🇺🇸 WordCamp Phoenix 2023

As WordPress makes an effort to modernize, developers are going to begin seeing many of the new futures from latest PHP releases in their everyday lives. Maybe you have been working in a legacy project, or (like me) you took a job that didn’t code in PHP at all, and now you are coming into the the latest PHP. This talk will walk you through what you need to know in order to survive and thrive in the world of modern PHP.

A typical WordPress custom application is built by defining some Custom Post Types, adding custom meta fields (often with Advanced Custom Fields), and maybe an underlying plugin for membership management or commerce. It’s good stuff, but since Gutenberg arrived, it’s possible to create custom blocks that carry out functions like collecting data, displaying it, and managing application logic. If you’re developing the blocks, it’s not exactly no-code, but for end users tweaking business applications on their sites, it actually can be. Here’s how to do it, and why you might want to.

ACF Flexible Content Rows have been the backend of choice for years for many web development agencies. But as the block editor reaches maturity, and our beloved ACF meta boxes get pushed further down the screen, it’s probably time to update your workflow. ACF Blocks can be a great first step towards bringing your content into the block editor- without changing much of your coding practices. We’ll take a look at a common landing page in Flexible Content Rows and migrate it to using ACF Blocks in real time- no JavaScript build process required.

Clients don’t know what they don’t know. What web solutions are right for them? How does WordPress come into the picture? Have you left out something vital?

All these questions and more will be explored as we talk about matching clients’ needs with what your agency offers without pulling teeth or pulling your hair out. Practical tips, and strategies for successful relationship building that leads to closing the deal.

Ecommerce is here to stay and there’s no better WordPress commerce extension than WooCommerce. But opening a new shop online can leave you wondering where to start!

The WooCommerce starting five will set you up with everything you need to get started with an online store using WordPress.

Queue the 90s Chicago Bulls intro music, Sirius by the Alan Parsons project! 🎶

At center, number 1, PAYMENTS.
At forward, number 2, TAX COLLECTION.
The other forward, number 3, SHIPPING.
At the guard position, number 4, AUTOMATION.
And at the other guard spot, number 5, SITE DESIGN.

With this starting lineup on the floor, you’ll be shooting threes and dunking all over your opponents — or at least selling your products online — in no time!

Don’t forget that crucial sixth man, though, leading that second unit: some additional must-have plugins for every store.

This introductory WooCommerce rundown will go over all the pieces needed to get up and running — with lots of basketball puns and gifs, of course.

The problem with website performance is that it depends on loads of factors.
It can be that your server resources are not enough for the website’s needs.
Or enough, but not configured properly.
It can be media on your website loading at the wrong time, or in the wrong size, or in the wrong format.
It can be an icon font loading 300KB of data while it’s only 1 single 1KB icon that is actually being used.
It can be an inefficiently built slider, or popup, or media player, or menu module that is loading its assets not at the right time, or loading too many of them.
It can be a slow response from the 3rd party that your website depends on to load its data properly.

It can be literally anything. Or a compound effect of a few.

But at the very core, there is just one single reason why your Core Web Vitals are not passing.
I see it all the time with my clients, with both those who are developers and those who are not. Despite the fact that they invest a lot of time and money in website performance, often the results don’t seem to be worth the effort. Most of the disappointment comes from the fact that people are solving problems that have an insignificant to zero impact on website performance. Getting small results creates this frustration around website performance and the stereotype of it being a black box that only a few “chosen ones” can open.

This is absolutely not true. In this talk, I will show how to identify the right problem to fix and target your efforts efficiently to pass Core Web Vitals.
And who knows, maybe afterwards, you would agree that performance optimization is a fun and extremely rewarding game to play.

WordPress is an awesome platform with a vibrant community of developers and a huge market share. Even though WordPress developers are a dime a dozen, it can still be difficult to find developers who really know their craft.

Don’t be “just another WordPress developer”. Learn how to create a roadmap for growth, hone your craft, gain confidence and stand out from the crowd.

In this presentation, you will learn:

1. How to identify where you are in the learning process.
2. What you should be focusing on right now to optimize your learning.
3. Mistakes you should avoid when learning new things.

Ultimately, the concepts learned here can be applied to learning any number of things, but we’ll be specifically focused on learning WordPress development.

Every day we learn about a new data breach that has exposed our private personal information, including usernames and passwords, to malicious attackers. As more and more breaches happen, including the breach that happened at LastPass last August, it is becoming increasingly evident that using the traditional username/password combo isn’t working. With less than 30% of people actually using two-factor authentication to protect their personal logins from being exploited, information security has an authentication problem.

Luckily, we have something on the immediate horizon to help us. That is passkeys. Based on the WebAuthn standard, passkeys are based on Public Key Cryptography, a technology that has been used since the 1970s to keep authenticate and protect sensitive information.

Lax security can affect our WordPress sites, but also our social media, our bank accounts, and so much more. Offering better authentication with passkeys to our eCommerce, membership and other users reduces friction and makes logging in easier. It protects against brute force attacks as well as phishing attempts making security stronger across the board.

