WordCamp Sheffield 2014

The real power of the web comes from its interconnectedness (see what I did there?). I’ll be looking at some of the ways you can integrate external APIs into WordPress and even use WordPress as an API itself.

bbPress and BuddyPress have this thing that we call “theme compatibility”.In a nutshell, it’s the system that lets those plugins seamlessly add templates for their screens and content types to your website, without requiring site owners to copy files around or edit their theme.

This session, intended for reasonably experienced developers, goes into the nitty gritty of how this works under the bonnet.

Over 10 years ago Mike co-founded WordPress. Here he will talk about how he got here, how WordPress has changed his life and his hopes for WordPress in the future.

This session will conclude with an on-stage interview with Mike that will have time for probing questions, remember to fill in your question for Mike when you buy a ticket!

On first install the WordPress admin screens can be a minefield for clients. This session will outline some of the steps that I have taken to try and ease the fears clients have when navigating and using the WordPress admin.

Michelle is the founder of Rockhaq.com, which piloted in 2011-12 as the UK’s only music journalism community for schools. Now Rockhaq is re-launching with a wider remit, this talk looks at the lessons learned from the pilot and what lessons others could learn.

This includes customising features, abandoning others, managing users/content, navigating legal hurdles, revising business goals, expecting the unexpected and waving goodbye to BuddyPress.

The average WordPress site sits on a traditional PHP development stack of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) …only there is no such thing as an average WordPress site!

In this talk Tim will take you through 3 different software combinations to show how its as important to pay attention to what WordPress is sitting on top of as it is to customise and optimise themes and plugins. From Nginx to running PHP through HipHop Virtual Machine, to Memcache and Elasticsearch there is so much more to it than a dull LAMP stack.

DONT PANIC!

Details matter is something heard so often and ignored almost as frequently. From the search input field to the way dates are laid out – these details build to make up the theme. Paying attention to details brings your theme to the next level.

You can bring delight to users by giving thought to even the smallest part of your theme. I’ll encourage in this talk to not accept the default and to consider even the smallest element of your theme. I will be showing that theme details matter.

Though in no way a WordPress expert, Samantha has five years experience in running the award-winning University of Sheffield Enterprise blog on the WordPress platform.

The blog is updated regularly and contributed to by a variety of authors with varying technical ability. This talk will outline some of the challenges of running this blog – technical, logistical, and legal – and some suggestions on how to make life easier for the editors out there.

Tom is co-founder & managing director of Human Made Limited, a WordPress development company specializing in high-end WordPress sites; and co-director of happytables, a website solution for restaurants. He’s been developing with WordPress since version 1.2 and maintains several WordPress plugins which combined have over half a million downloads.

In this session Tom will cover how Human Made and happytables are run remotely with no central office and staff all over the world.

So, How do I Know if my WordPress Website is Accessible? 16 simple tests that anyone can do on their own websites to assess the accessibility of the site. Shows examples and introduces a couple of useful free tools.

This will be followed by a LIVE Assistive Technology Demo – basically a  live demo of a screen reader and voice recognition software, and how they are used to browse the web.

Stop hacking and compromising on your WordPress theme builds! Building your own bespoke themes doesn’t have to be scary… in-fact it will ensure that you build themes that are built to purpose rather than having to work around lots of irrelevant code.

Developing WordPress bespoke themes for clients can be a minefield. Learn from my successes (and failures!) – plan, build and deploy flexible themes that suit your clients budget and editing capabilities and save you a whole lot of time in the future! I’ll cover my complete workflow that I’ve developed over a number of years and hopefully have time to share a few smart theme coding tricks that I use to build bespoke themes for WordPress.

Composer is a tool for dependency management in PHP. It allows you to declare the dependent libraries your project needs and it will install them in your project for you.

Here Tom will show you how to integrate Composer into WordPress for more robust development Workflows.

Make your site run faster. Oh yes.

I started showcasing cool plugins when I spoke at my first WordCamp in Cardiff back in 2009. Since then it’s grown into a list of awesome plugins that every site needs and a few that you’ve probably never heard of.

I’d say you should go ahead and visit wowplugins.com for more info but I’m still working on that!

Let’s get this thing started.