🇺🇸 WordCamp Phoenix 2024

Solving customer problems isn’t just a contest of technology or talent. It’s often about who is doing a better job of listening to the customer. Some call this “strategic empathy.” So if you want to build a successful new product or service, understanding your customer is paramount. In this talk, we will explore the process of creating data-informed, accurate customer profiles — and then how we can extend those profiles into empathy maps. We’ll see some real-world examples from companies like Ancestry.com, Bluehost, and others. And we’ll be sure to leave some time for a discussion on how this kind of thinking might help your business scale its ability to listen.

We’ve often been asked “why did ‘they’ make this change” or “when is WordPress going to do this?”. We are not mere spectators, but can find a place of belonging as WordPress contributors.
For WordPress to become a better project and meet its philosophies, it needs a more diverse set of backgrounds. Your life experiences are needed to move things forward!

During this session, you’ll learn about the teams that make WordPress, and ways to bring your unique background and influence.

What are the biggest changes you’d like to see? Come join the team: coding is optional.

Blockchain development has remained steady and on an undeniable uptrend since the birth of Bitcoin in 2009. What has grown out of an ingenious idea is fundamentally shaping humanity’s future. Rise above the FUD and learn the what, why, and how of blockchains.

According to the last census, approximately 61 million American live with a disability. Globally, that number is approximately 1.85 billion, or nearly 1 person in 5 on the planet. The way the world does business and shares information is increasingly online. Providing equitable access is the right thing to do and it is good for business because an accessible site is automatically better positioned for SEO and broader user consumption. It is also becoming mandated by law in the U.S and around the world.

How can you, the website owner make sure your site is truly accessible? How can you, the designer, make sure you are designing with accessibility-first, in mind? We’ll go over basic accessibility best practices from ground up design to testing for and incorporating accessibility into an existing site.

WordPress is the development toolkit for the web, and HTML is its language. In WordPress 6.2 the HTML API was born in order to re-engineer and re-invigorate its ability to speak and understand that language. It has grown since that release and is changing the way WordPress handles its core functionality as well as how extenders can write their own plugins and themes.

What does having a safe, reliable, and convenient HTML processor mean for WordPress and WordPress sites? What implications are there for site owners? For plugin authors? What is there to look forward to in the next several releases? How does this make WordPress more attractive for the modern web?

This talk will dive into these questions and more. It will introduce what the HTML API is and what you can do with it, review the ways it’s already being introduced into WordPress, discuss the implications of these changes, and preview what’s coming next. We’ll discuss some code snippets but won’t go too deep. This talk will not require advanced programming background, but it may be most valuable to you if you write code (and especially if you are fatigued from chronic-regular-expression pains!)

Once upon a time there was a Page in a WordPress site. This Page felt different from all the other Pages, but just couldn’t figure out why. The Page knew it had to find a place where it belonged so, it set out to find it.

This is the story of the Custom Post Type that started as a Page and its journey to find its own place in the big World of the WordPress Admin and the Template Hierarchy.

Perhaps this story is being told on your WordPress site.

Join us as we discover why not every page is a page.

Every day there’s more news about how AI is taking over the world and taking jobs in all sorts of industries with it. However, in the WordPress world, there’s a lot that AI can help you do if you work with it and integrate it into your daily workflow. In this talk, we’ll look at how content creators, WordPress administrators and developers alike can all benefit from the new AI tools that are being developed, with specific examples for each group! If you’re feeling overwhelmed by all the new technology out there, join us as we break it down and answer all your questions.

“Selling Softly: The Introvert’s Guide to Effective Service-Based Sales” distills nearly a decade of web design consulting experience into a gentle yet powerful sales approach, tailored for introverts and service-based entrepreneurs. This presentation reveals a subtle, relationship-focused strategy and serves as a roadmap for achieving business growth through authenticity and strong client relationships. Whether you’re a solopreneur starting out or part of a larger enterprise, this approach offers valuable insights into building lasting, meaningful client connections.

Unlock the full potential of your WordPress e-commerce site with a comprehensive exploration of e-commerce analytics. This deep dive will guide you through the maze of metrics and data critical to understanding and boosting your online business. We’ll cover how to effectively track and analyze key performance indicators (KPIs), understand customer behavior, and leverage data-driven insights to make informed decisions. Learn about the tools and techniques for gathering and interpreting data, from understanding the nuances of user flow to optimizing product placement and pricing strategies. With a focus on real-world applications and success stories, you’ll discover how to use analytics not just as numbers on a dashboard but as a roadmap to sustainable growth, improved customer satisfaction, and increased profitability. Whether you’re a small business owner, a marketer, or a developer, this talk will empower you to harness the power of analytics to drive your e-commerce success on WordPress.

Some of us love to manage servers. But for a lot of WordPress developers, servers are something we’d rather avoid. We’re happy to pay hosting providers, so we don’t have to worry about it.

WordPress hosting doesn’t remove all your hosting headaches. You still have to worry about scaling. You’re often overpaying for hosting because you have to worry about the worst-case scenario.

Well, that’s what serverless WordPress tries to solve. With serverless WordPress, you only pay for what you use. Meanwhile, you get an infrastructure that can scale from handling zero traffic to thousands in seconds.

This talk will go over serverless WordPress and how it works. You’ll learn how it differs from regular WordPress hosting with a traditional server setup and why it’s a game-changer for WooCommerce hosting. We’ll finish by going over tools and projects you can use to deploy your serverless WordPress site.

Learn how to build a custom block- using only other core blocks. Why? WordPress core already offers blocks for most common HTML elements- paragraphs, headings, images, divs, and more. Instead of starting from scratch on your next custom block, consider building it using the “InnerBlocks” feature to save time and offer a better user experience.

