WordCamp San Francisco 2011

Join the WordPress core team for an open Q&A to get the answers to your deepest, darkest WordPress questions.

About the Speakers:
The Q&A will include Lead Developer Mark Jaquith, UX and Community Lead Jane Wells, and Core Developers Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Daryl Koopersmith, and Jon Cave.

In 2011, SEO is more than just optimizing page titles and a few plugins; it’s about having the right site architecture, social signals, domain authority, site speed and much more.

Sujan speaks on the latest traffic driving tips for your WordPress website including the best plugins for SEO and Social Media. He also will talk about how to implement SEO, such as keyword research, social signals that affect rankings & social media optimization for WordPress. By following his tips, you can turn your WordPress site into a traffic driving machine.

Check out Sujan’s slides: SEO for WordPress

About the Speaker:
Sujan Patel is an intrinsically motivated entrepreneur. Sujan, with more than 10 years of Internet marketing experience, is the founder and president of the SEO consulting agency Single Grain. Before starting Single Grain, Sujan developed and managed several successful in-house SEO departments and teams for multiple companies. Sujan knows the “ins and outs” of Internet marketing including SEO, social media marketing, and link building. With his knowledge and experience, Sujan increases organic rankings, traffic, brand awareness and ROI for his clients.

Join the WordPress core team for an open Q&A to get the answers to your deepest, darkest WordPress questions.

About the Speakers:
The Q&A will include Lead Developer Mark Jaquith, UX and Community Lead Jane Wells, and Core Developers Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Daryl Koopersmith, and Jon Cave.

One of the great things about WordPress is that with 50 million plus users, there are thousands of WordPress themes available. Wait — doesn’t that mean that unless you’re using a custom theme (in which case, skip this session), your site probably looks an awful lot like a lot of other people’s. Sad! In this session learn how to take advantage of core features like custom headers and backgrounds, how to add them to your theme if it doesn’t support them yet, and how to do some basic look and feel customizations like colors and fonts using CSS.

You could say that 2010 was the best year yet for WordPress themes — a banner year in an already explosive marketplace. Entire companies are building their lives and businesses around selling themes, and they’ve flourished along with amazing growth of WordPress as a platform.

In 2011 the commercial themes landscape is even more innovative, fun, and crowded than ever. With this panel we’ll meet three industry leaders and discuss their experiences selling themes, providing customer support, and growing their theme business in these fast and
furious times.

The format will be a Q and A between the moderator and the panelists, but we’ll be sure to leave plenty of time for you to ask your own questions.

Panelists:
Brian Gardner, StudioPress
David Cowgill, AppThemes
Drew Strojny, The Theme Foundry

Moderator:
Lance Willett, Automattic

An overview of essential e-commerce concepts with some basic tips for implementing an e-commerce website on WordPress. This talk covers payment gateways, how credit card processing really works, merchant accounts, SSL certificates, PCI compliance, basic WordPress security tips and a very brief review of popular e-commerce solutions for WordPress.

Check out Jonathan’s slides: Ecommerce and WordPress

About the Speaker:
Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress. He began e-commerce site development in the late ’90s with open-source platforms, started using WordPress in 2005, then in 2008 developed and released Shopp. He is an ardent student of best practice design and development, loves elegant expressions of “code poetry,” and is an advocate for the WordPress platform.

What if for every HTML element on the page, you got two free ones? That’s what you get with the CSS pseudo elements ::before and ::after. You can use them as canvases to do all kinds of neat and practical design effects. We’ll cover how to use them and loads of real world examples.

Check out Chris’ slides.
CSS3 Pseudo Elements for Fun and Profit

About the Speaker:
Chris is a web designer currently working for Wufoo, an online form building service. He runs the web design blog and community site CSS-Tricks. He co-authored the book and blog Digging Into WordPress. He like banjos, artichokes, and serial sci-fi television shows.

Like most universities, Carleton University had, after a decade of the web, a group of villages instead of a city representing it on the internet. And so with a small team Computing and Communication Services at the university used WordPress to rebuild all 200 of its front-facing informational sites in a little under 2 years. Andrew Riddles explains the background to this project, outlines how the team achieved buy-in from the Carleton community and management, and describes how the new system was implemented.

About the Speaker:
Andrew Riddles is Web Architect in the Web Services Department at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He has 12 years experience in web development in the private sector and in higher education. When not working he is writing; when not writing he is listening to opera, getting a tattoo, or getting a tattoo about opera.

