WordCamp St. Louis 2015

Winning Brand. Winning Company. is a tour through how a brand develops. How and why the behaviors of a company influence the brand awareness of their target market is illustrated. The session explores the concepts of Brand Equity, Brand Fragmentation, Brand Awareness, Corporate Systems and Consumer Behavior.

Get to know the real differences between your brand, your marketing and your logo…this knowledge will go a long toward creating your Winning Brand or helping your clients develop theirs.

Understanding your brand and your clients’ brand(s) will allow you to craft compelling messages, content strategies and web concepts.

See real world examples of local brands that will solidify your knowledge and inspire you to act.

The question most people ask me is how to be me. But that isn’t really what you want to know. Your power to give back to WordPress is unique, and I can help show you the way. Don’t be me. Be you.

Mika’s presentation slides can be found on her site.

I recently replaced a proprietary SaaS CMS for the largest school district in the state (Newark, NJ). We launched our 70+ schools sites on Aug 29, 2014 on top of WordPress. Our district site is 30,000 pages and 300,000+ media assets. In the end, we cut our annual web site management budget in half and have beautiful new web sites powered by WordPress that ease the pain points our content owners, administrators and technology coordinators have when managing their school web sites.

This presentation will cover how this was achieved using WordPress, how it has solved many of the problems we were facing with our vendor-controlled proprietary system, and how we have embraced the concept of WordPress as an Application Framework, allowing us to create all kinds of sites, applications, and mobile apps directly from WordPress.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Dropbox.

WordPress, with it’s easy to maintain platform, strong community focus, and widespread adoption makes it the premier tool to reach an internet audience promoting your non-profit. Spend your time growing your non-profit and less time managing your web presence by utilizing WordPress.

With numerous plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress, your website becomes more than information. We’ll discuss some of the top plugins to use, and how get the most from WordPress.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.

Join St. Louis raconteur and man-about-town Bob Barker as he shows us all the ways WordPress can help you run a small startup (is there any other kind?) – for building an audience, handling receipts, managing customer service on social media and more.

WooCommerce is now the world’s most popular open source eCommerce platform. With over 5 million downloads, WooCommerce powers over 380k websites and over 17% of all eCommerce websites.

Michael Cremean is the Founder and CEO of Quadshot Software has deployed many WordPress eCommerce websites using WooCommerce.   Quadshot also developed an open source online ticket sales platform built on WooCommerce called OpenTickets, which is one example of how customizable the platform is.

This presentation will cover:

•  WooCommerce Overview
• Installation, Setup and Configuration 
• Setting up Products –  Physical, Digital Downloads and Virtual
• Products with Variations
• Orders and Reports
• WooCommerce Extensions –  how to use them
• Extending WooCommerce

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.

WordPress has revolutionized the web by letting anyone with a spare evening and an internet connection to launch a website and reach the world. With thousands of plugins offering an endless buffet of features, and every host promoting their one-click WordPress install, building a website has never been easier.

But building a site worth visiting is a whole ‘nother animal.

It may not be as much fun as perusing your favorite theme shop, but planning is the key to any great website. A great site pulls off a cool trick: it meets your business objectives by reaching your users’ goals (and delivering a delightful experience in the process).

The good news: you don’t have to have an MBA or be a sociologist to understand the two. If you start with a clear plan that shows how your site strategically fits into your business and develops a deeper understanding and empathy for your users is easier than ever.

And it’s the path to a truly great website.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

WordPress has a long standing history of providing a good user experience. Publishers, site owners, content editors, all have been able to benefit from the ease of use of the admin. In this talk, we’re going to take a deeper look into the experience of the WordPress admin –  how we can extend WordPress to make publishing content a breeze, and how a few changes to the way we approach the admin, plugins, and themes can help make the experience even better.

Cain & Obenland in the morning! – a morning show-style WordCamp talk with three segments: two that will cover any number of WordPress topics – current WP happenings, theming, design, development, best practices, worst practices, future trends, you name it – and a special guest interview with a big name from the WordPress world.