In this talk, we’ll walk through what passkeys are, show you how they work with a couple of different implementations, and show you where and how you can get started with passkeys. If you’re a developer looking to implement passkeys in your project, we’ll even show you where you can get started with code samples and support from the security community.

Many things come together to speed up a website. Some people still use PHP 7 or no object cache at all. This talk will give you insights into how big sites do their scaling and what you need to know to improve the performance of your site yourself or what questions you need to ask the people who could help you.
Scaling WordPress and WooCommerce is best done when focused on the primary reasons, which is usually slow code. And there are tools that aren’t WordPress plugins that professionals use to pinpoint the cause of slow sites.

Get ready to take your website-building skills to the next level and slam dunk your online presence with the new Site Editor of WordPress!

Join us for a practice session as we review the latest features that are sure to elevate your game. We’ll cover key fundamentals for using the block editor, patterns, reusable blocks, templates, template parts, theme blocks, styles, and more. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced user, this session will provide valuable insights and actionable tips for making the most of the new Site Editor.

WordPress’ contribution to the open web is just beginning. By leveraging the decentralized nature of blockchain technology, WordPress sites can give users more control over their data and online identities. New ways of building community are emerging, let’s explore how WordPress can lead the way.

Being a security enthusiast I always care about online security. I started to explore WordPress a year ago and was impressed with its ability and potential. It has got everything for an individual, business or organization to have their internet presence through own website. In fact, I created my own bio page using WordPress.

After hosting my website, the next thing came to my mind was to check security of my website. I used couple of free and open source tools to scan my website for security. Further I went ahead and figured out ways how to mitigate the discovered security risks.

No doubt, the web hosting websites have options for providing security to any website. But that comes at a cost. In this session, I want to show other how can they not only check security posture of their WordPress websites also apply fix to those by themselves. WordPress also has free plugins available for the same purpose. I this session I have planned to talk about both manual fix as well as security plugin.

In addition, I also want to talk about some additional measures such as:

1. Limit login attempts to prevent brute force attacks
2. Use a security plugin to enable two-factor authentication.
3. Limit access to your wp-admin and wp-login pages.
4. Use a security plugin to automatically scan your website for malware
5. Keeping the plugins up to date.

I was an engineer before I knew what an engineer really was. Before I ever earned the formal title of “developer” in any professional setting, I learned to modify, extend, enhance, combine, and otherwise transform various aspects of the WordPress ecosystem to solve publishing problems on the web. In retrospect, this was engineering at its finest. And I was very fortunately to have stumbled my way into our ecosystem of products and people that were all striving for the same purpose.

This non-technical talk is intended to be a celebration of engineering in our worlds. To do so, I’ll connect the audience of “makers, connectors and do-ers” with a few of the core values that define how the faculty, staff and students at ASU Engineering strive for greatness. Being able to articulate these values and learning to implement them in our day-to-day lives will ultimately help us all build more meaningful partnerships and solve bigger problems within our community.

There’s a wide range of quality when it comes to online content. Google’s Helpful Content algorithm update helped set the record straight regarding what the search giant considers useful to humans and how content created specifically (and only) for search will not be able to effectively rank in relevant search moving forward.

So what does it mean to create something that your target audience will enjoy consuming, while also achieving business goals? In this talk, we’ll discuss content user experience (UX) best practices, including:

– Takeaways from the Helpful Content algorithm update
– What Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines tell us about how Google determines a search result’s quality and ability to meet a searcher’s needs
– Practical tips to immediately put into practice, like incorporating a table of contents, how to complement copy with visuals, and text formatting best practices

This presentation will empower audiences to ask themselves, “What am I here to do?” and take the next step towards it. It will remind the audience of the amazing accomplishments we are capable of and the amazing impact we can make on ourselves and others by living truthfully and passionately.

It is our sacred duty to find our purpose or soul-calling, and sometimes it takes getting uncomfortable to follow that journey.

Where you come from and your social status do not define your worth as a person. It is who you are and what you do that truly matters.

Keely will also discuss how to have it all with creatively rewarding work, work that makes an huge impact, whether its on the entire world, a community or even just one individual.

We are all our very own brand of magic. By the end of this keynote, attendees will leave with a renewed sense of purpose – or the inspiration to go find it – and the tools and motivation to pursue their own “work worth doing” to make a lasting impact.

As an established service provider, you may be ready to grow but don’t want to hire or manage a large team. Digital products could be a great next step in your business by:

• Creating an additional stream of income
• Allowing you to grow your impact and customer base
• Giving you back some much-needed time

If you like the idea of digital products, but aren’t sure where to start, join me for this discussion where I’ll cover the first 5 mile markers on your journey. We’ll talk about defining a scope of your product, finding a topic, who your audience might be, the result you’re creating for your audience and the time frame for creation, launch and marketing.

Each stage of a website design and development project has its own unique challenges. At Motion Tactic, we’ve spent years trying different tools and platforms to help us organize complex client projects through the design and dev process. In this talk, I’ll give you an inside look into the tools that we use to collaborate internally and with clients.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been a hot topic in the blogging world, with many claiming that it is the future.

