboard, opening a blank design file to make an initial homepage mockup, or even worse, sitting in a closed-door meeting with 2-3 decision makers that “know” what they want for their organization’s new website. But what if we opened up the conversation and used data-proven feedback to help lead the conversation?

In this talk, you will learn the importance of online surveys, user interviews, analytics and focus groups to build better websites. Shifting the conversation from client focused projects to user-focused experiences allows you to truly understand and deliver for your users.

We will explore when to leverage tools like Google Analytics, Inspectlet, and marketing automation platforms. The outcome is a stronger relationship with your client, a repeatable method for continued website improvements, and an outstanding experience for both the client and its users.

In this lighting talk, I’ll go through 10 tips for designers, developers, and marketing gurus how to run their WordPress projects effectively. Some will be knowledge and expertise, some will be tools, some will just be common sense 😉

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.

We explain what the WCAG 2.1 guidelines are and why they are so important.

Then we will offer 11 easy and actionable steps that you can take as soon as you get home to help you become compliant.

We also go through and explain and give examples of each step so you will understand clearly.

Finally, we offer some links to free software that you can use to test your websites Section 508 compliance.

WordPress is changing and evolving quickly, how can we adapt and grow our projects as the platform continues to progress? BU Learning Blocks is a new plugin created by BU to assist with online, interactive learning. We will explore the process of developing a new plugin in the Gutenberg era and the various twists and turns the team encountered along the way.

Derived from the 6 Principles of Productivity Management for Software Development by Keane, Inc, a Boston-based consulting firm, these WordPress Project Best Practices are common sense methods for crafting better estimates, controlling scope creep, and getting projects completed on time, within budget, with the “right” features that delight your client.

During this session, I will share the 6 Principles and the best practices that they spawn as well as practical tips for applying them in “real life.”

Are you familiar with REST APIs? Do you know WordPress provides one out-of-the-box? Ever used it?

There is a better way of things.

Come and learn about GraphQL in WordPress.

GraphQL allows you to access data more efficiently and interact with it faster compared to the traditional REST API.

In this talk I’ll give an introduction to GraphQL, how to combine it with WordPress and how to use it.

These days, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The tech industry is facing a veritable raft of ethical, moral, and political crises. Automation and industrialization are reshaping our world. And sitting in the middle of all that? You and me. We’re digital designers, we’re developers, we’re product owners. But each day, our work is changing — more quickly than it ever has before.

Here’s the question we have to ask ourselves: what do we want that change to be? In this talk, we’ll look at some of the challenges facing our industry, and ask ourselves: what kind of work do we want to do?

Ever wondered about how to contribute to the WordPress Project? We’ll run though the WordPress teams and explain what they do and how to get involved. Then we’ll break up into smaller groups and get started!

*People of all skill levels are welcome to attend and participate*. There are a wide variety of ways to contribute to WordPress, and there are lots of ways to participate without having technical experience.

If you’re working with code, you’re going to encounter bugs. One of the most important aspects to efficient software development is learning how to troubleshoot and debug more effectively. In this talk, we’ll discuss some useful debugging methods, powerful tools, and insightful plugins that can help you become a better developer when building with WordPress.

Lessons learning from observing photography clients around the world and applying that to banks and credit unions. The importance of data + intuition in knowing your target audience. We will talk through:

• Different times of days to post
• Different uses of the website to drive traffic
• The importance of analytics
• Knowing your audience and what they want to learn

Finally, talking through the fact that the data does not exist in a vacuum, and learning to trust your personal experience in conjunction with the numbers.

According to the CDC, 1 in 59 children has been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Though the national unemployment rate for the disabled is about 9%, the unemployment rate for those on the spectrum is at least 60%, with some studies putting it as high as 80%.

Over the last few years, a few tech companies have developed programs to bring individuals on the spectrum in their hiring process and their workforce, mostly as developers. While this is a start, there is still a huge amount of untapped potential within the autistic community that can benefit the tech industry in a variety of ways in addition to coding.

This panel will discuss the challenges and benefits that come with having ASD, as well as the panelists own experiences finding employment, how they deal with disclosure and asking for accommodations, and how they manage their day-to-day work lives, including how they collaborate with their neurotypical coworkers.

