🇦🇹 WordCamp Europe 2016

Meet the leaders of some of the leading WordPress-centric consulting agencies worldwide, as they are interviewed by Brian Krogsgard on what it takes to cultivate a happy team, with discussion topics ranging from remote work, salary, management feedback, and personal growth.

Emotional design isn’t just about cute mascots and animated showcases. Real connections happen when you look at even the smallest interaction.

From an impatient button to a eager input field, emotion is a powerful thing we can use to connect to users.

In this talk I’ll explore why emotion is important in every part of the experience and how you can create emotional interfaces.

Meet the leaders of some of the leading WordPress-centric consulting agencies worldwide, as they are interviewed by Brian Krogsgard on what it takes to cultivate a happy team, with discussion topics ranging from remote work, salary, management feedback, and personal growth.

Have you ever wanted to run your own agency? Ever looked around your office and thought, “I could do this better than these guys!”? Ever yearned for more influence and flexibility in your day job? I’m going to tell you how my friends and I started our own WordPress development shop, carved out our niche, and built a successful 10-person firm with clients like the Pathfinder International, the Center for Food Safety, and the Endangered Species Coalition.

How to grow a virtual company with dozens of remote employees and freelancers. The talk will focus on hiring opportunities, delegating activities, identifying key roles for a company and finding the right talent. Once the team is sorted out, we’ll cover project management strategies and tricks, online collaboration (both for code and infrastructure, project management and communication), employee retention, and other key challenges that remote teams struggle with.

Once you’ve started a WordPress Meetup the early rush of having people show up and participate is great, but once you’ve started, how do you keep building momentum? What are the secrets to having it continue to grow? Are there tools and tricks to keeping things fresh and interesting? This talk will give 7 primary areas to address in planning your meetup for growth and engagement. Melbourne’s meetup group has grown from a single multidisciplinary monthly event into 4 monthly meetups happening across disciplines, diverse groups, and geographic regions. There have been a lot of learning experiences in raising up leaders for this group, and in maintaining its success. I’ll share some of those lessons in the context of this talk.

It’s easy to set up an email signup form on your WordPress site, but then what next? It’s all too easy to sit in front of a blank screen asking yourself “What do I say to my subscribers? I must contact them!” I’ll discuss how you can prepare for sending email newsletters your subscribes want to receive and generate ideas so you don’t get writer’s block.

Whether you’re creating a small site for one stake holder or re-designing a large site with many players, understanding how to manage the project is the key to getting anything done. We’ll look at a couple of case studies and learn about methods and strategies that keep a project on track and get the site launched.

Security can be complex, intimidating, and even frightening. Don’t let the enormity of it scare you into inaction. Learn what some of the security researchers and security professionals deal with, and then find out some simple steps you can take to secure your sites.

Base theme, child theme, framework – These are a few of the options you can use for creating a WordPress Theme. Weather you are developing a theme for your personal blog, a clients website, or a theme to be used by other sites and the WordPress community, it is important to know the different approaches for getting started with theme development.

Getting burnt by a project can leave you and your team feeling unmotivated and your agency unprofitable. Using our proven Discovery & Definition approach to project planning you’ll learn how to plan and budget a WordPress project successfully from the beginning whilst keeping both you clients and team happy.

Meet the leaders of some of the leading WordPress-centric consulting agencies worldwide, as they are interviewed by Brian Krogsgard on what it takes to cultivate a happy team, with discussion topics ranging from remote work, salary, management feedback, and personal growth.

Meet the leaders of some of the leading WordPress-centric consulting agencies worldwide, as they are interviewed by Brian Krogsgard on what it takes to cultivate a happy team, with discussion topics ranging from remote work, salary, management feedback, and personal growth.

How can you make sure that the themes and plugins do not clash? This talk will be covering the best practices so that your themes and plugins work in harmony. Ulrich will be taking code examples from reviewing themes on WordPress.org and explaining what the adverse effects can be and how to fix them.

Did you know Japanese is the second active locale based on the number of active WordPress installs, following the default US English? In this talk, Naoko will share some stories from the Japanese WordPress Community to demonstrate what it takes to grow a local community.