In this tutorial, we’ll build a custom carousel block using only the Cover block that comes built into WordPress. We’ll register our custom block type and write some JavaScript to get it running. Along the way, we’ll discuss the pros and cons of using the InnerBlocks method of block building.

We’ll take a look at multiple ways to use ChatGPT and BARD to speed up your WordPress builds, from using it to give you content that looks better than “Lorem Ipsum” to helping you with your CSS and coding. Then we’ll take a look at AI generated images, and how to structure prompts to get both images and background images. Lastly, we’ll look at a few other AI tools that might help you speed up your website workflow.

Art Enke will guide you through a step-by-step framework (a guided checklist) to elevate your business to its first million in revenue. Learn practical tips for on-page and off-page optimization, stay ahead of evolving algorithms, and explore real-world success stories. Whether you’re a startup or an established business, join Art for actionable insights that promise measurable results.

From getting the attention of prospective students, to engaging their community, to crisis management, higher education institutions are using organic social media in remarkable ways to connect with their audiences. We’ll look at some examples of what colleges and universities are doing right, and how businesses can use the same tactics to build affinity with their customers.

Although PHP 8.0 has reached End of Life, many WordPress sites are still sporting PHP 7.4 or below. Updating your PHP version can feel scary, and WordPress’s support for PHP has been uncertain. However, simple tools can help you embrace the newer secure (and speedy) versions of PHP. We’ll discuss how to make sure your site is ready to take the plunge with proper testing and preparations.

GitHub Actions is a great tool for automating development workflows.

It can be used to:

• Deploy code to different environments
• Run automated tests
• Perform code linting
• Manage theme and plugin releases
• Automate translation management
• Create your own Satis instance
• Much, much, more!

Come learn how to use it and walk away with some practical examples you can start using today!

In the face of disruptive AI advancements, true tech leadership demands a human-centric approach. The next generation of WordPress leaders are called on for open source solutions while exercising their authority in ways that inspire innovative and collaborative problem-solving. This includes stepping outside of your comfort zone to consider new ideas and unique contributors. This session equips you with 3 universal and core leadership competencies that can be applied across tech sectors and remote teams to improve your services, products, infrastructure, and team culture.

In the face of disruptive AI advancements, true tech leadership demands a human-centric approach. The next generation of WordPress leaders are called on for open source solutions while exercising their authority in ways that inspire innovative and collaborative problem-solving. This includes stepping outside of your comfort zone to consider new ideas and unique contributors. This session equips you with 3 universal and core leadership competencies that can be applied across tech sectors and remote teams to improve your services, products, infrastructure, and team culture.

ASU Engineering maintains a library of a dozen or more custom blocks that express various elements of the university’s design system. Those blocks are built using Advanced Custom Fields instead of the native solution for creating your own blocks that ships with core WordPress.

This presentation will outline some of our best practices for creating and maintaining blocks with ACF. That includes how to leverage some lesser-known functions within WordPress core to make sure that core block editor features like the color palettes or dimensions panel options are supported by your block. We will also learn how to do some possibly more advanced block creation skills like deploying an ACF block which supports <InnerBlocks> or consumes data from an API.

Your typical Gutenberg block doesn’t do much once it’s been displayed within a post or page. Even if you use dynamic rendering to present the block, whatever ends up on the page visitor’s screen won’t really _do_ much, at least not without forcing a page reload. But here’s the thing: The same React-like approach that makes the WordPress page editor _do_ stuff while you’re working on a post can be used within blocks on the front end of a site. The Interactivity API provides a way to do precisely this. You can add this kind of functionality to blocks you create within a more WordPress-like setting, using PHP on the backend to enable interactions on the front end. As it nears incorporation into the production release of WordPress, it’s not too early to get a sense of what it does and how it works. This talk will discuss some code samples, but is aimed at a general audience with some familiarity of the basic WordPress architecture.

With the introduction of the Block Editor (Project Gutenberg) and Full Site Editing, the potential for your website design seems limitless. Add in a mix of AI, and it feels like you have superpowers.

Alas, it’s not that easy. Competition will accelerate, and well-planned websites that serve both customers & LLMs that power AI will win. That means sites need excellent information architecture combined with top-class UXUI.

Augmented by AI, you will see how to plan an entire website using Figma & Google Sheets with considerations for FSE & LLMs. We will discuss custom types, meta, and rest API endpoints that create a great user experience & power LLMs.

Designing for WordPress is one thing. Building a business around it is entirely another. If you’ve ever dealt with nightmare clients, scope creep, or design results that make you cringe, you’re not alone.

Know this: You *can* guide your clients, with less headaches & more purpose, and translate their ideas into designs they LOVE.

Attend this session to learn the art of drama-free design and how to create a smooth project process that delights your clients and establishes you as a trusted leader vs. order taker. You will learn:

• Simple shifts to your sales process that will help you close more leads & charge more $$
• Why a repeatable design process will help you focus your creative energy (not stifle it)
• How to ask for feedback so you DON’T go back & forth with endless revision cycles
• Why doing all of the above will allow you to raise your rates confidently

WordPress users and companies have been early adopters of remote and distributed work, and many of the companies within our community have embraced some degree of remote operation, especially in the last few years. Remote work comes with its own set of challenges, and a Monster survey revealed that 70% of remote workers reported feeling burned out. Are there ways to escape this and find greater fulfillment in our always-on culture where Slack follows you on your phone? And what about leading teams in a remote, distributed environment? Are we doomed to return to the cubicle?

In this talk, we will explore stories of 20 years working and leading remote first. We’ll find new ways that we can succeed in proactively cultivating better work experiences with greater fulfillment, greater productivity, and a Monday morning that makes us more gleeful than glum.