Cain & Obenland in the morning! – a morning show-style WordCamp talk with three segments: two that will cover any number of WordPress topics – current WP happenings, theming, design, development, best practices, worst practices, future trends, you name it – and a special guest interview with a big name from the WordPress world.

Find out what the upcoming WordPress REST API is and why you should be using it. Come and be convinced that when this is added to core it will expand WordPress’ mission of democratizing publishing by democratizing content. Perhaps most importantly learn what JRR Tolkien had to say about using REST over XML-RPC.

Presentation slides can be found on the Speaker’s Google Drive.

“Having toddlers as coworkers” and other life lessons from the 314 team.

Hi, my name is Jason Yingling. I’m a lead developer at Red8 Interactive. We’re a small local web development firm specializing in WordPress. In this presentation I’ll cover Advanced Custom Fields and more specifically the Flexible Content Fields feature to create templates with, well, flexible content.

We’ll walk through the basics of how Advanced Custom Fields works and show how it could be implemented in a theme. I’ll show how to set up the the fields in the backend. Then show how to set up the if-while loop in the template to pull in the flexible content through WordPress. We’ll do it live to show how quick and powerful it can be.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

Decouple from the cascade and free your styles.

Speaker’s presentation can be found at http://sadness.dance

Be prepared! Whether you are responsible only for running a single site for yourself, or maintaining dozens for your clients, you should know how to take reasonable precautions to secure WordPress against common attacks. We will review the types of active threats that WordPress sites face, how and why a site gets targeted, and then look at a variety of techniques for improving security.

• Some areas we will cover:
• Access controls
• Htaccess recipes to block specific attack types
• Moving key WordPress files to spoil scripting
• Obfuscation methods
• File permissions
• Coordinating with a web host system administrator
• Responding to an apparent hack

The overall goal will be to make your site(s) less attractive to opportunistic exploits, and give you a better sense of how to respond before (and, if necessary, after) a security breach.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site. Notes can be found there as well.

If you spend your days designing and developing WordPress themes, you probably find yourself building the same elements over and over. Preprocessors like Sass and Less can speed things up inside a given site, but still – every site needs menus, buttons, headers, footers, form elements … you get the idea.

Well. What if you could craft your HTML and CSS (and your preprocessor variables, mixins and so on) into isolated patterns that:

• live at a single URL, so you can share it with whoever needs access, no matter where they are in the world;
• you can use over and over again, in project after project?
• yet still rewrite and restyle as a system, such that every single implementation can look wildly different?

That’s the essence of atomic design.

If you’re like me, you’ll discover the pattern libraries you build with atomic design give you a common starting point for new projects and a consistent process for your design system. The libraries themselves are simple to maintain, simple to expand.

And once you’re up and running, you can also use the WordPress template functions to organize your theme files the same way you’ve organized your pattern library.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Speaker Deck.

A WP site brings together three different kinds of pixie dust to make its magic:

Structure –

What happens on your site and where? How does the system build the layouts?

Style –

What does your site look like – from typefaces to colors to icons to layout grids?

Story –

I hate the word content. And I couldn’t think of three things with hard Cs for alliteration.

But anyway. What’s the story you want to tell?

• How?
• Text?
• Graphics?
• Audio?
• Video?

Does it matter where you put them?

Your visitors may not care. Your clients may not care.

But, yes, it matters. Let’s talk about why: the good things that happen when everything’s where it belongs – and the consequences of mixing things up.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

What’s the first step you take when setting up a new WordPress site?

You should grab a Jetpack!

Jetpack is a suite of tools designed to enhance WordPress with some of the features and power of WordPress.com, all delivered for the price of absolutely free.

This session will discuss the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, what it does, and why Jetpack should be in your default plugin arsenal when configuring new WordPress sites.

