WordCamp Omaha 2015

The Jetpack plugin has come a long way and can help us grow our audience through:

• Enewsletters
• Automatic social sharing
• Build-in metrics that are easy to review
• Automated related posts
• And many other great features

Master storyteller and global speaker Christoph Trappe will share how he has doubled his blog traffic through at least weekly content, keyword research and the strategic use of the Jetpack plugin.

Christoph has no connection to the plugin or its developers. He’s just a fan!

WordPress is a great framework, but other frameworks have great ideas inside of them. In this talk, we’ll take a comparative look at the tools and philosophies in WordPress, and compare these to other PHP, Ruby, and .NET frameworks and how we can take advantage of those inside of WordPress right now.

So you know how to write a theme, but do you know how to organize one? Let’s look at some techniques you can use to keep your code separated into logical groups, make it more reusable, and help you sleep better at night. This will not only help you to better maintain your projects, but it will also help with collaboration and the general speed of your work. Whether you are just starting to write themes and plugins, or have been doing it for years, these practices will add to your development chops.

It’s easy to get caught up adding HTML classes (and IDs) to each and every element we want to style, but the fact is, WordPress helps us out with specific targeting by adding its own classes and IDs to certain elements on every page and post. Cleverly utilizing WordPress’s default page build along with CSS’s pseudo classes and combinators makes it possible to be highly specific with our targeted styles while leaving the original HTML completely alone. In short, if we look for ways, we can often avoid adding more classes and wrapping text in spans to have WordPress and CSS do the work for us.

We will cover:

• difference between onpage and offpage SEO
• general WP settings for SEO
• helpful plugins
• picking a keyword
• headers, alt tags, internal linking, meta tags
• categories vs tags

Whether you have experience with design, development, or are ready to build your first theme, there is a lot of planning to be done before you open your favorite design program or code editor. WordPress themes are designed for two audiences: the end user (in the browser), and the site administrator (in the Dashboard), and it’s our job to account for both sets of needs. We will explore some workflows in the design and discovery process, including content mapping, wireframes and general WordPress logic. Whether you’re building a theme for yourself, for your client, or for sale, you can use these methods to build a map for your project before you begin.

All too often designers and developers alike wince at the phrase “command line interface”. In this talk I’m going to prove that you don’t need a neckbeard to use the terminal. If you like the idea of getting more work done in less time, or if you’re just down right curious about what this WP-CLI stuff is all about, then this session is for you!

Today’s web users have the need for speed. With internet and cellular connections getting faster and faster, users expect sites to feel snappy and not make them wait. We as developers must make sure we’re doing our very best to serve those pages quickly. This talk will focus on the things you should be doing, both on the front-end and back-end, when building WordPress themes.

This talk will highlight the many different ways to give back to Core WordPress. At a high level I will go over the core trac ticketing system and how to talk within tickets. I will even be diving into Vagrant and show how to set up a development environment and create a patch. This talk will take some of the ambiguity out of contributing to Core and focus mainly on teaching how to do the little things that lead to bigger impacts.

As web designers and developers, we often focus on the technical aspects of our jobs. Unfortunately, many of us struggle with an important part of a project – communication with our clients. It is an often overlooked piece of the puzzle, but it is directly correlated with outcomes and how the client feels we did our job. In this talk, we will look at communicating with clients and managing expectations in three broad phases of a project – pitching/planning, development, and launching/troubleshooting. Specifically, we will look at steps that will make the client feel involved and important. This level of involvement and communication will help keep clients happy through the entire process, giving us an outstanding outcome.

Child themes, theme frameworks, starter themes … there are so many choices when beginning to build a custom theme. How do you decide where to begin? We’ll talk about how to find a good place to start depending on your skills, comfort level, and the project budget.