Tips and tricks from my experience of managing the Russian WordPress community for 8+ years.

This talk shares the impact of WordPress contributions to business, professional growth & our community.

• Five For The Future.
• Where to contribute.
• Community.
• Other contributions.

This gives a walkthrough that may let you discover what you can enjoy sharing to WordPress & continue doing it & inspire others to share too.

Web agencies often dream of building successful products. Making money while you sleep is an exciting prospect for agencies used to selling hours. Making the leap from a successful web agency to a successful product organization is a big one. This session will give examples and concrete advice on how to be successful.

Tooling in WordPress has advanced rapidly in recent years. Not so long ago we were using basic development environments with zero automation. Times have changed and today we have some amazing tools at our disposal. But which ones should you use? I’ll show you the top tools and how to use them for maximum efficiency.

This talk explains how to start and the basics about this awesome command line tool to manage WordPress sites.

Multisite is often treated as a dark corner of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite to give context to some of the early decisions. We’ll walk through the structure and load process to show how straightforward it really is. And to help you work with multisite, we’ll cover some common situations and solutions.

WordPress search is notoriously lacking. Why? MySQL is not search optimized. Elasticsearch is a scalable database that when coupled with WordPress produces extremely powerful results. This talk will cover what Elasticsearch is, why it’s important, and integrating it with a WordPress website using a 10up open source plugin called ElasticPress. ElasticPress has become increasingly popular in the WordPress community even being leveraged by popular hosting companies such as WP Engine.

Meet the leaders of some of the leading WordPress-centric consulting agencies worldwide, as they are interviewed by Brian Krogsgard on what it takes to cultivate a happy team, with discussion topics ranging from remote work, salary, management feedback, and personal growth.

If there’s standing room only, or if you just prefer to view while hanging out and talking with friends, the Interview and Q&A with Matt Mullenweg will also be streamed live to screens in Halle G, the lobby and (most likely) the Leopold.

We’re excited to welcome back WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg for a fourth consecutive year at WordCamp Europe! This year we have something special lined up, a 30m exclusive interview with Matt by Brian Krogsgard of Post Status. During the second half of this hour-long session, Matt will field questions from the audience. So get yours ready!

At The New York Times we use Scoop, a homegrown CMS written in Java. Like WordPress, it uses TinyMCE for editing the article text. This editor is only for modifying the actual text content of the article. Rich content is either edited in a separate pane or in one-off CMSes.

I’m currently working on a team to create a next-generation editor for Scoop, built on top of ProseMirror, an alternative document model editor with customizable schemas, which will replace our TinyMCE instance. Let’s discuss what (and how horrible) contenteditable is, different library approaches to it, and whether ProseMirror could be useful to WordPress.

Advertising can be enjoyable, entertaining, moving and even beautiful. Why is it such an awful experience online?

This talk addresses these questions: Can we make ads better so we don’t have to hate them? Can developers learn to speak the language ad-ops uses?

So you’ve created a plugin or a theme for WordPress? Awesome! It doesn’t stop there. We will discuss why great support matters and give you simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing your time or effort.

So you’ve created a plugin or a theme for WordPress? Awesome! It doesn’t stop there. We will discuss why great support matters and give you simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing your time or effort.

During a decade spent as a professional musician, I discovered web development and then WordPress, and made a primary career switch. While on the surface they sound incongruous, I believe that skills I learned and honed as a classical pianist have translated directly to becoming a leader in open source software development. Join me as I take a look at those skills and celebrate alternative paths into WordPress.

Come on a journey through all things WordPress REST API, we don’t have much time so strap yourselves in!

From the basics of REST to advanced customer endpoints, auth, JavaScript usage and WordPress to WordPress communication, Joe attempts to provide a quick-fire look at many areas of the REST API and application development.

Expect many code examples, case studies, visualisations and metaphors; if you do get lost, be consoled by the fact that Joe is almost certainly lost too!

WordPress Hardening – Ten tips in ten minutes (Maurizio Pelizzone)

WordPress Hardening is an underestimated problem for many people and even when you keep your system updated you are not completely risk free. Many projects, after golive, are left in the lurch without love… I’d like to share some small improvements that are achievable with very little effort and can make the difference.