**This session is for people on the spectrum and not, in hopes that we can all understand each other a little better.

WordPress can be used to start a blog, make a site for a club, or power a business, large or small.

WordPress can also be used as a way to document your life, and save important things for later. You can bridge WordPress to other parts of the web that you use to store all of your data in one place, without having to worry about an app, hardware maker, or social media site going out of business and taking all of your content with it.

I considered myself an interloper into the IndieWeb movement, until I realized that the movement — just like the technology that powers it — is decentralized. My habit of copying data created on other sites, as well as creating a website for my lifelogging, is part of what this community is about.

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!

Anyone who has experience with WordPress Multisite knows how it works: Each site exists as a separate silo, and all content and tags stay within each particular site. But what if this compartmentalization didn’t have to be the case? What if the WordPress Taxonomy system could be used to create categories and tags that span across many sites? And what if related content from other sites in the network could surface no matter where in the network you happen to currently be?

This talk will look at a plugin, developed at the Harvard School of Public Health, that does just this. It will discuss how this plugin allows many thousands of articles across the school’s some 2,000 websites to be tagged according to subject, indexed, and made easily available to users looking for further reading on any given topic. This system has wide, potential application for other settings in which WordPress Multisite is used.

You picked a web host and set up your WordPress site – everything is cool! Until it isn’t. Maybe your site isn’t loading. Maybe your theme looks all kinds of broken. Maybe some jerks graffitti’d over your latest travel adventures! Now what?

Step one is determining whether your WordPress config is the reason or if you’ll need to contact your web host for a deeper dive into your hosting environment.

Different companies may offer different levels of technical support, but there is a basic and universal approach to getting your WordPress site back up and running again as quickly as possible. You’ll learn who to contact and why if and when your WordPress site ever runs into trouble.

We’ll take a look at getting hired, whether you should work for yourself or someone else, and what jobs are out there, particularly if you want to do something other than development or design.

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.

Transients allow developers to easily micro-cache expensive queries and remote data calls in the most efficient way possible. They’re relatively easy to use and can make dramatic performance improvements in your site.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language used to control the look and feel of your website. This powerful tool controls the spacing, coloring, fonts, and decorative elements (such as boxes and underlines) of your WordPress website. In this session, we’ll learn what CSS is, how to view the CSS already affecting your website, and how to add your own CSS.

Have you been asked to translate your website(s) yet? If not, the question is coming soon. The US has 4.3% of the world’s population and yet, less than 5% of US companies export. Plus, nearly half the population in the top 5 US cities don’t speak English at home. Being able to research and buy online has blasted open multilingual lead generation and customer acquisition opportunities leading many companies to become “accidental exporters”. If your (or your client’s) website isn’t translated and you aren’t doing multilingual marketing, you are losing out. In this session, learn how to develop a multilingual communications strategy, leverage WordPress with translation technologies, and figure out the right process to get the quality you need.

Accessibility is a practice that touches on many aspects of good web design and development, including performance. This talk will highlight opportunities and techniques to improve your website or web app’s performance by embracing an accessible, inclusive mindset.

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.

Internet privacy is more important now than it’s ever been. In 2017 the Department of Justice approached DreamHost with a problematic subpoena for customer data. When the request was refused, an avalanche of international media attention followed, bringing the issue of internet user privacy to the global stage.

In this case study you’ll learn how one company used its core values to turn a public dispute over website logs with the DOJ into a wildly successful global campaign for internet privacy, AND you’ll learn why open platforms like WordPress are so important to preserving a free and open internet, especially in times of crisis.

At the end of the session you’ll better understand how to:

• Use your WordPress blog as a central component of an overall messaging strategy
• Interact with media to tell your story
• Turn your brand’s core values into media talking points
• Navigate the treacherous waters of political brand involvement while maintaining an ostensibly neutral stance

Responsive Web Design lets us adapt to the size of our screens, but how do we adapt an element to the size of its container? Gutenberg blocks can appear in narrow columns, widescreen, or (soon) in sidebars or footers, each container a different width and context. A way to write Container Queries to handle these situations has topped the Responsive Design wish list for years—but unfortunately, they’re not coming any time soon, and may even be impossible with CSS alone.

