WordCamp Salt Lake City 2013

⇒ Blair Williams

If you’re writing WordPress themes or plugins, you’ll probably need to do some AJAX sooner or later.

WordPress has some really great internal tools for doing AJAX on the admin side … but there are some great techniques that can help you leverage these same tools on the front end of your website.

In this session we’ll discuss best practices for implementing AJAX in WordPress and go through some demonstrations to show you how to set this up in your plugins.

⇒ Adam Dunford

While the principles of responsive web design can make sites look better on mobile devices, they don’t necessarily load faster than a site designed for desktops. And as more and more sophisticated WordPress themes emerge, with their multiple options and fancy sliders, websites just keep getting more and more bloated.

This presentation will help cut out the junk that’s larding up your sites so you can better meet the demand of users wanting fast-loading user experiences–no matter the device or connection.

Slides

⇒ Mike Hansen

We will go over the basic structure of the theme hook alliance model. Explain why it is good for both users and developers. Why a third party option is the best option for this type of standard vs core adoption. Talk about data loss/inaccessibility due to features built into themes, that become lost after a theme switch and how the theme hook alliance can help make plugins more theme agnostic.

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⇒ Brandon Buttars

There are many reasons to migrate a website to WordPress. We will discuss some of these reasons. We will go through a checklist of elements that cannot be overlooked during a site migration. Overlooking any of these elements can be detrimental to the website. “Migrating to WordPress” will recommend some processes and tools that can help the migrations and rebuilds go much easier.

⇒ Ryan Sullivan

The barrier to entry for starting a WordPress site is very low. The one-click install is a real thing, and with all of the theme and plugin options that are available, setting up an entire website using an options panel is a real possibility. People forget that under the hood, WordPress is a combination of PHP, CSS, and Javascript, and that underneath that code is a MySQL database. This talk will address best practices for managing all of the most important aspects of your WordPress website, as well as managing multiple sites in a scenario where you have clients of your own.

Slides

⇒ Patrick Cox

In this “minimal slides” presentation we’ll take a live, non-responsive WordPress blog and perform a responsive retrofit-ectomy on it… awe the magic of CSS. But this isn’t just another “how to use media queries” talk either, I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you can actually accomplish with some simple CSS techniques. Oh yeah, no plugins required!

⇒ Bryan Petty

With over 30,000 plugins and over 5,000 themes out there in the wild west of the Internet, it can be an intimidating job finding just the right ones for your WordPress sites. In this presentation, we’ll cover all of the best techniques for finding quality plugins and themes that you can trust, and what you can to do to avoid messy upgrades.

Slides

⇒ Jessica Barnard

Client management is by far one of the most difficult aspects of freelancing, and will make or break the success of your business. When you foster excellent relationships with your clients, not only will they keep coming back for more, but will also recommend you to anyone who will listen. In turn, those new referrals come in trusting your business and assume they will have a positive experience, which makes your job easier from the get-go. Basically, good client management creates a snowball effect of pure awesome.

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⇒ Rebecka Hathaway

We all have images on our websites. All too often you’ll come across a blog or site that is filled with great big honkin’ photos that take way too long to load. Life’s too short to wait, so you close the window and move on. Don’t let that slow site I’m talking about be yours. In this session we’re going to discuss sizing, optimizing and watermarking your photos. We’ll do that using free online photo editing software. Then we’re gonna upload photos to WordPress and do some SEO stuff that will help bring yummy traffic to your site.

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⇒ Josh Harr

The admin and theme interfaces are highly segregated areas of WordPress for logical reasons. While the WordPress front end API is highly stable and allows for a high degree of customization, the Admin design changes much more frequently and allows for a much lower degree of customization. In this presentation, we’ll examine Spot Travel’s implementation of a custom Admin interface for its customers using the front-end WordPress APIs. We’ll cover the basic architecture, pros and cons of this approach, and discuss who might benefit from it.

⇒ Chris Reynolds

Almost 40% of WordPress downloads are for localized, non-English versions. That can potentially mean that if you are not internationalizing your plugin or theme, you could — literally — be speaking a different language than your users. This presentation will help to correct that and show you how to make sure you are __doing_it_right().

Slides

⇒ Becky Davis

Installing a shopping cart plugin and adding products is the easy part. Figuring out which plugin is the best for your needs and getting all the information needed in place is the tricky part. Do you have good consistent web-ready images? How are you handling shipping? Do you have a merchant account, payment gateway and SSL certificate in place? Does the business have a plan in place for how to handle orders and more importantly, how to handle exceptions? This is a must see presentation whether you’re developing a site for a client or thinking about selling products on your own site.

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