What’s New in PHP7 and what to expect in PHP7.1 (Dan Blows)

PHP7 was released in December, with a hefty speed boost and new features to improve the quality of your code. I’ll be giving an overview of the key features and how you can take advantage of them in WordPress, and closing with some insights into what might be in PHP7.1.

I will cover different tools for faster and easier development of WordPress projects from the local set up to acceptance testing. The focus is on the improvements that we all can do in our daily development work that can help us write cleaner code, deploy it safely on remote servers, test it and also to be able to include easier new people in our teams and onboard them.

Ever been baffled by an online comment? Said something online that’s blown up in your face? Communicating through text alone is a challenge, but communicating in text in real-time in a multinational context is insane. This talk will address the challenges of online communication and look at how you can communicate effectively through just the medium of text.

I’ll talk about my humble beginnings as a WordPress user, developing a feature plugin and how I eventually got commit access to WordPress core. What is it like to lead such a project? What is it like to break the web? Also, I will reveal what Swiss chocolate has to do with getting commit access…

How to integrate Composer – PHP package manager – into process of developing WordPress websites: where to start, what tools could be used, what changes in workflow should be made. People would get practical advice on how to start with configuration examples and common problems solution. That’s the real-world case that my team and I use on everyday basis.

Flexbox is a new way to create responsive layouts. In this talk we’ll walk through some of the flexbox features and explore how you can start using flexbox right away to make your life as a theme developer much easier.

How accessible is WordPress now, which improvements were made in the last years and what still needs to be done? Where can you find help and documentation to improve your code? What are the new Accessibility Standards, added to the WordPress Coding Standards? And as a bonus: 3 quick tips, to easily improve the accessibility of your theme or plugin.

In 2015 a chain of encounters led a group of strangers to reorganize the WordPress Italian Community. After endless hours on Slack, we have regular monthly meetups in half a dozen cities, Contributors meetings and at least 3 WordCamps planned for 2016. This is our story and we hope it can be your community’s story too.

Unless you have ample money, you need good people skills to get your way in open source projects. (Honestly even with ample money). Get a glimpse at how Drupal 8’s multilingual initiative involved 1300+ people over 4.5 years under my leadership in dramatically improving multilingual features. So much so that: https://twitter.com/tkraftner/status/671267078616272896

Working on and with the web is engaging in that most human of endeavors: Communication. Even so, it’s easy to forget that the people we interact with and those who access and interact with our creations are just that: People. Learn how to make empathy and acceptance driving forces for your interactions and designs to build great informational experiences for everyone.

Your content is trapped – How a proper content architecture can save it (Thomas Kräftner)

Face it, a lot of great content is trapped in pages and an amorphous post content field. Looking at an example project we’ll see how a clean content structure can simplify content management and get your site prepared for future changes. It will make your client happy now as well as for years after the launch.

Publish in 10 Minutes Per Day (Andrea Badgley)

I had a writer’s block and it was horrible: I felt uncreative, watched my blog dry up, and crawled in the corner and cried. I felt like a loser. But I’m NOT a loser. So I fixed it. I created a blogging plan that involved only 10 minutes each day. My writer’s block disappeared, my blog stats climbed, and I now know how to turn it around when I find myself neglecting my site. Whether you are a personal blogger or run a business website, this talk will give strategies for adding content without huge time investments. Learn how to eliminate writer’s block, create material relevant to your site’s purpose, and build a regular publishing habit.

As WordPress grows beyond 25% of the internet, we have a unique opportunity to leverage that power. This talk will propose the Connected WordPress initiative, to connect all WordPress sites together into an Open Platform, for social, sharing and security.

This talk will cross between technical and non-technical topics to explain why and how NewsCorp Australia successfully migrated the largest ‘news’ websites in Australia to WordPress VIP. It will showcase and prove to other companies/developers that it is possible to host sites as large as news.com.au (over 10million views per day) on WordPress.com

This talk will cross between technical and non-technical topics to explain why and how NewsCorp Australia successfully migrated the largest ‘news’ websites in Australia to WordPress VIP. It will showcase and prove to other companies/developers that it is possible to host sites as large as news.com.au (over 10million views per day) on WordPress.com

In this talk we’ll discover the breadth of new WordPress interfaces enabled by leveraging the WordPress REST API, such as visualizations and new editor experiences. How can our API client libraries and the applications that use them be designed for maximum flexibility? The future of WordPress is not one interface, but many.

