WordCamp Cape Town 2014

Today, working from home has become more of a reality than ever. Scott digs into the pros and cons of from working at home and if it’s right for you.

There are so many services, apps, and plugins that can help you and your team be more productive with work. Scott has been working specifically w/ WordPress for the past 7 years and hopes to share tips he’s learned along the way from working in client/product and on both remote and office teams.

WordPress has long evolved from just being a blogging platform. It’s capable of being an integral part of any of your web ideas and concepts, regardless how abstract. In this talk, Noel will present his ideas on how we should stop blocking ourselves with design stereotypes and be limitless in our use of WordPress.

Remember the feeling when first discovering WordPress? The feelings of excitement, power and inspiration at the endless opportunities before you?

Emma will be talking about Code4CT, a program that introduces high school girls to coding for the web. The girls are taught how to use WordPress and apply it as a tool to create social impact.

The visual customizer in WordPress is probably the most under-utilised feature in the worlds most popular content management system. While Theme companies spend their days creating intricate page-builders they seem to miss that WordPress already has one. I will show you our take on how to stick to the WordPress core while still being able to build any page you want for your clients using the new (and free!) Hatch theme for WordPress.

Using experiences from NicSocks.com and his previous company, Motribe, Nic will explain the value of real relationships and face to face business in a digital era.

Going through all the different types of caching available to WordPress developers while dispelling myths along the way and then provide a practical method of implementing fragment caching in your code.

Exploring the science behind irresistible WordPress products and services, and how to achieve results (almost) every time.

Noted Google partner and owner of Metis Marketing Solutions, Chantelle Bowyer looks at the three tools that will get you in the good books with Google – Google Adwords, WordPress and Google Analytics. She’ll be delving into why it’s essential for  traffic, development and measurement to be integrated, for maximum results.

Making sure your WordPress website is secure from hackers is a hot topic these days. Learn how to write secure code to prevent attacks such as SQL injection, XSS, and CSRF using WordPress coding standards. We’ll also go through a few useful plugins to help on the server side as well.

Developing a WordPress plugin isn’t as daunting as it sounds. In this workshop, Hugh will show you how to get started with the code, provide some helpful tips and show you how to get your plugin added to the WordPress.org repository. You will be building a brand new plugin from start to finish in this workshop.

Who is this workshop for?

This workshop is for any developers who would like to get started building their first WordPress plugin, but just don’t quite know where to begin.

If you haven’t heard yet, task runners are all the rage this days when it comes to frontend development. However, not many WordPress developers are familiar with them, so Tomaž will be presenting both an introduction to GruntJS (the most popular task runner) and it’s benefits for the developers as well as a hands on course on how to get started and how to most effectively use it for theme development. After this workshop, you’ll wonder how you managed to live without it! 🙂

Throughout his career as a web developer, Tomaž encountered a lot difficult situations (being fired, firing a client himself, handling disputes) that could mostly be avoided if things were communicated properly by both sides. Almost never did these situations arise from the lack of technical know-how but rather from unresponsiveness, missed deadlines, improper solutions, poor documentation, etc. After having founded Codeable, these problems did not go away, and even new ones arose: Poor communication within the team, dissatisfied clients, lack of direction; Every developer encountered one form or another of these problems and in this talk, Tomaž is going to go over them, analyze their causes and suggest a few solutions from which we can all improve our business relationships.

In 2014 the WordPress platform has matured and the ecosystem has grown up, as have the demands and requirements of WordPress site owners. The commercial product space has become noticeably saturated and overnight success for plugin and theme creators is a thing of yesteryear. But never fear there’s still plenty of entrepreneurial opportunity and gold nuggets to be mined if you look in the right places.