This presentation focuses on breaking down the communication barriers that can make working with a developer more difficult than it needs to be. The presentation will cover

• Interviewing Your Potential Developer
• Planning & Project Management
• Using A Version Control System
• Bug Reporting.

The session will give the audience a reality check on how to go about working with a developer to get a custom WordPress site (or any digital project) built on time and on budget. After attending this session, the audience will have a better understanding of what goes on in the mind of a developer. Armed with this knowledge, clients can contribute to a more effective development process. This will help to reduce costs and save precious time.

Thanks to cloud-based services and Open Source technologies, IP is not only changing, it is being redefined and it is helping increase the value of many a start-up (and service) like never before. I am the founder of Tabletracker, a restaurant booking service whose arms, legs, and many other organs are powered by cloud based services. The brain of our service is our technology, and data-base management software, but at its heart, we have used WP and BuddyPress to power-up a community of restaurant lovers, foodies, and critics to create stickiness and brand loyalty. Our beta service combines feeds and API’s from various services such as Qype, OpenTable, Google Maps and others. We use BuddyPress and have enabled reward points, activity badges, restaurant reviews and recommendations and more in one beautiful service that pushes the boundaries of what each of these services can do. Our commitment to the WP community is to give back as much of our knowledge as possible, and to encourage users and WP novices to look into the power of open source as the example to follow when building “Monster” companies and services of your own. Because, quite frankly, why would you want to re-invent the wheel, when building a beter car?

 
Check out Ed’s slides: Building a Better Frankenstein’s Monster: Tabletracker

About the Speaker:
Ed is the founder of TableTracker, a startup that is being built in the tradition of Victor Frankenstein, MD. He hopes to inspire you with his talk about how you can create a better monster building with cloud-based tools, open-source parts and a lot of heart and sweat. TableTracker has already achieved a couple of unique “firsts” using WP and BuddyPress, which Ed will be showing off as part of his talk. He has written a book, attended a number of film festivals in exotic locales, and once dove into a pool with no water.

 
Check out Crystal’s slides: Getting to +1: Negotiation in Open Source Teams

About the Speaker:
Tiny, fiery Southern girl who, when she isn’t baking pies or telling you what to do, works at Mozilla as a User Experience Designer. Previously she was a LOLcat herder at Cheezburger, Inc.

How to Move Your “Enterprise” CMS to WordPress and How to Convince YOUR Company to Do It

There are many challenges when it comes to convincing your company that WordPress is a true CMS — and once you have convinced your company to make the switch to WordPress, there are challenges when it comes time to port 100s of 1000s of records/posts/content types and expose that data to world. Get a guided tour of the issues and considerations that came into play during eMusic’s recent switch to WordPress and learn what you can do to make your own process as smooth as possible.

 
Check out Scott’s slides: Case Study-Emusic-WordPress in the Enterprise

About the Speaker:
Scott Taylor is the lead PHP developer at eMusic and is architecting their transition to WordPress as a CMS platform. He resides in New York City and has been developing with WordPress since 2009. When not programming, he is the lead guitarist of Goodbye Picasso and a lover of gourmet Mexican food. He wrote a WordPress theme that builds his blog for him over at http://scotty-t.com. Scott spoke at WordCamp NYC in 2010.

WordPress provides an excellent platform for non-profit organizations to build out their web presence. In this joint session, two unique non-profit projects will be showcased, and questions about both projects and/or why using WordPress is such a benefit to non-profits will be answered by both presenters.

CURE International

Learn how CURE International moved to WordPress to become an award-winning website as well as providing their constituents with the world’s first social sponsorship platform (cure.org/curekids). This talk will also cover the release of Personal Fundraiser, an open source (GPL) WordPress plugin that provides organizations the ability to allow their fans and constituents to create their own custom online fundraisers using Paypal donations and other payment methods.

UNICEF in Uganda

We built a very graphically oriented custom theme for UNICEF in Uganda. The product is a information portal that includes resources about health, education, workers rights, and more. We get our content from the Uganda Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and other in-country partners. The portals are deployed in rural community centers. These centers have spotty internet at best. We wanted to keep all the systems sync’ed, so we devised a process that includes:

• a centralized WordPress “master” install, where content creators & administrators add new resources
• a custom script that packages the “master” install into a distributable format — on CD-ROM or USB Stick.
• a custom script that installs (and updates) WordPress onto the community center machines.

