WordCamp Seattle: Experienced Edition 2015

This panel is comprised of the project managers and developers behind three complex and highly-trafficked WordPress sites. They’ll briefly discuss how they use WordPress at scale and the challenges they had to overcome. and will then take questions from the audience.

This panel is comprised of the project managers and developers behind three complex and highly-trafficked WordPress sites. They’ll briefly discuss how they use WordPress at scale and the challenges they had to overcome. and will then take questions from the audience.

This panel is comprised of the project managers and developers behind three complex and highly-trafficked WordPress sites. They’ll briefly discuss how they use WordPress at scale and the challenges they had to overcome. and will then take questions from the audience.

This panel is comprised of the project managers and developers behind three complex and highly-trafficked WordPress sites. They’ll briefly discuss how they use WordPress at scale and the challenges they had to overcome. and will then take questions from the audience.

Welcome to WordPress

In this early morning keynote, I’ll give an intimate look into how working with WordPress has impacted my life, and how I’ve strived to impact others

Jake has vetted hundreds of applicants over the last decade, and has personally considered and hired more than 40 WordPress engineers over the last few years. While the hiring process at 10up has evolved and has been mostly delegated, the fundamental precepts – and many key questions – live on, as we consider hundreds of applicants each year.

10up’s questions range from the philosophical – “Describe something that really frustrates you about WordPress right now, and propose a solution”- to technical – “Tell me about the two basic types of hooks in WordPress, and the difference between them” – to granular – “What’s the best way to prevent posts in a specific category from showing up in the blog index?” Sometimes there’s more than one right answer, sometimes there’s really only one answer. And there are also some really bad answers.

Can you pass 10up’s WordPress developer interview?

We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do.

With great power, comes great responsibility. During this talk, Taylor will step through the do’s and don’ts of Multisite Networks. He will share how WordPress Multisite can be your best friend or worst enemy… but usually both… at the same time.

Expect pro-tips, eureka moments, and hard lessons learned from his experience setting up and running multisite networks for small private company intranets, all the way to global enterprise brands.

By the end of this talk you will know the pros and cons of WordPress Multisite Networks, best practices for setting up and running a multisite, and know about alternatives if multisite isn’t a fit for your next project.

As a developer or designer, when you are ready to hand a completed project back to your client, what do you do if they don’t understand how to operate and manage their new WordPress site? Do you teach them yourself? Do you send them to a tutorial site? Recommend an online course or an in­person workshop?

Whatever strategy you use, are you sure it’s the best solution for your client? In the first part of my presentation, I’ll talk about the different options out there, your clients’ learning styles, and how to better understand what your clients need while making sure they are comfortable moving forward.

For theme and plugin developers, I’ll share the most common needs people have when looking for support and documentation, as well as strategies for making your documentation easier for your customers to understand.

In both cases, I will share insights and tips from thousands of beginners and users, who are likely 80% or more of your market.

Is your workflow slowing you down? Destroy bottlenecks — and boost your bottom line — by building a workflow around the Bootstrap CSS & JavaScript responsive framework. Jeff Brock, one of Seattle’s most in-demand WordPress front-end developers, has built more than 75 WordPress sites. In the last six months, he revamped his workflow to reach productivity Nirvana and will walk you through:

1. Streamlining your local development environment with tools such as DesktopServer, CodeKit, Coda, and Git.
2. Building a SASS-flavored Bootstrap starter theme based on the “_underscores” theme.
3. Deploying with plugins such as WP Migrate DB Pro.

This is a introduction to unit testing, why it’s critical to a solid development workflow, and how to write some basic unit tests. Basic command line skillz prerequisite.

Free and premium themes are great, but if you want to build a truly custom website with WordPress you need to build a custom theme from scratch. In this presentation designer, developer, and educator Morten Rand-Hendriksen takes you through the process of building a theme from scratch with what is arguably the best starter theme available: _s (Underscores). The presentation looks at design and development decisions and principles including mobile-first, accessibility, responsive design, and information architecture, and takes a deep dive into the structure of the Underscores theme to show the audience how to build a theme from the ground up to become what you envisioned and more.

Each of these three talks will be 10 minutes long and packed with information on their given topic.

Using the theme customizer – Merrill Mayer

An overview of the theme customizer API and how to build it into your themes.

