WordCamp Buffalo 2014

Making custom WP themes isn’t hard. If you’ve ever developed a website from wireframes or mockups to html, turning it into a WordPress theme is just a few extra steps. Watch how Andy and Ben do it, and take your web skills to the next level with custom themes.

It’s hard to think of an open source project with the branded look and feel we find in WP. Why is that? Where did the branding come from? How were decisions about the “look and feel” made: the fonts, the colors, the logo? And how do these things impact us, as designers, developers, users? We’ll try to answer these questions in my presentation.

Making custom WP themes isn’t hard. If you’ve ever developed a website from wireframes or mockups to html, turning it into a WordPress theme is just a few extra steps. Watch how Andy and Ben do it, and take your web skills to the next level with custom themes.

Throughout my years organizing the Buffalo WordPress Meetup, one of the most common issues are related to poor choices in themes, or not understanding what elements are easy to change when looking to download or purchase themes. I will give an overview of theme choices, styles, what to look for and what options you have for customization on your own, or with help from a professional. Many themes boast powerful editing options, and have options lists longer than a luxury sports car. It is about filtering through the noise to find the information that matters most.

In this session you will learn how to create custom fields with the
Advanced Custom Fields plugin. We will discuss planning out your fields and content types (an important practice known as content modeling); explore the code necessary to display and relate fields and posts; and finally look at some examples of custom fields on sites to solve real-world problems. You will leave this session with a new appreciation for how robust of a CMS WordPress can be, and lots of new ideas on how to structure your content in a way that is easy for you to create, and easy for your clients to manage.

Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags. There is so much confusion about what types of things should be put on a page and what should be in a post. Static vs. Dynamic content is the best way to tackle this. An “About Us” page would be just that… A PAGE. If you are talking about something that is more time sensitive, then you want to do a post. Connected to this would be Categories and Tags. What are they? When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses.

You have great information you want to share on your blog, but your writing doesn’t sparkle. Learn how to tighten up your copy, punch up your headlines and avoid common punctuation mistakes so that you can take your blog to the next level.

We all have horror stories about difficult clients. But the success of a project is often a team effort that includes the participation of the client. How do we keep the client involved and avoid frustrations and misunderstandings? How do we turn a client from a dictator into a collaborator? Education and early participation is the key. Let’s talk about how you can help your client understand the their role, the sites goals and key audience. We’ll review WordPress tools and approaches you can take to help educate the client about important topics such as responsive design and UX, so they can make informed decisions that you can both agree upon.

Google Analytics is a data goldmine available and it is accessible for free. The problem for many site owners is information overload from the moment you log in. After all, the idea is to use that data to improve the performance of your site. At the same time, how do you know where to begin? We’ll discuss the options for implementing Google Analytics into your WordPress site and where to focus your attention to get the most out of the traffic numbers it makes available to you. If you want to understand bounce rate, landing pages, exit pages, visitor loyalty and what these terms mean to you and your blog, you’ll want to join us. The data tells a story if you know how to follow the plot.

Learn what plugins are and how to pick the best ones. And the 7 plugins that every WordPress user should be running. Ask questions and pick my brain. Apple may say, “There’s an app for that,” but with WordPress, “There’s a plugin for that.”

Often times when people first start our using WP, they get frustrated and leave their poor site unattended. It’s unfortunate because it’s not really the user’s fault, it’s that just they haven’t been shown how to do things and make things happen. In this session I draw parallels to starting to use a WP site to having a new born baby. No one shows you how to be a mom or dad, but through trial and error and some wisdom from others, it becomes natural. During my session I talk about how things associated with babies can be just like things with WP. Like themes being baby clothes, and plugins being toys, etc. In my sessions I like to draw similarities to real life situations and associate them to using WP. It seem to break the complexity of WP down to things people understand and can relate to.

Showcasing easy and fun ways to make your WordPress installs appealing for users and authors.

How to setup a start file just for you for your WordPress projects to make things go as smoothly (and quickly) as possible. I’ll talk about my basic file structure as well as how to use CSS preprocessors like SASS to speed up the development process.

Most of us have discovered that WordPress.org has made efforts into making the WordPress platform more web accessible to those with physical and mental challenges, as a website publishing platform, but what about WordPress communities?

My presentation will discuss how to make your WordPress community or WordCamp event more accessible. I will cover what accessibility is, and why it is important. I will cover who accessibility affects, and how accessibility can help those affected. I will also discuss what it means to me as a person with a physical disability, and share some life experiences and real life challenges. From there, I will share some informative tips on how any community leader can go about making their WordPress communities and WordCamp events more accessible.

Heard of Backbone.js but have yet to use it in your WordPress plugin or theme? Get an introduction to Backbone.js (and Underscore.js), why you should be using it, and how to add it to your next project.

Back in WP 3.1, we got Post Formats. While great in theory, we’re limited by the existing set of formats and Core doesn’t allow us to extend these. Nacin once said, “If you want a custom post format, then chances are you shouldn’t be using post formats.” Aside from this, from a creative standpoint, we seem to be stuck in a mindset of Post Formats being Tumblr-like functionality and therefore have failed to use formats to their full potential.

At HowAboutWe, we needed a way to convey the personality of a post in our streams. All posts are different, so why should they all look the same at first glance when a viewer hits your homepage or views a category? What makes your readers want to click a link and read the full article?

The answer, thanks to the power and flexibility of WP, is that we can roll our own ‘Post Formats’ solution. No longer limited to a predefined set of formats, we can allow posts to be displayed in the way that best fits them. Want to display a list of links, embedded tweets, a poll, a gallery? You can do anything you want, and I’ll show you how. We’ll take a look at how Post Formats are implemented in Core, how to roll your own, and some creative uses, including a ‘Reblog’ post format for displaying a post from one site on another within WordPress multisite.

So you know your business needs to get into content marketing, but unless you have plenty of free time, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the extra work required (after all, your content won’t write, edit, promote, and measure itself). In this session, you’ll learn how core WordPress features—and a few open source plugins—can make hiring, organizing, and working with your new content team easy, efficient, and safe at every step along the way so you can keep your free time and grow your small business.

We can all pretend that we’re helping others by making web sites accessible, but we are really making the web better for our future selves. Learn some fundamentals of web accessibility and how it can benefit you (whether future you from aging or you after something else limits your abilities). We’ll review simple testing techniques, basic features and enhancements, coming trends, and where to get help. This isn’t intended to be a deep dive into ARIA, but more of an overall primer for those who aren’t sure where to start nor how it helps them.