This script installs a full system to support WordPress (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the system runs locally on the machines. The community center machines are updated periodically, when new content becomes available on the master machine and someone is available to drive to the rural off-the-grid areas, or automatically for those machines that have infrequent internet access. We think this is a really unique way of using WordPress, and it creates a lot of social good. We’re pretty happy with the results — it’s a really cool looking application, with some amazing materials.

Check out Zach’s slides: Using WordPress to Power Nonprofits

Check out John’s slides: WordPress for the Greater Good

About the Speakers:
John Kleinschmidt is the technology dude for CURE International where he pushes cure.org to its limits. When he is not building new features for CURE, John keeps busy mountain biking, playing hockey and loving his 3 kids and wife.

Zach is a SF based geek and entrepreneur who has spent the last 10 years building and working with startups and non-profits around the world. Zach migrated from Movable Type to WordPress in 2004 and never looked back.

Lead BuddyPress developer will walk through the code changes in the latest releas of the popular social networking plugin.

Check out John James Jacoby’s slides: What’s new in BuddyPress 1.5

About the Speaker:
Having feasted on Wisconsin’s finest beers, brats, and cheeses for a majority of his life, John James Jacoby is currently traveling the world experiencing food groups he didn’t know existed. He works for Automattic, is the lead developer of both BuddyPress and bbPress and has been contributing to WordPress since 2007. He is an alliteration alchemist, musical mixologist, and cannot stop using the Oxford Comma.

WordPress users enjoy a strong online community.  Let’s talk about how to enjoy strong local communities as well.  Attendees will learn tips and tricks for facilitating successful meetups or user groups along with some suggestions for holding a WordCamp in your area which provides value to all in the WordPress ecosystem.  Aaron will be sharing his experiences of four years of local WordPress event organization in the Portland area as well as lessons he’s learned from organizers of meetups and WordCamps in other cities.

 
Check out Aaron’s slides: IRL FTW Organizing WordCamps and Meetups

About the Speaker:
Aaron Hockley is a photographer and blogger who spends a lot of time conversing with others about new media topics. He writes frequent articles and has been cited as an industry source by publications such as CNN and the New York Times. Aaron founded WordCamp Portland and is active in a variety of events in the Portland tech scene. He has attended and spoken at several blogging and social media events including BlogWorld & New Media Expo, a few Ignites, and a handful of WordCamps.

The Web has moved past data awareness to social awareness. This started a few years ago but the launch of Google Plus confirms it. When the biggest web company re-orients their businesses to say that “Today’s web is about people. To organize the world’s data, you have to understand people” then you know that even data is telling people who only want to understand data (Google is a pretty algorithmic culture) that we have met the point of it all and it is us: people.

How do people connect best with each other? And why should we have to go to one place where our content and conversation will be owned by one company to do it? In order to have “sites” (which sounds kinda geographic) that work well in a real-time social web, we need to consider creating conditions or being people together: more like hosting a party or conversation. We need open source WordPress to evolve us past where facebook, tumblr and even Google Plus have us. The human skillset or practice of creating engaged conversation or connection is called tummeling. It’s a Yiddish word that describes the job of entertainers hired to get the community involved in the show and have a good time.

Influenced by the web and her community of its earliest makers, innovative comedian Heather Gold began creating a way to involve the “audience” in her shows, scale conversation and hasten intimacy over a decade ago. In this “talk” she’ll show the basic differences between presentation and conversation and the assumptions underneath each. She’ll explore ideas with everyone there about how what we already and and what we’d like to be able to do create connection on our own and our collective space online by delving into what makes that kind of conversation in the physical world. More entertainingly (and usefully) she demonstrates these ideas by creating a great, relevant conversation in the room so that all can feel the difference.

 
Check out Heather’s slides: Tools for Tummeling

About the Speaker:
Heather Gold is an innovative artist, comic, speaker and talk show host best known for her ability to work the room. She’s a web veteran with geek cred from Apple’s webcast pioneering team and the start- up that birthed some of the iPod/iTunes experience. She mixes up Net ideas and performance flow and DJs the people formerly known as the audience in her shows. Heather shares her insights on tech, social engagement and authenticity as the host of Tummelvision.tv and in popular keynotes at places like Google and Web 2.0 and YLE, Finland’s BBC. Heather’s written for Alan Cumming, shared the stage with Margaret Cho and  baked over 50,000 cookies in her interactive solo show Cookie was named the Best of the Bay and won Curve Magazine’s national lesbian theatre award. Heather often appears in media like NPR, Wired and TWIT.tv. BoingBoing calls her “one of our favorite comedians.”  You can follow her work atheathergold.com or on twitter @heathr or join her at one of her UnPresenting workshops on 8/17 (http://bit.ly/oWgtFP).

