WordCamp Sydney 2018

This talk is aimed at users to get the most out of their WordPress publishing experience.

Kristen’s talk will include some of the overlooked parts of WordPress admin such as:

• The Help menu.
• Screen Options.
• Drag & drop media.
• Inserting multiple images at once.
• Use the Edit Selection section of media dialogue.
• Page Ordering.
• Bulk Edit.
• Emoji.
• And many more!

You don’t need to be a coder to run a WordPress plugin business, but it has implications (and opportunities).

Ben Ramsden shares his journey since 2014 with GFChart, a premium extension to Gravity Forms.

In past 14 years I have seen many technological shift in WordPress.

I would share with example and best use guide what I feel the best Local Development Environment for WordPress in 2018.

This will be a very helpful session anybody looking to drive deep into WordPress and who are already working in WordPress, they will be able to explore other better ways to improve their workflow.

How to deliver and receive success and excellence

This talk will focus on the success and failures from building a 6 figure plugin sales business.

Have you ever made a plugin, and asked yourself what on earth you were thinking?

Or did you buy a plugin and it had no end of problems, but the developers weren’t supportive?

Some plugins are great, work seamlessly with your website, and deliver on what they promised.

Some are really, really bad. Just awful. Refund me now! Your website stops working, there are constant problems, the plugin developer is useless.

Chris Bryant has had some major plugin failures, and some great successes over the past 10 years, in his web development firm.

In this non technical talk, Chris will share his successes and failures with making plugins over the past decade. Topics to cover include:

For Business Owners

• Why your website company might be the worst people to make your plugin.
• What makes a good WordPress plugin?
• Setting expectations – What do you get for your money when you buy that $15 plugin?
• Why does the plugin you bought not work as expected?
• Why is it so expensive to have one system talk to another and what can I do about it?
• The role of quality, accuracy and price in choosing a plugin developer.

For Web Developers

• What happened when we were overloaded with support requests.
• How the smallest Git almost crushed us.
• The time we were told our plugin was about to be removed.
• How to build a successful business with WordPress plugins.

Case Studies
We’ll also cover a broad range of case studies which will provide valuable insights to both business owners and developers, including:

• The rarer one – $10,000 plugin
• The everyday gem – $500 plugin
• The big win – increasing plugin value with incremental improvement
• The complex one – Enterprise financial integration & risk management

Following from Luke’s talk on the Future of Web Content we’re kicking off a special panel on Gutenberg (new WordPress Editor).

We’ll start by taking Gutenberg specific questions from the audience and field them to our expert panellists, then if we have time we can move on to more general WordPress related questions and issues for our panel to help you with.

If you have any questions, please email them to us before the panel at [email protected] or tweet them to @WCSyd using the hashtag #WCSydPanel.

Learning and sharing the experience of how to use WordPress in large corporates, multiple sites , page builders, maintenance, ease of rollouts etc

Aspen Pharma only uses WordPress for all their sites.

Learning and sharing the experience of how to use WordPress in large corporates, multiple sites , page builders, maintenance, ease of rollouts etc

Aspen Pharma only uses WordPress for all their sites.

Everyone hates seeing the White Screen of Death, especially if it’s discovered by the client calling to tell you their site is down. Even more frustrating can be intermittent error and/or slow response times, as these can be much harder to diagnosed.

Aimed at newer WordPress developers and advanced users, this talk will start with the basic diagnostics tools available and go all the way through to advanced debugging. Attendees should be able to leave this talk with an informed diagnostic approach to errors, rather than just panic.

An exploration of ideas, lessons, hacks and opportunities to make you a more productive WP developer… and take your business on the road.

Topic points:

• Lessons learned whilst traveling the world as a remote WP developer.
• Hard realities of what it’s like to be a digital nomad, and what you need to do to make it profitable
• Australian specific tax implications and opportunites
• Acknowledge maintenance is required, and turn it into a product you sell to your clients (eg: ManageWP, InfiniteWP)
• Develop using ‘reusable function’ methodologies in your business (eg: starter themes, child themes, frameworks). Look at baking your own framework, but always use others.
• Look for opportunities to streamline your development (eg: CSS compilers, FTP sync, placing WP in a subdirectory).
• Become a hosting reseller to increase your passive income and be a one point call for your clients. This will save you time dealing with site builds.
• Identify opportunities to buy developer licenses and sell access to these as part of your maintenance.
• The benefits of stepping out of your comfort zone, and learning from other developers – especially non WP focused ones.

Working for yourself is great and all, but sometimes it can get lonely.

I figured this out pretty quickly when I began working for (by) myself. I’d love to share some tips and ideas I’ve picked up over the last few years regarding your working environment, finding others to work together with (on your own stuff), co-working spaces etc.

