WordCamp Manchester 2015

I’ve been looking into using a more modern approaching to deploying and managing WordPress. Composer, dependency management, has taken the PHP world by storm and is a fantastic way to quickly set up a site and lock down versions of plugins as well as opening up an entire world of code repositories for use in your own plugins. Once you’ve tasted the power of Composer you can never go back.

On average images comprise over 2/3rds of the size of a page request. This gives us a wide birth in order to look at different ways in order to optimise images and potentially reduce this proportion and decrease the total page size.

Without a clear tracking strategy you should not be investing time in content marketing. Tracking your digital marketing activities accurately will enable you to justify the time you are investing, see a clear return on your investment and direct you efforts in the future based on past results. Reviewing the core tools to track your digital marketing activities accurately, how to integrate these tools into a effective process and how to deal with the growing Google Analytics referral spam problem.

How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Despite the varied and plentiful choices for WordPress hosting that are available, there is still something liberating about running your own servers. Providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services have reduced or removed most of the barriers for those that want to take the leap, but Systems Administration remains an art of its own. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances. My session will introduce Ansible, touch on vagrant and cloud hosting, show how to deploy WordPress using Ansible, and demonstrate how we can re-use these tools across multiple environments.

We have just finished developing our first ‘proper’ product. I say ‘proper’ because although as a 3 person agency we’ve built many a plugin, they are often treated like mistresses; only worked on in the evenings and weekends. This product we wanted to treat like a client. I’d like to talk about the process of creating a product, how we built up a financial buffer from client work, the reasons why decided to move from being a client facing agency to a product building agency, whether it is working and the lessons learnt along the way.

Development process is a critical part of making a WordPress project a success. Defining a workflow and establishing development tools can help you code more efficiently. This session is intended for developers looking to fine tune the tools they use to code more efficiently.

I will detail setting up a secure, performant, VPS using modern up to date techniques. Covering WordPress, Nginx, caching, DNS, email, and security.

If you’re not already using the customiser to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customiser action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls for more advanced input options.

Testing process is very important as it helps to speed up your development workflow, keep your source code away from bugs, improve user experience and build high quality products.

In this session I will talk about:
– Testing tips and tools
– Automated tests
– Usability tests and how to get the most out of users feedback

How can you improve on the default WordPress dashboard; and make the post editing toolbar less cluttered, more intuitive and relevant for your users? All it takes is a bit of forethought and a sprinking of code in functions.php. Why do this? To make life easier for content editors, help them avoid some common mistakes, and put some useful new options on the editing toolbar.

As a content writer who has collaborated with various web agencies on a freelance basis, I’ve experienced some issues that have made my role harder than it should be and problematic for the client. I’d like to talk about how web agencies can work with content writers more efficiently to assist with speedier projects and happier clients. In my talk, I would like to cover these main areas: attitudes towards content writing / content writers, communication and the systems to put in place to aid it positively and how your client and content writer can work together to assist a successful project.

WordPress doesn’t live in isolation but’s sits as part of a stack. From the operating system, to the web server each aspect of the stack should be carefully chosen. In addition WordPress can be enhanced by using other application in tandem. Tim takes a look at the eco-system that WordPress lives in, to help people create a very modern WordPress stack.

So you’ve got a blog, chosen a great-looking theme, added some plug-ins. Now you “just” need to write some content that people are going to want to read and share with their network. That means having a content strategy. It doesn’t have to be complicated but you need to think about that strategy every time you sit down to write a blog post. I’ll be drawing on journalistic skills to help you devise your own content strategy including:- – Deciding what to write about. And when. And where. And how. – Making it easier for people to find your content. – Engaging with your target audience

After freelancing for just over a year now and having left a well paid job this talk outlines lessons I have learned from taking the plunge to being a freelancer and some tips and tricks I have learned along the way. This talk will benefit anyone looking to become a freelancer or any current freelancers that are looking for some tips and tricks on getting by.