Improved browser support of CSS3 has allowed us to build a richer web with visual treatments like rounded corners, animations, transformations, gradients, transparency and drop-shadows. But with great power comes great responsibility. Just because you can add a skewed animated rainbow with drop shadow to your site doesn’t mean you should. In this session we’ll look at what’s really cool (pun intended) in CSS3 by making snow with CSS3. You’ll have to restrain yourself, though. Yes, we’ll cover transitions, transforms, keyframes and more. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

 
Check out Estelle’s slides.

You could say that 2010 was the best year yet for WordPress themes — a banner year in an already explosive marketplace. Entire companies are building their lives and businesses around selling themes, and they’ve flourished along with amazing growth of WordPress as a platform.

In 2011 the commercial themes landscape is even more innovative, fun, and crowded than ever. With this panel we’ll meet three industry leaders and discuss their experiences selling themes, providing customer support, and growing their theme business in these fast and
furious times.

The format will be a Q and A between the moderator and the panelists, but we’ll be sure to leave plenty of time for you to ask your own questions.

Panelists:
Brian Gardner, StudioPress
David Cowgill, AppThemes
Drew Strojny, The Theme Foundry

Moderator:
Lance Willett, Automattic

You could say that 2010 was the best year yet for WordPress themes — a banner year in an already explosive marketplace. Entire companies are building their lives and businesses around selling themes, and they’ve flourished along with amazing growth of WordPress as a platform.

In 2011 the commercial themes landscape is even more innovative, fun, and crowded than ever. With this panel we’ll meet three industry leaders and discuss their experiences selling themes, providing customer support, and growing their theme business in these fast and
furious times.

The format will be a Q and A between the moderator and the panelists, but we’ll be sure to leave plenty of time for you to ask your own questions.

Panelists:
Brian Gardner, StudioPress
David Cowgill, AppThemes
Drew Strojny, The Theme Foundry

Moderator:
Lance Willett, Automattic

Javascript is often thought of as the scripting language for the web, but it is in reality so much more. One part of javascript that is often ignored is its ability to be used as a part of testing. This talk will go over current options for javascript unit testing, tools for headless testing, and other ways that you can use javascript to test your web application.

 
Check out Aaron’s slides: Don’t Repeat Your Mistakes

About the Speaker:
Aaron Jorbin is an engineer with Clearspring where he works on AddThis and a WordPress Core Contributor. He has spoken to multiple User Groups and at WordCamps in four time zones. When he’s not busy creating and fixing bugs, Aaron helps run an educational simulation conference for over 1500 college students. He’ll gladly toast to the GPL any day of the week and happily will discuss whisky, quality beer, or the upper peninsula of Michigan anytime he can.

Turns out that the fundamental principles that led to the success of the web will lead you there, too. Drawing on 15 years of web design and development experience, Jeff will take you on a guided tour of what makes things work on this amazing platform we’re all building together. You’ll learn how to stop selling ice, why web browsers work the way they do, and where Rupert Murdoch can put his business model.

 
Check out Jeff’s slides: How the Web Works

How do you get a point across within 10 seconds? Comics are a unique way to communicate, using both image and text to effectively demonstrate time, function, and emotion. Just as vividly as they convey the feats of superheroes, comics tell stories of your users and your products. Google used them. The US Postal Service used them. Adaptive Path used them. The US Navy used them. Business author and TED speaker Daniel Pink used them. It seems comics are in use everywhere lately. In See What I Mean, Kevin Cheng, OK/Cancel founder/cartoonist and author of the soon to be released Rosenfeld book by the same title, will teach you how you can use comics as a powerful communication tool without any illustrator skills.

 
Check out Kevin’s slides: WordCamp 2011 See What I Mean

About the Speaker:
Kevin is an independent product and user experience advisor exploring new ways to improve the world. Previously, he was a product manager at Twitter, leading the redesign of the website, the Director of User Experience at the gaming social network Raptr, and the designer of Yahoo! Pipes. He also co-founded the user experience web comic OK/Cancel, and is working on his upcoming book, See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas. He blogs at kevnull.com and tweets as @k.

Ian explains just what the heck WordPress Post Formats are and why they’re so awesome. Come and find out how to take advantage of that awesomeness and how easy it is to save your WordPress Themes from boring monotony.