Blogging seems to be the best way to get recognition for a nifty talent, share your experience with the world, or even leverage your business. Content creation aside from social engagement is truly one of the life bloods building an authority in your niche. In this session we’ll go over:

• Basic blogging tips
• A little about SEO and how to keep it in mind when creating content
• Some syndication and social sharing tips
• How to avoid that dreaded bloggers block

I’ll even give you plenty of resources to topic ideas to take away so you never have a problem creating content ever again!

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

The best WordPress site is an updated WordPress site. Learn about why you should update your site without the headache. I’ll talk about ways to prevent problems when updating and share some best practices on site updates.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

Responsible sites.

Responsible site owners and builders.

What do those ideas even mean?

Let’s take a look at:

Devs’ role in the process.

• Ethics
• Performance
• Accessibility.

WP-specific:

• Tricks
• techniques
• considerations

Finally, we’ll explore some ways we work to stay responsible on projects for our Collective.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.

Are you a blogger or a business owner?

Want to get up and running fast with a WordPress website? Want a pro to help you do it?

Come see how to hire the right web designer for your project:

• How do you evaluate a web designer’s portfolio?
• Who do you ask for recommendations?
• What’s the ‘the coffee test’ – and what can you learn from it?

Are you a web designer or the owner of an agency?

Discover what’s important to potential clients – and start figuring out how you stack up.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s Slideshare.

Managing WordPress Projects – Let’s get better on this!

Developers and Designers love to use their creativity to build amazing things for their clients with WordPress , however it’s not always that they are able to delivery those on time. WordPress is a wonderful tool that allow us to have a powerful website up and running in a couple of hours, so why do we need to be worried on how we manage our projects? I’m pretty sure you have tons of reasons to be worried about it…

We all know how hard it is to keep the expectations of our clients in a proper level over the course of the project. How difficult it is to maintain the scope, and if it changes, how to identify the impact before the “go live” date? I would like to present some basic concepts of Project Management applied specific to WordPress projects, using the experience I got managing projects for my company.

Intended Audience: WordPress Freelancers and Startups

Presentation slides are available on the speaker’s Slideshare.

As one of the most versatile and user-friendly CMSes out there, WordPress offers a wealth of possibilities for content marketing.

It doesn’t matter who you want to reach – consumers or businesses – or what your experience is – from occasional blogger to Pulitzer-winning journalist – WordPress works.

Come join me for a look at how you can leverage the platform for your own content – to build your audience and reach your goals.

Plus: A few of my favorite plugins and WordPress tricks, to help you navigate the CMS like an expert and bend WordPress to your will.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.

We all love WordPress but know that things can go wrong from time to time. What if you knew exactly what to do whenever a WordPress issue arises? This can include anything from a theme or plugin issue all the way to those really bizarre things that can happen, leaving you clueless how to troubleshoot them. No high-level amount of technical experience needed with the tricks we will show you.

Being equipped to handle WordPress issues can really help you keep things running smoothly on your site and focus on the fun stuff, rather than hair-pulling and other madness.

Version control.

We all know we should be using it. A lot of us are. And some of us are a little intimidated.

Fact is, it’s not always quick or easy. And sometimes the workflow doesn’t flow.

Enter git flow.

At 10up we use git flow with services like Beanstalk and Bitbucket to auto-deploy commits to staging and production environments.

Sound like a mouthful?

If you’re new to version control, you’ll start to understand its power. And you’ll see – it’s not as hard as you might think!

If you’re a seasoned developer, you’ll see how using git flow can help on bigger projects that have multiple developers. And if you’re even thinking about getting into the enterprise, it’s crucial to show companies you’ve got a systematic and secure development processes.

In this talk, I would be discussing version control. But more specifically, I would be outlining a version control workflow called git flow. I would also be outlining how we use git flow in conjunction with services like beanstalk and bitbucket to auto deploy commits to staging and production environments.

I think this would be a great talk for various attendees. Beginners could begin to understand the power of version control, and advanced users could see how using git flow can be a benefit when working on larger projects, with multiple developers. As WordPress continues to make inroads into the enterprise marketplace, it is becoming more important for WordPress developers to implement safe and organized development processes.

Presentation slides can be found on the speaker’s site.