WordCamp Columbus 2012

This presentation is a practical guide to the use of a Version Control System (VCS) to keep your theme, plugin, website, or project safe. You will learn the basic concepts common to version control programs like Git, Subversion and Mercurial in both a team and individual development settings. The unique aspects and advantages of using Git will also be covered, including the social aspect of revision control provided by GitHub.

There are tons of ways to integrate social media and digital marketing into WordPress. Knowing how to add Facebook into your site, how to use a twitter conversation in a blog post, and why Pinterest matters is important for your clients and for your blog as well. But before adding APIs and plugins it’s important to know what the site needs to accomplish and who the audience is. This talk will address adding the right digital strategy for your site and then cover the tried and tested ways to add digital marketing to WordPress in order to boost SEO, social engagement, and to add another set of tools to your arsenal.

This is a two-session track.

So, you have been designing and developing, but have come to the point in your career that you are needing to apply your skills to splicing and coding that PSD to WordPress, right? For anyone that has never worked with designing with WordPress, it might be a bit confusing, but really… it is not.

In this session, we WILL assume you know coding like CSS and HTML. We WILL go over what a basic theme should have, and some tricks to make translating that graphic image you made into a WordPress theme. Even if you know intermediate to advance skill level in PHP or other markup languages, this session will at least lead you on the way to coding your theme with the necessary WordPress elements to make your code ninja skills easier.

The important thing to take away from this session is that you should NEVER be intimidated by code, especially when taking a layered graphic like a PSD or another similar file format and making it into a WordPress theme. I hope that my session helps simplify your thinking and allows you to not just think outside of the box, but like Deepak Chopra says “get rid of the box.”

A introduction to using WordPress actions and filters to extend and modify your WordPress site.

In 2009 Ohio Hi-Point Career Center launched the “Hi-Point Journeys” campaign on a WordPress blog long before content marketing was a buzzword. Today, the campaign, based on building content from students, continues and has inspired other school districts to launch similar programs for both communication and educational purposes. This session will take you through the steps to launching and maintaining a content marketing campaign in education.

Let’s face it, theming in WordPress is powerful. Even with all of the great themes, sometimes a custom theme, or custom child theme is needed to make the site just that much better. There are a ton of great WordPress themes out there, but have you ever had the need or desire to create your own theme, even just a child-theme? Where do you start? In this session learn the basics of creating a theme, either brand new or a child theme based upon an existing theme. Find out what files are needed, their uses, and learn some tricks to get started. You won’t learn how to create a complete theme, but you’ll at least get your feet wet and know where to start.

This is a hands-on, two session workshop in which the attendees of our WordCamp will crowdsource the idea for a plugin prior to Camp, then work together to build that plugin during this session, led by Nowell VanHoesen. Prior to coding we will go over the requirements and development best practices. The plugin functionality will be up to the attendees. After the initial functional requirements are complete, we will take suggestions for what additional features can be added. Time permitting the additional functionality will be added, as well.

Use this session to learn the essential information that should be on every website (or blog). Remove the unnecessary clutter to give your website a more focused approach. Learn to design an effective website by seeing live website critiques. This session will teach you the essential information that should be on every website (or blog). Remove the unnecessary clutter to give your website a more focused approach. Learn to design an effective website by seeing live critiques from a full time website developer.

Learn how and why your site will get hacked, how to prevent it from happening, and what to do when you do get hacked.

Many of the themes being created today won’t stand the test of time. How many themes, beyond WordPress defaults Twenty Ten and Twenty Eleven, will still be useful in five years? Points of discussion will include shortcodes, embedded plugins, and theme options.