But this is Boston, the “home town” of responsive styling; we don’t let the impossible stop us!

In this session we’ll discover how to roll our own efficient, container-aware styling with the JavaScript ResizeObserver object, using code that works in all major browsers. With only a few lines of HTML & CSS we can make our blocks look superb wherever they appear on the page!

You know your website should be accessible, but how can you achieve that? This session will get you started creating content that is available to all. I’ll review how to layout content on a web page so that it can be read by assistive technology, guidelines to creating sentences and paragraphs that are accessible, and how to include images, charts and infographics in a way that transmits information to those with sight impairments and reading challenges. I’ll also show you how you can include downloadable documents on your website. Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDFs all can be accessible.

We’ll talk about practical resources and advice that beginners to seasoned veterans can use to improve their content and their perception to their audience.

Kathy has helped hundreds of WordPress site owners recover after a hack while working for Wordfence. In this work, she’s seen how far malicious actors will go to take over websites for profit. As WordPress now powers more than one-third of the web, it’s a big target and attracting the attention of more hackers.

Learning to think like a hacker in the security realm is a big part of keeping your assets safe, and there are additional benefits. In this session, Kathy will use the stories of defeating hackers to help you make better security decisions. She’ll also illustrate how the hacker mindset is much more than protecting your site and information. Thinking like a hacker can also help you break through perceived limitations, overcome obstacles, and capitalize on opportunities to innovate.

Attendees will learn practical real-world security tips they can put into practice immediately. We’ll also learn the top mindset patterns that make hackers successful and how we can leverage those patterns for protection as well as creativity and innovation.

Every great design starts with great typography. We have the tools to make our layouts responsive, so isn’t it time we do that for our type? This talk explores how text reacts to a responsive context, how to manage how your typography within this context, and new technologies you can take advantage of to optimize the user experience.

The internet is the single most effective information sharing tool in all of history. We can build on the work and progress of others in a completely unprecedented way. The implications for the progress of humanity are both serious and exciting!

But it’s also in danger. Find out why Aaron thinks open systems and the open web will steer our future or how the lack of them will ruin it.

While you use the internet and web every day, you may not have ever stopped to consider how all of it works. When managing your website, there are lots of components and systems working together to keep your site working. Understanding how all these work together allows you to make changes to improve your site as well as better communicate with the developers that you may get support from.

In this talk, we will be exploring:

• What exactly is the internet?
• How do servers and hosting work?
• How do domains work?
• How do browsers work?
• How does the page cycle work?
• What do all the acronyms you encounter (such as FTP, DNS, JS, and more) mean?
• How does all this make your WordPress site work?

When leveling up as a developer, one of the most intimidating aspects often is using the command line interface, or CLI. In fact, it might seem downright terrifying. The reality is: If you can type, you can use the command line.

Every senior level developer will remember a time when they got overwhelmed by opening the terminal. Those same people will tell you this is one of the most important capabilities they acquired.

Bash can unlock the true potential of any machine. Besides gaining more control of your device, Bash lets you leverage hundreds of power tools like WP-CLI, Drush, npm, composer, and Behat, to name a few.

Leave this session understanding:

• How to stop being afraid of the command line
• A brief history of Bash and how it does what it does
• The basic commands for manipulating your files and folders
• An overview of tools that are only available through the command line
• The basics of scripting to automating anything

The WP-CLI gives developers powerful tools to rapidly manage WordPress sites, automate repetitive tasks and diagnose problems from the command line. But if you aren’t building custom commands, you’re leaving tons of time-saving potential on the table!

In this session we’ll explore best practices for creating custom command line interfaces, combining and reusing commands, plus other tips & tricks.

Experience with WP-CLI will be helpful, but not required to attend.

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.

Not having enough time or energy to manage all our systems and processes is one of the biggest stress inducers for freelancers. In this talk, Allie takes a look at how useful automation tools can sometimes be overused to the point of disconnecting us from our work entirely and how that ultimately causes more stress for freelancers. We will then explore how to find a healthy balance so that automation can be a friend, not a foe.