 
Check out Ian’s slides: Awesome Up Your Boring Theme

About the Speaker:
Ian Stewart works as a Theme Wrangler at Automattic. He’s had a hand in creating some of the most popular WordPress themes around — most recently the new default theme, Twenty Eleven — and it’s highly likely that he’s thinking about WordPress themes right this very minute. Either that or he’s thinking about how to survive another winter in the frozen Canadian waste he calls home.

“Nice site!” “Great theme!” “Buy Cialis!”

Some spam is more obvious than the rest… But what is it doing on your site? How did it get there? How did it defeat the Captcha, and why didn’t that nifty invisible javascript stop the spam-bot anyway?

Can you tell the spam from the ham? Find out how (and why) spam finds your site. And learn the best practices for managing it.

About the Speaker:
Pete works at Automattic as a Business Engineer, where he spends a lot of his time with the Akismet team, seeing more spam than you’d care to read about. Before Automattic and WordPress, Pete has been a BBC journalist, a grad student, and a General Manager at a startup.

You can break your WordPress blog in a myriad of interesting and, at times, baffling ways. This talk, aimed at new WordPress users, will cover the top five breakages, showing you not only how to trigger disasters but hopefully also how we can learn from doing so, and piece our blogs back together afterwards too.

Check out Hanni’s slides: Five Ways to Break Your Blog and Fix it, Too

About the Speaker:
Hanni is a Happiness Engineer, a runner, a polyglot, and overwhelmingly hyperactive. She wears pink socks, lives in the south of France, and is slowly slipping over to the lawyer dark-side. Life as a rosbif comprises running, sampling the local cuisine, breaking far too many of her possessions by mistake, and fitting into ovens. Otherwise, ever since the b2 era Hanni has enjoyed breaking her websites in an attempt to improve them. These days, as part of the Happiness Team at Automattic she loves trying to help WordPress.com users solve their problems, enjoy their blogs, and break them more safely.

There’s a lot of amazingness packed into WordPress. Do you know where all the best tools are? This talk is targeted at beginners, but WordPress veterans might just discover a handy trick or two. And hey, you might just find the one thing about WordPress you never knew you always wanted.

Check out Sheri’s slides: Top Ten Features You Aren’t Using

About the Speaker:
Sheri is a designer, developer, and photographer currently living in Saratoga Springs, NY. She earned a Bachelor’s in Business and a Chemistry minor from the University of Utah before spending eight years managing websites for Myriad Genetics in Salt Lake City. She has always considered herself a WordPress evangelist, and now her endlessly positive nature makes her a perfect fit as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic.

Your site is about your content. With mobile devices, iPads, phones, gaming consoles, etc: people can access your content many different ways and formats. How can we maintain some control over the display of our content and keep our brand consistent? How can we try to provide the best user experience on any platform?

Enter Responsive Web Design. A term coined by Ethan Marcotte. Many experts aren’t leaning on one static design anymore, but on structured content that adapts to its given environment. We are going to take a look at responsive web design techniques out there including: progressive enhancement, flexible grids, media queries, flexible images & video, & other methods that you can implement to make your WordPress theme “Responsive”.

 
Check out Sara’s slides: Responsive Web Design

About the Speaker:
Sara Cannon has a love for WordPress, design, and typography. Intersect these things and you’ve found her passion. She loves keeping up with the latest trends in technology that we can use make our WordPress sites beautiful. Sara is a WordPress core contributor working with the UI group and works as interaction designer & developer at Scout Branding Company in Birmingham, AL. She has spoken at many WordCamps across the US and is absolutely thrilled to be speaking at WordCamp San Francisco. You can find her on twitter @saracannon or on her blog sara-cannon.com.

Could your plugin be the cause of a WordPress site being hacked? WordPress security experts Mark Jaquith, Jon Cave, and Brad Williams will be performing live security reviews of submitted plugins on Saturday as well as providing tips on security best practices in plugin and theme development. Standard coding techniques and patterns to defend against attacks such as XSS, CSRF and SQLi will be taught by example. If that previous sentence makes no sense to you, you really need to attend this session!

Mark is a WordPress lead developer and a freelance WordPress security consultant, Jon is a core developer and member of the security team, and Brad is author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development and a security fanatic. Together they have helped numerous plugin and theme authors fix vulnerabilities in their products.

If you would like to have your plugin reviewed then submit it using the form. We are looking for plugins that are relatively short in length, approximately 400 lines of code or fewer, and will select a few to review together during the session.