These are all things that can benefit your productivity, your professional growth, and even your mental health.

Have you used Microsoft Azure for your WordPress work? Azure is actually a very good platform to work with WordPress. As a cloud platform, Azure offers many different ways to host WordPress, from IaaS using virtual machines to PaaS using web app instances or container instances.

At the end of this session, audiences will learn 1) how to deploy WordPress on Azure virtual machines, 2) how to deploy WordPress on Azure App Service using git, 3) how to deploy WordPress on Azure Container Instances, and 4) how to deploy WordPress on Azure App Service using Docker Container, Docker Compose and/or Kubernetes.

Target Audience: Developer

Level: Advanced ▉▉

Ecommerce is evolving and brands can do a lot to move the needle for their businesses if they know the right strategies to use.

Learn about the most relevant trends in ecommerce right now and how you can put them into practice immediately.

Page Builders can sometimes get a bad rap, from being bloated and slowing sites down, to breaking sites and causing problems, or just not cool enough for real coders to use.

In this presentation I will show you how Page Builders are becoming more accepted, from novices to seasoned professionals, and use cases that demonstrate ways page builders can speed up development and make you more efficient.

Affirming the Role of the Designer in the WordPress Ecosystem

With a market spanning DIY to Enterprise, WordPress has cemented itself as the tool of choice for nearly 30% of the world’s internet creators.

We celebrate the robust content engine and the thousands of themes available, but with so much ‘done for us’, where does the role of designer fit within the WordPress environment, and how can we continue to use design to influence and shape the experience of WordPress for businesses, developers, DIY’ers and their respective audiences.

Following from Luke’s talk on the Future of Web Content we’re kicking off a special panel on Gutenberg (new WordPress Editor).

We’ll start by taking Gutenberg specific questions from the audience and field them to our expert panellists, then if we have time we can move on to more general WordPress related questions and issues for our panel to help you with.

If you have any questions, please email them to us before the panel at [email protected] or tweet them to @WCSyd using the hashtag #WCSydPanel.

The General Data Protection Regulation presents the greatest overhaul of data laws to Europe in 20 years, however its effect goes beyond the borders of the European Union.

Not only is the landscape of data law changing, but with data breaches from Equifax and Facebook, it’s now more important than ever that businesses remain careful and trustworthy data stewards.

This talk will provide an overview of the major changes brought in by the GDPR, what WordPress is changing to allow compliance, and why data privacy is becoming an even greater issue in the minds of consumers.

For far too long SEO companies, affiliate marketers, webmasters and business owners alike have tried to ‘game the system’ in order to rank their websites.

To ‘cheat’ their way to the first page of Google. But in 2018, with AI casting an Orwellian shadow over Search Engine Optimisation like never before, and the landscape of search (both organic and paid) shifting like sand beneath our collective feet, it’s time to re-evaluate our approach to what makes a website ‘great’ in Google’s eyes.

Google has over 200 ranking signals and over 10,000 sub-rankings signals, all tasked with working out who goes where in Google search.

In this talk, we cut through the digital skullduggery and online obfuscation to reveal the ‘Top 10 things every website needs to do to own their business vertical in 2018’.

‘When we build, let us think that we build forever.’

Overview – WordPress is a well-architected web platform for any sized organisation.

Do we run the risk of underselling WordPress to ourselves and our customers?

• Is WordPress more than a web platform?
• Is WordPress architected?
• Do we understand the value of an architected system?
• How can we take architectural values, apply them to our WordPress delivery, in creating enduring solutions?

This talk aims to provide WordPress Developers, Users and Business people see the greater value that WordPress brings to the table in delivering enduring solutions.

For the past 5 years, I have worked for The Code Company developing bespoke web applications using WordPress as a CMS/application framework.

I wanted to share some lessons and insights gained from working on niche start ups to enterprise-level applications as well as talk about general problems in software development.

The intent is to share my personal experience as a client-facing back end developer. Anyone with interest/experience in project work with WordPress is invited to come along.

Waiting on content is one of the biggest bottlenecks in digital agencies. In this talk I cover

• Why clients take to long to send content
• 3 ways to help your clients provide content faster
• Some great tools to help the process along
• How to request content in a way that makes it easy for clients

Facebook groups are a great way to build your brand and build connections but can you really make money from them?

In this presentation I’m going to explain how to create your own groups to support your customers, build trust and authority and upsell your products and services.

With two large groups (6k and 3k) I’ve learned the hard way how to deal with the trolls, share the right content, create connection and sell without selling.

