WordCamp Cape Town 2015

For business owners looking to grow sales of your online store or agencies looking to help their clients be more successful online, this workshop will run you through all the tools and philosophies WooThemes has implemented to become a strong WordPress brand and profitable company.

Learn all about how to measure, grow and market your self online.

Whats coming next in core, cool community projects, and future innovations for the industry.

The Hands on Workshop will be an end to end walkthrough of building your e-commerce store from scratch with WooCommerce. We will learn about the foundational concepts of WooCommerce, How the products and the order management processes work followed by setting up a Payment Gateway to process funds. This will be followed with configuring Shipping for the products through a 3rd party courier company. Finally we will test our store with a purchase. We will also be discussing the best practices to be followed for setting up your store and some tips for customization.

The participants will be required to bring in a laptop with an installation of WordPress to peddle with and plenty of courage.

The WordPress Customizer is taking over from the Theme Options panel. It provides a live-preview interface for themes, which can take your site to the next level.

Join Marc while he takes you through the basics of programming with the WordPress Customizer API.

In a world where poverty, hunger and unemployment are rife, where we are constantly reminded that we live in a time of turmoil on a planet that we are slowly killing, can we actually make a difference?

We take a look at some of the people and organisations who, along with the local WordPress community, are using technology to make a real difference.

Intended for business owners who don’t necessarily have technical skills, this workshop will help you figure out what you need to look for in a website developer, what to expect during your project, and the pitfalls that you should look out for.

In this workshop I plan to give an overview of using a configuration of Vagrant such as VVV in your day to day WordPress development. Learn about how you can easily share projects environments across teams and quickly get setup with new sites, themes or plugins among other great benefits. I plan to give use cases to show you how easy it is to get started via command line. I’ll also be touching on other great tools such as WP-CLI, Gruntjs, Xdebug and more. All in the interest of improving your local development environment.

We’re at a point now where we have these incredibly powerful query classes in WordPress core that allow you to really tailor down to whatever criterion you want. In this workshop, Drew will provide some real-world examples of some crazy stuff you can do with queries – it’s very much a “sky’s the limit” kind of situation. Queries are really interesting and powerful, and a lot of people are intimidated by advanced queries, even with the abstraction layers that WordPress has put in place.

Starting a website is easy with WordPress, but having a clear goal in mind is vital for determining design, structure and content. In this workshop we’ll first focus on setting clear goals, before we in the next step will translate that into a better website. We’ll look at different types of goals like personal blogging, sharing portfolio, revenue gain, community building, and so on. Together we’ll discuss what would be the best approach for each of those specific goals.

This workshop is ideal for WordPress beginners who’ve never built a website or those who want to take their website to the next level.

WordCamps are great, but how do you get the most out of your attendance at these events? More to the point – how do you get the most out of WordCamp Cape Town 2015?

WordCamps are about more than just listening to talks and (if you’re feeling confident) asking a question or two. There’s a whole host of other things to do, people to meet and so much more. In this introductory talk, Hugh will shows you just what you can do to make this year’s WordCamp Cape Town a hugely rich experience that will leave you changed forever.

This will be a user-focused session on the foundations of how WordPress works and how you can use it (the basics) to your full advantage. This requires no coding knowledge.

A talk on how Anthropology and other human sciences can be applied to identifying customer journeys and improving customer experience as a whole. Marcela will focus on behavioural principles and how these are applied to marketing and user research projects.

Backwards compatibility is a cornerstone of WordPress core development philosophy. It is, unfortunately, not something nearly enough plugin or theme developers take seriously. When a plugin or theme project gains 10s or 100s of thousands of users, backwards compatibility can be crucial to the overall health of the project.

Ensuring backwards compatibility is more of a mental mindset than anything. Developers have to mentally make the commitment and say to themselves “I will NOT break installs during upgrades”.

The WP REST API is slated to be included into WordPress this year. This is one of the most drastic shifts (if not the most drastic) in the WordPress landscape. Companies like Wired.com, the New York Times and Rant Sports are using the API today to craft incredible experiences on top of WordPress. We often talk of vanity metrics, ideas like “WordPress runs 23% of the web”. Once the WP REST API is in WordPress, these become meaningless. WordPress will eventually be running parts of 100% of the web. This talk outlines the history of the API, the differences between the current stable version and what will likely be in WordPress, as well as paradigms and patterns within the project and some practical examples of how it might be used.

This talk will introduce the concept of website personalization, and walk through some of the many ways available to provide personlised content to your visitors, from the simple to complex machine learning approaches. The talk will have a specific focus on WooCommerce sites.

The open source community works because of the amount of knowledge that is shared between people. Although everyone has knowledge and experiences to share, many do not feel they have anything worthy of saying.

In this talk, you will learn that everyone has something to share, how to generate talk topics based on conversations you have every day with your peers, and discuss the different methods of sharing – not all of it is on a stage.

We will also review the impact of the share mentality and how it is helpful even for your business.