We all use and love open source software — and being a maintainer of a popular project can be stressful and turn you away from what you love. Join Daniel Bachhuber, unfortunate maintainer of many open source projects over the last decade, to explore the challenges of being a maintainer of a popular open source project.

The Plugin Directory is the backbone of the success of WordPress. It provides tens of thousands of possibilities to expand your WordPress site and add the most unusual features. It has been doing its job for almost ten years without difficulties or major failures. But it’s time for an overhaul. In this session Konstantin explores new features, a shiny new design, and provides a unique look behind the scenes of a brand new Plugin Directory, ready to take on the next decade of WordPress growth.

Whether it’s differences between European and American business cultures, or the age-old battle for budget allocation between marketing and IT departments, how do you optimize your interaction with clients that have different personalities and business practices than your own?

Your content is trapped – How a proper content architecture can save it (Thomas Kräftner)

Face it, a lot of great content is trapped in pages and an amorphous post content field. Looking at an example project we’ll see how a clean content structure can simplify content management and get your site prepared for future changes. It will make your client happy now as well as for years after the launch.

Publish in 10 Minutes Per Day (Andrea Badgley)

I had a writer’s block and it was horrible: I felt uncreative, watched my blog dry up, and crawled in the corner and cried. I felt like a loser. But I’m NOT a loser. So I fixed it. I created a blogging plan that involved only 10 minutes each day. My writer’s block disappeared, my blog stats climbed, and I now know how to turn it around when I find myself neglecting my site. Whether you are a personal blogger or run a business website, this talk will give strategies for adding content without huge time investments. Learn how to eliminate writer’s block, create material relevant to your site’s purpose, and build a regular publishing habit.

Have you ever compared yourself to other designers / developers and felt like you’re not in their league?

Do you write code, but wouldn’t dare to call yourself a developer?

Do you shy away from contributing or publishing your code / designs / projects openly, because you’re worried you’re not good enough?

At WordCamps, are you afraid to ask “stupid” questions or admit if you don’t understand something?

Yes?!

Congrats, you’re suffering from Impostor Syndrome.

Most of us do, but not many talk about it!

I’d like to share my struggles with it and how I’m overcoming it. And so can you!

Why You Want a Four Star Review Everyone gets bad reviews. It’s the nature of the beast when you put your product and code out there for everyone to use and abuse. But too many people spend their time fighting the wrong battle and striving for the wrong ratings. Don’t become the death of your own product; handle your reviews sanely and you will be the success you’ve always wanted to be. Key Takeaways: What to look for in reviews, how to take good from the worst reviews, how to handle yourself in bad reviews, understanding what is experience, making the most of reviews.

WordPress is over twelve years old now. How does the software and the project as a whole continue to move forward, maintain relevance, push boundaries, and assert influence when it has to compete with much leaner, cooler, and more modern alternatives? I’ll attempt to answer these points in this presentation.

While speaking about accessibility I’ve realised that for some people the key to understanding why accessibility is so important comes from experiencing how people with disabilities actually use the websites we build. So I’ll be demoing two pieces of assistive technology (AT): Dragon – voice recognition software and NVDA – a screen reader.

Handling Anxiety (Tom Nowell)

Our work can be stressful, and when stressed we face many problems stemming from burnout, anxiety, depression, and others. In this talk, I’ll walk through my own experiences with anxiety as I’ve progressed in my career, and share the strategies I’ve found that can help developers and support take care of themselves, along with the support that companies can provide for prevention

The Science of Happiness (Davor Altman)

How to achieve happiness? I will present the formulas for Customer Happiness, practical ways to implement them, and how a scientific approach to Happiness can increase profits and improve businesses. Greatest benefits of this talk would have plugin and theme developers/companies and WordPress consulting agencies.