 
Check out the slides for the Security Showdown.

Join the WordPress core team for an open Q&A to get the answers to your deepest, darkest WordPress questions.

About the Speakers:
The Q&A will include Lead Developer Mark Jaquith, UX and Community Lead Jane Wells, and Core Developers Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Daryl Koopersmith, and Jon Cave.

There is no single correct way to write a web application. For WordPress core developers, few (if any) decisions are trivial. Balancing feature development, iteration, and deadlines (everyone’s favorite) is rocket surgery. Our code runs on a large stage — with tens of millions of users and tens of thousands of developers, we consider every change carefully.

We’ll discuss the factors that inform WordPress core development decisions, and development principles that can improve your own web application.

 
Check out Daryl’s slides: Decisions not options

About the Speaker:
Daryl Koopersmith is a man of many hats. By day, he is a nomadic WordPress core developer — he works at Automattic and is jazzed about JavaScript, interface engineering, and the infamous Alot. By night, he dabbles in the dark arts of rhythmic tapping and culinary combinatorics. Koop is currently settling into temperate San Francisco, where he is fueled by burritos and all things musical.

Check out Otto and Nacin’s slides: The Otto and Nacin Show

Join the WordPress core team for an open Q&A to get the answers to your deepest, darkest WordPress questions.

About the Speakers:
The Q&A will include Lead Developer Mark Jaquith, UX and Community Lead Jane Wells, and Core Developers Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Daryl Koopersmith, and Jon Cave.

All software has bugs. What sets a great developer apart is how effective they are at tackling them. But even the best can get tripped up, spending hours searching in vain for a bug, and even longer contemplating the proper fix. In this talk, learn the best tools and strategies for finding and fixing bugs in plugins, themes, and even core. We’ll discuss what the common pitfalls look like so you can learn to avoid them. They say that with enough eyes, all bugs are shallow — but if you don’t know where or how to look, you’ll never break the surface.

 
Check out Andrew’s slides.

About the Speaker:
Nacin is a core developer of WordPress. As a member of the core team, he wrangles contributions, develops new features, and tries to fix more bugs than he creates. He lives in Washington, D.C., and works as a Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital, where he works on WordPress.org and other projects. He prefers decisions over options.

Query, Rewrite, etc. Nobody knows how this stuff works. More importantly, nobody knows how deeply pluggable everything is. I will begin by posting a request on my blog in June. The audience will pose questions about how things work or how to get certain things done. I will take the best questions and build a presentation around them.

Check out Andy’s slides.

About the Speaker:
Few people witnessed the time when Andy wasn’t a computer geek. He began contributing to WordPress and joined Automattic in 2005. His AFK pastimes include perspiring in the Texas heat and throwing a slimy tennis ball.

The web is replete with “widgets” embedded into sites but hosted by external parties (witness: Google Maps, Facebook Social Plugins). Some of the best uses of these widgets require the various widgets to communicate with the embedding site or even with each other. Without a secure communication channel, though, these widgets can expose sensitive information or capabilities to malicious parties eavesdropping, spoofing, or manipulating that communication.

window.postMessage() [1] gives modern browsers a secure and convenient communication channel. Unfortunately, a significant portion of internet users are browsing with non-modern browsers [2].

The traditional method of communicating between iframes is via updating the target frame’s URL fragment (a.k.a. #hash). This method can be made secure, but naive implementations (of which there are legion) are open to spoofing and eavesdropping.

This talk will describe the Needham-Schroeder-Lowe protocol, a well-known security protocol, and show the protocol’s ability to secure the traditional #hash communication channel against spoofing and eavesdropping attacks.

The information in this talk is based on research by Adam Barth, Collin Jackson, and John C. Mitchell of Standford University’s Web Security Group [3].

[1] http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/comms.html
[2] A brief flip through Wikipedia suggests about 10% of the web browsing population uses Internet Explorer 6 or 7.
[3] http://seclab.stanford.edu/websec/frames/post-message.pdf

About the Speaker:
Rising from the depths of the Quantum Information halls of Caltech, mdawaffe has been using WordPress since 2004 and a Contributing Developer since 2006. Enjoys late night conversations about obscure code, long debugging sessions on the beach, and candlelit security reviews.

I will explain why would we want to write tests, how to write them (in WordPress and a plugin setting) and how this changed my life. I have experience with unit-testing (WordPress, GlotPress, before), and I am one of the maintainers/committers in the current test framework.