In this talk, we will take a closer look at the AI language model ChatGPT and Writesonic to help you streamline workflows while also discussing the limitations and potential pitfalls of relying too heavily on AI.

By the end of this talk, attendees will have a better understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI in blogging and be able to make more informed decisions about its use in their work and prevent plagiarism.

If you are a WordPress freelancer who struggles to manage your time, this presentation will help you develop a comprehensive time management system and put you in charge of your workdays.

Improving your time management can free up space for more work and revenue. It could also give you more time to spend outside work with family and friends, traveling, or simply enjoying downtime.

• Time management tips presented here will help you:
• Time block your work week in simple patterns for success
• Develop a calendar that can manage both tasks and appointments
• Borrow time when you need it the most
• Find the right tools to manage your time effectively
• Track your progress to make adjustments
• Get through tough times in your life

This talk is perfect for freelancers who want to control their schedules, so their clients don’t do it for them.

Successful content marketing does not happen overnight.

In this workshop, we will take a step back from actual content creation and dig deep into the foundation of your brand. After all, all great content begins with understanding who YOU are as an entrepreneur and the value of your business.

We will:

• Discover the purpose for developing an online presence
• Consider our core messaging on our website, social media, and email.
• Identify our unique selling proposition
• Discuss competition and how to learn from their content

Full Site Editing and the new block-based tools are beginning to significantly impact how freelancers and agencies build websites for clients, and will only continue to do so in the next few years. But much of the information on Gutenberg mainly speaks to those releasing themes to the general public, instead of addressing concerns of those creating bespoke themes for clients.

In this talk, we’ll look at how you can integrate concepts like theme.json, Block Variations and Block Styles into your current work for clients who require and deserve more flexible customizations. We’ll even take a quick zip forward and see how a brand new theme specifically designed for FSE could be built, speeding up your workflow along the way.

The Gutenberg editor in WordPress is an absolute game changer. For users, it provides them an easy way to build out the content on their site in new and exciting ways. And, for developers, it’s a powerful tool that can be used to provide clients custom blocks to match their every need.

I don’t know about you, but JavaScript is still outside of my comfort zone. So, when WordPress made the switch to the block editor (formerly called Gutenberg), I was really concerned about how it would limit my ability to build the things I need to build for myself and for my clients. But, once I found a way to build custom blocks without the need for JavaScript, I was very excited! And I’m even more excited to share how you can do it, too!

Accessible websites can be used by people of all abilities on all devices, including assistive technology. Increasingly, website accessibility is required by laws around the world, and WordPress plugin and theme developers are in the unique position of impacting the accessibility of thousands – or even millions – of websites worldwide, depending upon their install counts.

Simply by improving the accessibility of their products, plugin and theme developers can dramatically improve the accessibility of every site that uses their themes or plugins. Likewise, if a plugin has many problems it can be a barrier to many websites achieving accessibility compliance.

This session will cover accessibility best practices for theme and plugin developers, including considerations for ensuring accessibility on settings and report screens in the wp-admin. Plugin and theme developers will learn accessibility basics and how to test their code for accessibility problems. There will also be a discussion on how to prioritize issues and how to roll out accessibility fixes if backward compatibility is a concern.

For WordPress and the WordPress ecosystem to be truly accessible, it has to be available to everyone. When we talk about accessibility in WordPress, we usually talk about web accessibility. But our community is more than websites – it’s people.

What if I told you that people in the disabled, BIPOC, LGBTQ+, Neurodivergent, and even older communities, often find the way to success paved with roadblock after roadblock?

DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Belonging) is more than screen readers and color contrast. It’s about making sure that there is room everywhere for everyone.

This talk will bring forth the struggles that people in our community experience in finding success, as well as ways we can all be advocates for one another, and make room at the table for all.

Starting in WordPress is addicting. So many people get stuck in the midst of wanting to go from customer service or design and want to get deeper into development. I will share my experience going from customer service to designer to developer to team lead. This will include resources I found helpful, bad mindsets I had to fight, and a shoutout to the community that helped me grow.

As a small business owner, you know how important it is to have a solid online presence. This presentation will teach you how to leverage the power of social media and WordPress to elevate your brand and reach new audiences. Learn how to create engaging content for your social media, optimize your website for maximum visibility, and measure the success of your campaigns. Discover best practices for managing your social media and how to use the features of your site to enhance your online presence. This presentation offers the insight to help you take your business’s online presence to the next level.

The WordPress Block Editor can be used to create top-notch designs and websites. Its versatile layout system is a key factor in its ability to accomplish this.

Let’s take a closer look at the components and blocks that enable this, including Cover, Group, Columns, Rows, Stack, Content-Wide Width, Global Layout Styles, and how you can use each one of them effectively at the right place and time.

Yo! It’s time to throw down with the WordPress Block Editor!

If you are still hesitating about using the Block Editor, let me show you why you should join the party and enjoy the flexibility and infinite possibilities the WordPress blocks have to offer.

I’ll show you tips and tricks, introduce you to my favorite third party blocks and we can even get a little geeky on the dance floor with some custom blocks.

BYOB = Bring your own Brain and I’ll provide the Food for Thought!

See you at the Party!