During their career, every freelancer develops their own strategies for pricing their services most often charging by the hour or per project. In this talk, Tomaz is going to highlight some of the mistakes we all do, that hurt is as individuals and as the industry as a whole.

Having the ability to set legible body copy is an absolute must, and we’ve come a long way with web typography since the dawn of web design. However, it sometimes feels like we have allowed the lack of variety prior to the rise of web fonts to dampen our creativity now that thousands of web fonts are at our disposal. Have usability conventions and the web’s universality steered us away from proper art direction? Have we forgotten about art direction altogether? Let’s look at ways we can push typographic design on the web further, beyond the status quo of today.

How to achieve happiness? I will present the formulas for Customer Happiness, practical ways to implement them, and how a scientific approach to Happiness can increase profits and improve businesses. Greatest benefits of this talk would have plugin and theme developers/companies and WordPress consulting agencies.

Handling Anxiety (Tom Nowell)

Our work can be stressful, and when stressed we face many problems stemming from burnout, anxiety, depression, and others. In this talk, I’ll walk through my own experiences with anxiety as I’ve progressed in my career, and share the strategies I’ve found that can help developers and support take care of themselves, along with the support that companies can provide for prevention

The Science of Happiness (Davor Altman)

How to achieve happiness? I will present the formulas for Customer Happiness, practical ways to implement them, and how a scientific approach to Happiness can increase profits and improve businesses. Greatest benefits of this talk would have plugin and theme developers/companies and WordPress consulting agencies.

SEO has gone from a technical trade to being more marketing focussed. Joost & Marieke will talk about how to gain great rankings & satisfied visitors by writing good content. Focussing on SEO copywriting has a major pitfall. We give examples and tips on how to write a post that is both readable as well as SEO-friendly.

SEO has gone from a technical trade to being more marketing focussed. Joost & Marieke will talk about how to gain great rankings & satisfied visitors by writing good content. Focussing on SEO copywriting has a major pitfall. We give examples and tips on how to write a post that is both readable as well as SEO-friendly.

WordPress Hardening – Ten tips in ten minutes (Maurizio Pelizzone)

WordPress Hardening is an underestimated problem for many people and even when you keep your system updated you are not completely risk free. Many projects, after golive, are left in the lurch without love… I’d like to share some small improvements that are achievable with very little effort and can make the difference.

What’s New in PHP7 and what to expect in PHP7.1 (Dan Blows)

PHP7 was released in December, with a hefty speed boost and new features to improve the quality of your code. I’ll be giving an overview of the key features and how you can take advantage of them in WordPress, and closing with some insights into what might be in PHP7.1.

We are building free software tools that both the public and developers can use to check how a website is doing with regards to privacy and see what measures can be taken (and how). We’ll present this work and also talk about how developers are affected by the new EU data protection laws and the death of Safe Harbor.

We are building free software tools that both the public and developers can use to check how a website is doing with regards to privacy and see what measures can be taken (and how). We’ll present this work and also talk about how developers are affected by the new EU data protection laws and the death of Safe Harbor.

Responsive design has changed the way we think about designing websites — we have to cater to wide range of devices and interactions and adapt our design process accordingly. Learn about the benefits of utilising a style guide to establish a strong visual language which will help you design and code stand–alone modular components.

This talk tells how a completely distributed team works using the example of Hyperion, one of the teams that worked on the new WordPress.com, codenamed Calypso. The audience will be able to see in a deeper detail how a distributed team is organized and it will get a few driving principles on how to replicate that themselves.

The introduction of Calypso has brought the notion of a modern JavaScript approach to the front and center of the WordPress community. What does an admin UI built entirely in JavaScript (with technologies like React that have taken the JavaScript community by storm) mean for WordPress and how we think of JavaScript in the project? Explain some of Calypso’s core development values that have driven us from the very start at Automattic. How does it look internally and why it’s not powered by any “framework”? How can you get started, contribute, and begin making cool things with it?

The average web page takes fifteen seconds to load, this can lower the PageSpeed score to the low 30s. Working together web designers and devs can make sites readable in two seconds, working towards a web seven times faster.

Find out how to get a PageSpeed score in the 90s. What are the rules you have to follow, what are those you have to break?