WordCamp Buffalo 2019

A frank and honest conversation with women in WordPress who have been involved for different amounts of time in WordPress – ranging from development to designer to marketer.

Panelists will include:

• Chrissie Pollock
• Michelle Ames
• Jen Witkowski
• Sarah Rowe

Mindfulness is the future of work – from Google and Microsoft to Cheerios and Aetna Insurance. Workplaces and employees are embracing mindfulness in health and wellness programs through North America & Europe. Learn how the science affects our brain making us calmer & healthier.

This session will highlight different methods one can use to tell their own stories. In addition to highlighting ways of compiling information and displaying it, attendees will also learn how to implement these ideas on their own sites. While focused on genealogy, the content is applicable for any type of story.

A panel discussion with members of the WordPress community exploring ethical issues that can arise when working with clients, with each other, and within the WordPress community at large.

Panelists will include:

• Kiera Howe
• Nick Adams
• Maryann Reissig
•  

WordPress is a great place for visual artists to share their work, but getting things set up can be challenging. In this talk, I’ll cover everything from preparing imagery of artwork for the web, useful built-in WordPress functions, recommended plugins, and improving the user’s viewing experience. I will also demonstrate my free WordPress theme, optimized for artists.

Over 15 million U.S. Internet users have some form of impairment that affects their ability to use the Internet.

In this talk, we will share some simple ways to improve your site’s accessibility. These changes help everyone. As an extra bonus, accessibility improves your search engine optimization (SEO).

By the end of this session, you will be able…
1. To understand why accessibility is helpful for everyone.
2. To help make your website better for the visually impaired.
3. To help make your website better for the hearing impaired.
4. To help make your website better for the mobility impaired.
5. To improve your website SEO.

Websites can be a good way for students and instructors to share information, but the coding requirements of some web design platforms can create a nearly insurmountable barrier. I have found WordPress very useful for both teaching and research because it allows beginners to design pages without coding but still allows flexibility and modification of the code. I will discuss two ways I have used WordPress: in a student-run blog for a course and in a website I built using Divi to promote my research projects. I will highlight some of the Divi widgets and components that I have found particularly useful.

A panel discussion with members of the WordPress community exploring ethical issues that can arise when working with clients, with each other, and within the WordPress community at large.

Panelists will include:

• Kiera Howe
• Nick Adams
• Maryann Reissig
•  

The WordPress community is comprised of people and their relationships with one another and the open source CMS itself. Combined we are a global neighborhood, complete with volunteers, freelancers, employees, a marketplace, and a multitude of opportunities; opportunities for relationships, working, learning, teaching, sharing, volunteering, and more.

At its foundation, its most fundamental part, this neighborhood is built by every individual member. We are each an integral part of this growing, morphing phenomenon, so it is up to us to ensure that it is a robust living organism.

How do we do that?

• For Myself: by making sure I stay healthy both physically and emotionally
• For You: by checking in on my friends and coworkers to help where needed
• For Us: by contributing to the community in thoughtful and deliberate ways

This talk will share ideas to keep us all healthy, learning, and flourishing, for the betterment of ourselves, each other, and the WordPress neighborhood.

With all the new changes to WordPress with Gutenberg, many people are confused.
I’m going to show you how to create your home, about and contact pages in 30 minutes using Gutenberg blocks.

What is Travis CI and how is it used to automate the developer workflow and save a lot of time.

In this session, I will cover how to connect with others in the WordPress community, how to build relationships and trust with other professionals, best practices for successful partnerships and mistakes to avoid so that your partnership can thrive.

This topic is relevant to anyone who wants to get more connected in the WordPress community as a contributor or start working with others in the community in a professional manner.

Description: Session Abstract:
It has been 5 yrs since High Performance WordPress and a lot has changed. This is an updated talk with new material that builds on the lessons learned in my 2014 WCNYC talk. There is a discussion about theme and plugin design.

Goal: 
Teach developers how to design with performance in mind. How should you structure your theme and plugin code to not be a bottle neck to page load time. What are some of the tools you can use to analyze your code to improve the efficiency. 

This talk is also a good session for non devs to catch some Zzzzz (just kidding), but seriously devs will be on the edge of their seats taking notes and learning new stuff.

Site owners/maintainers will learn about important concepts like CDN configurations and tools they can use so that they may have informed discussions with their developers/consultants.

We will look at a few of the many ways Google Data Studio can help you as a WordPress user. All the examples will be made available to attendees to steal, er… use on their own sites.

• How to start with free templates – Steal from the best!
• How to see an overview of all your sites in one report.
• Uncovering traffic mysteries on your site.
• Finding your audience questions from Search Console in 5 minutes.

The plan is to have plenty of time for audience questions also.