WordCamp Salt Lake City 2012

“With such a wide matrix of WordPress versions, browsers, and plugin combinations out there, it can be a daunting task releasing your own plugin with highly forgiving compatibility requirements. In this presentation, I will demonstrate how you can write your plugins to support more users than you thought possible using automated unit tests while feeling confident that your new plugin changes didn’t break your other features or even WordPress itself.

This presentation will be highly technical, and require some previous experience writing WordPress plugins. We will make use of the new WordPress unit testing framework (which was rewritten in July), and PHPUnit. If we have enough time, we will briefly cover JavaScript unit testing with QUnit as well.”

A case study based on a fresh install of WordPress with the default theme. I will introduce various web performance optimization tools that you can use to optimize your site. Next, I will implement some performance optimization techniques on a live default install of WordPress and view the results in the optimization tools for anticipated improvements (no WordPress plugins will be used, but I may discuss a few). Specifically, I will discuss compression, browser caching, image optimization, minification, and avoiding a hidden 404. Lastly, I will mention some of the pitfalls of these techniques and what you can do to avoid them.

Learn how community newspapers in California are replacing their proprietary publishing systems with WordPress. See lots of outside the box uses for WordPress from someone who learned the hard way. We’ll take a deeper dive into topics depending on audience interest. Talking points and demos include:

• Plugin demos
• Theme building
• Child themes for mobile optimized sites
• Scaling WordPress
• Advertising sales models
• Subscription based sites
• and more…

Bootstrap is an HTML/CSS/JS framework that allows rapid responsive development that can target mobile devices, tablets, and wide screen computers. In this session, Jake Spurlock will take you through the foundation of the framework and show how to build WordPress themes using Bootstrap.

Over the last year, no other WordPress niche has seen more development than ecommerce. In this session we are going to demonstrate how to build a full-featured ecommerce platform complete with detailed customer accounts, product variations, social marketing, a great responsive design…all from directly in the WordPress dashboard and without touching a line of code! We’ll learn how to get started with one of the free ecommerce platforms available for WordPress (most likely WooCommerce), get setup with taxes, shipping and other default settings, how to add different types of products (physical, virtual/downloadable, affiliate, etc), how to link customer account information to BuddyPress, and how to install social media sharing tools for your products.

I’ve been using multisite pretty heavily for a little over a year now. I’ve even taken a company off of their in house CMS network and converted them entirely over to multisite, with appropriate permissions given to the appropriate departments.

I’ve learned a lot in this process that I would love to share with the community. It is rather easy to set up and get going fairly quickly once you have some real direction.

Posting every day to your blog is the best way to build content, attract faithful fans and earn advertising dollars, but what happens when you can’t get yourself to post every day? I have a step by step plan to get your mojo back that I will share with you so you’ll be ready to post to your blog as faithfully as you did when you first started it.

Over the past year, major improvements have been made to WordPress, both within core as well as within the development ecosystem. Through those, there have emerged some best practices when developing WordPress themes and plugins. Some of these best practices include version control, deployment, dashboard UX , and more. This talk will cover these best practices as well as offer some useful tips for developers, share some stats from PressTrends, and end with a quick Q&A.

In this talk, I’ll share some of the interesting data we’re finding on how open source software such as WordPress makes a real economic impact.

Want to learn how to write a WordPress plugin? Now’s your chance, and it is easier than you think. We’ll take baby-steps in learning the file structure that WordPress expects, how to properly load scripts, write an options page for the administration panel, test it out, then submit it to the Plugin Repository.

If you’re relatively new to WordPress development — say you’ve hacked a couple themes, toyed with building your own plugin, built your blog from scratch or just broke your brother-in-laws WP powered photography site — it’s good to have a nice tool bag at you disposal. In the beginning WP development feels like being dropped into the zombie apocalypse. But with a couple katana swords and plenty of shotgun shells it’s actually pretty simple and fun. In this session we’ll build you a nice arsenal of WP development industry leading resources, bullet proof frameworks and themes, great plugins, software applications and development tools that will help you efficiently develop WP powered web and mobile sites for you clients or your boss.

• My WordPress Conversion Story (how I got started, etc.)
• Success and Failure: What Worked and What Didn’t (what I’ve tried to do with WordPress – broaden horizons)
• Revelations: How I Figured Out What to Do and How to Do It (resources)
• Conclusions

A first-hand look at building a WordPress theme from humble beginnings to the elite rockstar level of getting approved by the WordPress Theme Review Team and included in the WordPress.org repository.  Do’s and don’ts about how to get started, what resources you should use, how to prepare your theme for review, what not to do, and how to not cry yourself to sleep at night when your theme is not approved.

The psychological impact of good design, from emotional connections to subliminal suggestions that all help persuade visitors to convert.I will cover getting to know your target audience, the meaning behind color schemes, some actual psychology, and much more!

Slides available here.