I’ll cover:

• Why you should consider a Facebook group
• How to set primary goals for your group
• How to build and maintain engagement
• Managing time and resource investment in your group
• What kinds of content to share
• How to sell without selling
• Dealing with trouble makers and keeping things positive

Basics of SEO – Search Engine Optimisation for WordPress

• Understand search results (organic vs paid)
• SEO versus SEM
• Understanding search intent
• Keyword research
• Ways to improve search engine ranking
• Using SEO plugin in WordPress

Small businesses make up around 97.5% of all the registered businesses in Australia.

As such, they’re a market that shouldn’t be completely ignored. They do often need more help to get a website that works for them, and that’s where this session comes into play.

Jane developed her own website brief after finding many business owners were not given or talked through a proper brief by their website designers/developers.

They were left with sites that don’t work- they don’t attract leads, and don’t convert to sales once there.

There are also common frustrations around the handover of the site (or complete lack of), and where web developers can stay involved without taking over.

In this session, Jane wants to step you through how to develop a website brief with a small business client, how to correctly manage their expectations, deliver a website so they get a great result, and both parties walk away happy.

Lessen frustration and miscommunication and earn five star reviews! Key takeaways – Key questions to ask your client to help the website connect with their clients – Clients you should probably avoid – How to reduce frustration, miscommunication and rework – Getting great reviews – Handing over the site – Retaining the client.

I am an absolute ace at hiring overseas staff.

I know the pitfalls of a WordPresser and how they can overcome it.

I have built a successful WordPress agency even though I have no idea how to unpack a WordPress site. 🙂

I’m well known in the WPElevation crew.

I want to empower freelancers to grow their business by at least 1 person so they can go out and get more work – and grow their business.

You wouldn’t try and work out what’s wrong with your car engine by looking at the front bonnet.. so why debug your application from the outside when you can “pop the hood”?

The xDebug extension for PHP offers some amazing tools for developers to both understand and debug problems in their applications, but is frequently passed over as its benefits, setup, and configuration are poorly understood.

This talk aims to bring xDebug to the masses, discussing the setup of xDebug for a couple of local environments ( currently Local by FlyWheel, Laravel’s Homestead and Laravel’s Valet, though open to including more ‘WordPress’ environments like chassis ) and the configuration of your IDE ( VS Code / PHPStorm). Along with some demonstrations of how this method of working can help everyone take their development to the next level.

WooCommerce is the most popular eCommerce platform on the web and is the eCommerce platform for WordPress. Many businesses use WordPress and WooCommerce to manage their online presence and other applications inside their business with no integration between the offline and online applications.

In this session I’ll demonstrate how you can use the WordPress and WooCommerce REST APIs to seamlessly integrate your business applications with your webstore and remove any duplication and double data entry by:

• downloading WooCommerce Orders into your internal CRM
• uploading Products and Images from your internal CRM to WordPress and WooCommerce
• use Webhooks to receive instant notifications of new WooCommerce orders

If you haven’t used the WooCommerce REST API or not sure why you might use it this session will show you the benefits of integrating with the WooCommerce API.

Following from Luke’s talk on the Future of Web Content we’re kicking off a special panel on Gutenberg (new WordPress Editor).

We’ll start by taking Gutenberg specific questions from the audience and field them to our expert panellists, then if we have time we can move on to more general WordPress related questions and issues for our panel to help you with.

If you have any questions, please email them to us before the panel at [email protected] or tweet them to @WCSyd using the hashtag #WCSydPanel.

Principles and Practices to keep and build your business through better client relationships

Regardless of its size, the most critical pillar of maintaining and growing your business is going to be servicing clients. For some of us, this is one of the most invigorating parts of what we do, for others, it can be one of the hardest.

In this talk the speaker will propose answers to the following questions:

1. How do you keep sensible boundaries with your clients?
2. How do you say NO without ruining your relationship with your client?
3. How do you make your client an ally instead of feeling like they’re an interruption?
4. How will really serving your client actually serve you?

In the whole gamut of clients, from solopreneurs to international global corporations, one thing is constant, you need your them more than they need you. How this often plays out is that you find yourself bending over backwards to keep them happy… sometimes to your own detriment.

In this talk you’ll learn how to make yourself indispensable to your clients, without becoming a doormat.

Following from Luke’s talk on the Future of Web Content we’re kicking off a special panel on Gutenberg (new WordPress Editor).

We’ll start by taking Gutenberg specific questions from the audience and field them to our expert panellists, then if we have time we can move on to more general WordPress related questions and issues for our panel to help you with.

If you have any questions, please email them to us before the panel at [email protected] or tweet them to @WCSyd using the hashtag #WCSydPanel.

An introduction to the new WordPress editor

The new WordPress editor is coming, and it’s quite a departure from the classic “text in a box” mode that we’re used to.

In this talk, we’ll discover hidden features and workflow tips to help optimise our writing flow. We’ll also discuss editing and layout trends enabled by Gutenberg, to help our content stay fresh and engaging.