 
Check out Nikolay’s slides: Unit Testing Will Change Your Life

About the Speaker:
Nikolay is a long-time WordPress core contributor, lives in Bulgaria, works for Automattic, and has a bear.

After 15 years of contenting ourselves with system fonts, type in images, or workarounds with Flash, we can finally use real fonts on the web.  Broad browser support for CSS @font-face has ushered in a web typography renaissance.  Join Typekit co-founder Greg Veen for a look at some beautiful examples of web fonts in use, a review of how this all became possible, and an examination of the challenges involved in working with web fonts – plus techniques for navigating them in your development projects.

WordPress provides an excellent platform for non-profit organizations to build out their web presence. In this joint session, two unique non-profit projects will be showcased, and questions about both projects and/or why using WordPress is such a benefit to non-profits will be answered by both presenters.

CURE International

Learn how CURE International moved to WordPress to become an award-winning website as well as providing their constituents with the world’s first social sponsorship platform (cure.org/curekids). This talk will also cover the release of Personal Fundraiser, an open source (GPL) WordPress plugin that provides organizations the ability to allow their fans and constituents to create their own custom online fundraisers using Paypal donations and other payment methods.

UNICEF in Uganda

We built a very graphically oriented custom theme for UNICEF in Uganda. The product is a information portal that includes resources about health, education, workers rights, and more. We get our content from the Uganda Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and other in-country partners. The portals are deployed in rural community centers. These centers have spotty internet at best. We wanted to keep all the systems sync’ed, so we devised a process that includes:

• a centralized WordPress “master” install, where content creators & administrators add new resources
• a custom script that packages the “master” install into a distributable format — on CD-ROM or USB Stick.
• a custom script that installs (and updates) WordPress onto the community center machines.

This script installs a full system to support WordPress (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the system runs locally on the machines. The community center machines are updated periodically, when new content becomes available on the master machine and someone is available to drive to the rural off-the-grid areas, or automatically for those machines that have infrequent internet access. We think this is a really unique way of using WordPress, and it creates a lot of social good. We’re pretty happy with the results — it’s a really cool looking application, with some amazing materials.

Check out Zach’s slides: Using WordPress to Power Nonprofits

Check out John’s slides: WordPress for the Greater Good

About the Speakers:
John Kleinschmidt is the technology dude for CURE International where he pushes cure.org to its limits. When he is not building new features for CURE, John keeps busy mountain biking, playing hockey and loving his 3 kids and wife.

Zach is a SF based geek and entrepreneur who has spent the last 10 years building and working with startups and non-profits around the world. Zach migrated from Movable Type to WordPress in 2004 and never looked back.

About 2/3 of the world population speak more than one language and most of the world doesn’t use the Internet in English. This presentation will cover what components are needed for a successful multilingual WordPress site. We’ll compare different set-ups, review key plugins and examine common pitfalls. Then we’ll look at advanced features like e-commerce and email marketing.

Check out Shannon’s slides: Taking WordPress to the World

About the Speaker:
Shannon is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. She also builds professional, custom-designed Web sites for businesses and non-profits. Shannon holds graduate degrees in psychology and journalism and her freelance articles have been published around the world. She speaks English, French and Italian. Read her blogs at chroni.ca and breastfortheweary.com

In June of 2011, Observer.com relaunched on WordPress, joining Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com to form a network of WordPress sites. Why was WordPress chosen to replace Drupal, the site’s CMS since 2007, and what are the comparative advantages of each system for a newsroom? How were 100,000 articles migrated from Drupal to WordPress, and how did the new site stand up to heavy load? Which plugins crashed the site, and which saved the day? This talk will range from a high-level business overview to a deep exploration of individual files in WordPress’s core.

 
Check out Austin’s slides: Migration from Drupal to WordPress

About the Speaker:
Austin Smith is a founder and partner of Alley Interactive, a software development firm in New York City which specializes in high traffic sites for news media, entertainment, and higher education. Alley Interactive was founded by ex-employees of The New York Observer, which converted to WordPress in June of 2011 after four years of running Drupal.

New to WordPress, or trying to convince someone to use it who is? This session is for you. An introduction to the WordPress ecosystem and how some organizations are working within it will be followed by examples and case studies of large-scale installations who are using WordPress to do great things.

 
Check out Sara’s slides.

