WordCamp Sydney 2014

NewsCorp Australia is going WordPress at scale – the why, and the how

NewsCorp Australia has recently decided to go with WordPress for some of the busiest domains in the country like news.com.au and foxsports.com.au, as well as using it for popular blogs and as a Digital Authoring Platform for lifestyle products.

This presentation will tell you how we came to this decision, and how we intend to deliver story telling at a global scale with WordPress.

Working on code by yourself is simple, but working with other developers can often get confusing pretty quickly.

Git is a hugely popular tool for versioning and sharing code. Some know it mode fondly as the tool made popular (and accessible) by github.

Jack will be showing you how to get started using git, how it can empower you and your team to work closer together, and how to start using git in your WordPress project.

Git is a powerful utility for team coding, and as such with great power comes great responsibility! This session will also discuss some of the workflows and strategies teams use to help streamline their development.

For some, the idea of writing a WordPress plugin is scary because there is so much that you can do with them, both good and bad.

But plugins don’t have to be complicated, there are some amazing things you can do with just a few lines!

The Customizer is one of the least known yet most powerful features of WordPress.

We need to get past thinking of it as the “Theme Customizer” which only good for tweaking colors and a limited number of settings.

No, the Customizer provides a framework for live-previewing any change to WordPress.

In WordPress 3.9 I led development of incorporating Widget management to the Customizer, and I’d like to get on a soapbox to get people excited about developing their own custom controls for the Customizer.

Organiser’s Note: This is a Dev/Tech talk that we’re squeezing into the schedule at the last minute.  It’ll be fun!

Too many people think building a site is hard work, or something only a “professional” can do.

For less than the cost of a cheap developer, you can actually create a better result yourself.

Most common mistakes and some easy fixes + tips on how to communicate with your web vendor to get the most out of your WordPress websites

Running A Remote Team

I run a remote sales/ marketing team around Australia and also developers / back office in Philippines – pitfalls and techniques to help, challenges, getting started etc

If your WordPress site is being used for something serious, shared web hosting just doesn’t cut it. Caching plugins and CDNs are often just masking poor host performance.

Virtual server hosting is now more affordable than ever. For as little as $10/month, you can get your own private SSD Linux server hosted in the Cloud.

Vlad shares his tips on choosing the right virtual server and setting it up for top WordPress performance, including configuration & tuning tips for Apache, PHP, Opcode Caches, MySQL and WordPress itself.

Whether you’re a blogger or a specialist in your professional field, WordPress can be a powerful tool to help build your profile.

Belinda Williams, a marketing communications specialist, copywriter and fiction author, will discuss how she utilised WordPress to build her author profile.

She’ll also share insights gained from her role as a WordPress Producer around helping businesses build and run their websites, and in the development of co-founding AssistantPress.me, an online company centred around helping businesses blog effectively to build their profile.

An evaluation of the most popular WordPress SEO Plugins, Yoast, All in One SEO. An basic breakdown of settings, other good supporting plugins.

Other advice and tips that don’t rely on plugins AT ALL!

Modifying WordPress beyond plugins and themes is difficult, right?

It might surprise you to find out there are some mods anyone can easily make to their WordPress site.

This presentation is focused on helping beginners overcome their fears of working with the code behind WordPress.

Scott will show you how easy it is to work with custom post types, change the login screen logo, modify a theme and add a custom dashboard widget.

Seeing how easy it is to mod your code will have you popping the bonnet and tinkering with WordPress in no time.

Dan spent 7 years failing at entrepreneurship before launching one of the world’s fastest growing WordPress support providers in 1 week.

Dan’s book The 7 Day Startup is a bootstrapper’s bible for going from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.

In this Talk he will present concepts from the book along with 5 criteria for building a high growth WordPress business.

This talk will compare several naming conventions and the pros and cons of each. From here, we’ll look how these benefits can be applied from the beginning of a project, assist the design process and how they apply to WordPress themes and plugins.

Did you know that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that is not loaded within 3 seconds?

If you are a WordPress developer or site owner, optimising WordPress for speed and performance is super important if you want to convert more leads, customers and sales for your clients or from your own WordPress site.

For this presentation, I’ll show you 99 ways that you can decrease your site’s load times and increase the front-end, back-end and server-side performance of WordPress.

Demonstrating how WordPress + WooCommerce can be integrated with an IoT based solution to help business do business.

Getting to the bottom of creating custom post types, and how this can benefit your clients.

Learn how to declare them, label them, add taxonomys and make them navigable in the Dashboard.

Then learn how to build templates for them and take full advantage of core WordPress functionality to make yours and your client’s life easier.

An insider’s look at how Troy built up WP Elevation.

Rainmaker: what it looks like and how it works.

Take your WordPress development from **competence** to **excellence**.

This discussion will cover some best practices around writing code for WordPress. What are the WordPress Coding Standards, and why should you use them?

What’s the best way of including scripts and styles? Is there a better way of handling AJAX?

We’ll talk about questions like these, and start you on your way to writing fast, safe, and beautiful code.

Learn how to select WordPress themes and plugins that will stand the test of time.

Working with WordPress (rather than against it) to set up a site that will last longer than you do

WordPress, the world’s most popular publishing software, now hosts the world’s fastest growing e-commerce software – WooCommerce.

So why is WooCommerce so popular?

Why would you want to set up a store on WordPress?

And what the heck is this WooCommerce thingamajig anyway?

In this talk, I demonstrate the most interesting features of the free WooCommerce plugin and discuss why its open source foundation combined with a marketplace for extensions is helping foster a great community.

I’ll then share the stories of some folks now making their living thanks to WooCommerce in the hope of inspiring others to believe they can do the same.

The advantages of localising open-source code for WordPress, things to consider when developing software for a global audience, and how to save time for developers and translators.

How to fortify your WordPress installation and keep those nasty hackers and sctipt-kiddies at arms length.

Gian Wild looks into PDF use in 2014 and the experiences of both the general public and people with disabilities.

Gian will also talk about how to deal with the legacy PDF problem.

She will explain how sometimes the best solution is not to make all your PDFs accessible, especially when resources are limited, and more importantly, how to meet accessibility requirements with thousands of untagged PDFs on your site.

You can download Gian’s slides from your smartphone from 7am Saturday on http://pz.tt/wordcamp-syd-14 (or your laptop if you’re old-school!)