Falling in Love with Sass for WordPress — Frederick Meyer

Learn why Sass, the CSS preprocessor, is better than vanilla CSS for complex projects, based on two key qualities of Sass: 1. It’s DRYer, and 2. It’s dynamic. The talk will describe these benefits with reference to a complex real-life client project: creating a user-managed WordPress theme generator, with widths, color scheme, typography, etc., all changeable as Sass variables, compiling to one clean custom CSS stylesheet with no extra “theme options” DB calls. The talk will cover examples of Sass fundamentals (mixins, extends, variables, functions, nesting) as they appeared in that project, and will briefly cover Sass best practices and when to use Sass in a WordPress context.

Using Composer and WordPress  — Kalen Johnson

Composer has taken the PHP community by storm, allowing projects to easily integrate PHP packages with their projects. Although WordPress doesn’t (yet) use autoloading and Composer, that doesn’t mean we as developer’s don’t have to. We’ll walk through what Composer is, how to use it, then see how we can integrate it with our own WordPress projects, whether that’s a theme, plugin, or an entire WordPress site.

Each of these three talks will be 10 minutes long and packed with information on their given topic.

Using the theme customizer – Merrill Mayer

An overview of the theme customizer API and how to build it into your themes.

Falling in Love with Sass for WordPress — Frederick Meyer

Learn why Sass, the CSS preprocessor, is better than vanilla CSS for complex projects, based on two key qualities of Sass: 1. It’s DRYer, and 2. It’s dynamic. The talk will describe these benefits with reference to a complex real-life client project: creating a user-managed WordPress theme generator, with widths, color scheme, typography, etc., all changeable as Sass variables, compiling to one clean custom CSS stylesheet with no extra “theme options” DB calls. The talk will cover examples of Sass fundamentals (mixins, extends, variables, functions, nesting) as they appeared in that project, and will briefly cover Sass best practices and when to use Sass in a WordPress context.

Using Composer and WordPress  — Kalen Johnson

Composer has taken the PHP community by storm, allowing projects to easily integrate PHP packages with their projects. Although WordPress doesn’t (yet) use autoloading and Composer, that doesn’t mean we as developer’s don’t have to. We’ll walk through what Composer is, how to use it, then see how we can integrate it with our own WordPress projects, whether that’s a theme, plugin, or an entire WordPress site.

Each of these three talks will be 10 minutes long and packed with information on their given topic.

Using the theme customizer – Merrill Mayer

An overview of the theme customizer API and how to build it into your themes.

Falling in Love with Sass for WordPress — Frederick Meyer

Learn why Sass, the CSS preprocessor, is better than vanilla CSS for complex projects, based on two key qualities of Sass: 1. It’s DRYer, and 2. It’s dynamic. The talk will describe these benefits with reference to a complex real-life client project: creating a user-managed WordPress theme generator, with widths, color scheme, typography, etc., all changeable as Sass variables, compiling to one clean custom CSS stylesheet with no extra “theme options” DB calls. The talk will cover examples of Sass fundamentals (mixins, extends, variables, functions, nesting) as they appeared in that project, and will briefly cover Sass best practices and when to use Sass in a WordPress context.

Using Composer and WordPress  — Kalen Johnson

Composer has taken the PHP community by storm, allowing projects to easily integrate PHP packages with their projects. Although WordPress doesn’t (yet) use autoloading and Composer, that doesn’t mean we as developer’s don’t have to. We’ll walk through what Composer is, how to use it, then see how we can integrate it with our own WordPress projects, whether that’s a theme, plugin, or an entire WordPress site.

Do you know what it takes to make a website that works for everyone? Come to this info-packed session to learn about website accessibility, WordPress accessibility initiatives, and the role that YOU play in making the web more accessible. There will be resources, tips, and code snippets galore! Come ready to learn and leave inspired to make your next project more accessible.

Marketing yourself or your business can be really scary when you’re an introvert who is more comfortable in front of a computer than in front of real people.

There are a lot of introverted folks in the WordPress community looking for freelance jobs, employment, or quality contractors to hire, yet many of us feel scared, directionless, isolated, overwhelmed, and hungry for work.

I’ll share my experience growing from a timid one-person freelance shop to a more confident team of nine great people, including practical tactics for in-person networking, working with freelancers, finding the right fit, and community participation.