About the Speaker:
Sara is a business & digital strategist, writer, photographer, and technology lover living in Milan, Italy. She works in VIP Services at Automattic(WordPress.com & more) and has been working in technology for 15 years. She has many WordPress sites, from food & travel at Ms. Adventures in Italy to tech topics at When I Have Time to a grassroots fan celebration of Nutella Day. All of them can be found at SaraRosso.com. She tweets at @rosso.

Ask your questions here and I will answer them during my session.

 
Check out Matt’s slides.

Check out Otto and Nacin’s slides: The Otto and Nacin Show

What are the 10 things you need to know to become a well-known food blogger? Includes how to write a recipe, how to become part of the community, get comments, take food photos, etc. I will show examples of WordPress food blogs and explain why they succeed.

 
Check out Dianne’s slides: Killer Food Blogs

About the Speaker:
Dianne Jacob is the author of Will Write for Food: The Complete Guide to Writing Cookbooks, Blogs, Reviews, Memoir, and More. The first edition won the Cordon D’Or International award for Best Literary Food Reference Book in 2005. The second edition won the Gourmand World Cookbook Award in 2010 for best book in its category in the US. Her blog, Will Write for Food: Pithy Snippets about Food Writing, covers food writing trends and technique. Her posts have been picked up by Publishers’ Weekly, Chow, Eater, BlogHer and the Food News Journal. She started the blog in 2009 as a way to update her book, which features an extensive chapter on food blogging.

This talk will discuss how designers can take control of their designs with version control. It will give an overview of popular version control systems, why designers should start using version control, and when and how designers will need to use version control in the WordPress community.

 
Check out Chelsea’s slides: Version Control for Designers

About the Speaker:
Chelsea Otakan, also known as Chexee, is a web designer and time traveler from Reno, NV. She started blogging with b2/cafelog when she was in high school and spent her early college years crafting a student newspaper’s website with WordPress MU. These days, she can be found wrangling designs for Automattic, contributing to the core UI group, sailing through space and time, and trying to make her puppy famous.

The back story of the very-real world application of the WordPress system by a team of photographers, embedded with US Marines in southern Afghanistan.

 
Check out Teru’s slides: Taking WordPress to War-Basetrack.org

About the Speaker:
Teru Kuwayama is a photographer from New York, and the founder of ww.lightstalkers.org, a web-based network of photographers, filmmakers, journalists, and complex emergency operators. His work over the past decade has focused on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir. He was the 2009–2010 Knight Fellow at Stanford University, a 2010 TEDGlobal Fellow and a 2010 Ochberg Fellow at the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. He received a 2010 Knight News Challenge Award to launch Basetrack, an online social media project that chronicled the deployment of a US Marine battalion in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011.

Join the WordPress core team for an open Q&A to get the answers to your deepest, darkest WordPress questions.

About the Speakers:
The Q&A will include Lead Developer Mark Jaquith, UX and Community Lead Jane Wells, and Core Developers Andrew Ozz, Andrew Nacin, Daryl Koopersmith, and Jon Cave.

Could your plugin be the cause of a WordPress site being hacked? WordPress security experts Mark Jaquith, Jon Cave, and Brad Williams will be performing live security reviews of submitted plugins on Saturday as well as providing tips on security best practices in plugin and theme development. Standard coding techniques and patterns to defend against attacks such as XSS, CSRF and SQLi will be taught by example. If that previous sentence makes no sense to you, you really need to attend this session!

Mark is a WordPress lead developer and a freelance WordPress security consultant, Jon is a core developer and member of the security team, and Brad is author of Professional WordPress Plugin Development and a security fanatic. Together they have helped numerous plugin and theme authors fix vulnerabilities in their products.

If you would like to have your plugin reviewed then submit it using the form. We are looking for plugins that are relatively short in length, approximately 400 lines of code or fewer, and will select a few to review together during the session.

 
Check out the slides for the Security Showdown.

This talk will discuss professional WordPress development, scaling up and out to meet demand, and strategies for deploying everything that will keep you sane. Topics for discussion: Apache, Memcached, APC, nginx, NFS, rsync, Git, Capistrano.

 
Check out Mark’s slides: Coding, Scaling, and Deploys, Oh My

About the Speaker:
Mark Jaquith has been working with and contributing to WordPress since 2004. He is one of the lead developers of the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services with a focus on scaling, security, and custom functionality. Mark likes patches that have more red than green, and his favorite WordPress features are the ones that you’re not even aware of. He eagerly looks forward to shooting down your feature suggestions with, “No, but it would make a great plugin!”