WordCamp San Francisco 2012

WordPress themes have come a long way since the first themes started popping up years ago. We’ll look at where themes have come and, more importantly, where they might be headed in the future.

Learn about the design of Twenty Twelve – the new default WordPress theme.

Matt Mullenweg takes a look at the past year in WordPress and lays out a vision for its future.

Being an ambitious entrepreneur and a very average developer is an “interesting” combination (to say the least) when you set out on the journey of creating a sustainable & profitable business within an open-source ecosystem. In this talk, I’ll share some of stories I experienced & unexpected lessons I learnt since venturing into the world of WordPress and eventually co-founding WooThemes.

We’re becoming increasingly mobile. Big companies talk about the post-PC era, but the truth is we’ve always been mobile, we just have more possibilities now than ever before.

There have been official, open source WordPress apps for over 4 years. We’ve come a long way since the first iPhone was introduced, now it’s time to figure out how we want to use WordPress while on the go over the next four years. We’ll talk about the latest app updates, how the apps fit into the WordPress ecosystem, and discuss some possible directions for mobile WordPress at large. As a community we can make it happen, and we’re only just getting started.

Learn how we leveraged the WordPress.org platform to build, grow and sell a SAAS web app to scale to tons of users and billions of impressions by building a customized admin, user interface, 13 plugins and a lot of blood, sweat and panda tears.

In an age of ever-increasing distractions, creating habits in users has become a requirement to stand out from the noise. How do technology companies create addictive products? What are the secrets of creating products customers use everyday? How can you design a product
compelling enough to create an “Automatic Customer”?

As we’ve been registering more and more custom post types in WordPress over the last couple of years, we’ve found that we often need to relate them together in meaningful ways. Randy Hoyt will explore in detail one particular kind of a relationship, a subordinate relationship where posts of one type are children of another type. WordPress core uses this relationship in places, as do a number of popular plugins, and Randy will cover code you can use to take advantage of this kind of relationship in your work.

Leo will share how he grew an audience of 250,000 subscribers on Zen Habits from nothing. He used WordPress as his platform to experiment with nearly every aspect of blogging until he eventually figured out what matters most in growing an audience.

The Web is no longer a dusty bookshelf of documents. It needs to become a rich operating system that lets us tell stories, share our experiences, and which provides powerful functionality and services wherever and whenever we need them.

In this mobile-first world, platforms like WordPress and Facebook are uniquely positioned to help fulfill this promise. In this session, we’ll review the work that we’ve been doing with Automattic, the W3C, and the broader industry. We’ll discuss & demonstrate the WordPress Facebook plugin project. And we’ll explore how the WordPress community can help the Web as a whole rise to this collective challenge.

The Performance Golden Rule is that 80-90% of the time it takes for a website to load happens on the front end. Since we all care about our websites performance, let’s focus on that. We’ll cover some easy things that have a big impact on making our websites faster.

Code is Poetry. You may have noticed this phrase in the footer of WordPress.org or printed on a t-shirt or sticker. It’s a beautiful metaphor, but what does it mean? During the course of this talk, we’ll take a look at possible definitions for “Code is poetry” and how they can be applied to developing extendable themes and plugins.

We will examine why plugin performance matters and the right way to measure performance in WordPress plugins.  We will also look at common ways to avoid slowing down your customers’ sites.

Almost exactly a year ago, my friend Nathan and I attended our first WordCamp with an ambitious to-do list:  learn the WordPress API, port two themes, import an archive of 13 years of content (39,000+ posts), launch the whole thing on the wordpress.com cloud and …. oh ya … help solve global warming.  One year later, we’re back! And, after a year of work and extremely generous help from many people, we’re happy to report that … we did it!  (Except the global warming part, that is still a problem.)  This is the highly-abridged story of how Grist — the nation’s coolest environmental blog and magazine — went WordPress.  I’ll share a few of the technical and business lessons we’ve learned this year, talk a bit about what it means to move an entire small media company to WordPress, and mention some of our successes and challenges since making the big switch.

Thanks to a number of freely available plugins, you can create and customize any number of Content Types in whatever combinations that are necessary for a given project. This condensed presentation will go over many solutions available within the WordPress plugin directory which aim to save you time on your next project.

The premium marketplace is saturated with plugins and themes, but there are plenty of awesome opportunities beyond single sales. Noel will talk about his experience founding happytables, a software as a service for a niche market.

We often use writing text as an analogy to writing code. This is incredibliy cool. There is a lot to compare – process, values, what good writers and good developers have in common, the art of creation, the art of communication. However, we rarely get down to the lower levels. The talk will fill the gap and will show how we can write better code using rules from the great Strunk & White book.

How traditional problems for writers and journalists — like libel, copyright, and protecting your sources — apply to bloggers.

Using jQuery in the past, I’ve made many of the common mistakes. If you’re just starting out using jQuery, or you want to learn from my goofs – this is the talk for you!

APIs that make private data available require authentication.  JSON is the hot “new” API response format.  In the browser, authentication and JSON generate insecure APIs when combined naïvely.  Let’s figure out what can go wrong and try to find a better way of combining authentication and JSON in browser-accessible APIs.

Do you want your WordPress site to be fast and reliable? Even when you get lots of traffic? Join an Automattic Systems Wrangler for a quick tour on what a well-performing WordPress setup should look like and some tips on what’s going on behind the scenes of WordPress.com on the server side.

The P2 Theme (P2 for short) is the best-kept secret of productivity in the world of WordPress. Not only do all the core teams use it, it’s also the communication backbone of Automattic, WP Candy, and many other WordPress projects.

Have you ever wondered how you can…
Ditch email for good? Brief a new employee without having to go through your Documents folder? Stop discussions from being side-tracked with last-person-to-answer syndrome? Run a small country?

Pete Davies (Premium Services lead at Automattic) reveals all.

Do you know WordPress backwards and forwards, or could you be missing out on some of its best features? There’s a lot of amazingness packed into WordPress. Take a spin through the dashboard and test your knowledge about the neatest things WordPress can do.

bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress. Learn about the state and vision of the bbPress project, and why it’s the best and easiest way to create a community inside your WordPress-powered site.

BuddyPress is growing strongly and the community is vibrant. This session is a celebration of everything that’s happened in the BuddyPress ecosystem over the last year, and of the journey ahead.

You’re stuck. The project is incomplete, buggy as heck, and the client is calling every 30 minutes. Enlightenment is knowing what your code is doing and why. Thankfully, instead of having to depend on your inner calm, there are a number of tools and strategies you can use to better see what’s going on. We’ll cover the secret insights to turn your frustration into bliss.

Why we get involved in WordPress is as diverse as the ways in which we express our passions. Between helping out in the forums or IRC, or coding a patch, there’s no one right way to volunteer, and we welcome all of them. All you need to get started is that nudge.