WordCamp Toronto 2012

The Malvern Red and Black Society is a NPO dedicated to keeping over 100 years worth of high school alumni in touch in Toronto. This session will show how the MRBS used an out-of-the-box solution, with free themes and a few plugins so that their own committee can update and post information to their more than 3000 members worldwide.

How to get involved in the WordPress community regardless of whether you’re a user, developer, freelancer, or business and the rewards and risks that come with it.

This presentation will explain why you must go social on your site. We’ll look at the best WordPress plugins for social follows and sharing, (mainly for self-hosted sites), including toolbars/welcome bars and other social media widgets. We’ll also look how best to feature social media on your site. And finally, You will be introduced to some cool free and new premium plugins for Facebook and the fast-growing Pinterest that can help you generate more leads and loyal followers to your site and to your social media platforms.

A brief of our Government of Canada funded war of 1812 local history project, what technologies we used and how WordPress helped us pull it all together.

A complete overview of creating a newspaper website using WordPress. This presentation will cover common newspaper, and magazine concepts, starter themes, advertising integration, helpful plugins and solutions for newspapers from startups to national publications.

This talk will be focused on bloggers with limited technical knowledge. In 45 minutes, users will be brought though the steps required to implement a fully functional, WordPress powered news website.

Our workshop will cover topics regarding Simple Theme Customization. The workshop is broken down into 4 sections. First, we will show you quick and easy ways to install a WordPress theme. Next, we will teach you how to setup Home Page widgets and how to widgetize any area. Moving forward, we will demonstrate how to make basic CSS updates using Google Chrome as a helpful development tool. Lastly, we will explain what Page Templates are, how to use them, and how to customize them.

A quick introduction to creating plugins for WordPress.  As we construct a simple plugin to add an awesome widget to your sidebars, we’ll summarize the resources needed to help you create plugins.  While you will definately will need to learn PHP, HTML and CSS to create your own plugins, no coding ability is required for this workshop.  You just need to be able cut and paste text into a file you create on your web site.

Could you recover your WordPress website if it was lost due to a hardware failure, hacked, or corrupted during an update or plugin install? Having good backups can make the difference between a 10 minute recovery and complete site rebuild that may take a week. This presentation will cover the basics of backups, and several techniques of creating and restoring backups including: using cPanel, WordPress plugins, and services like VaultPress.

About 2/3 of the world population speak more than one language and most of the world doesn’t use the Internet in English. This presentation will cover what components are needed for a successful multilingual WordPress site. We’ll compare different set-ups, review key plugins and examine common pitfalls. Then we’ll look at advanced features like e-commerce and email marketing. This presentation will be accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of WordPress. No coding necessary.

Richard Martin explains how WordPress should be the foundation of an online business. He will also cover (hard) lessons learned while building his own online business. This case study is designed for companies, professionals (lawyers, physicians, etc), entrepreneurs, and solopreneurs who want a presence online.

An overview of essential e-commerce concepts with some getting started tips for things to think about when setting up an e-commerce site. We’ll touch on payment gateways, how credit card processing really works, merchant accounts, SSL certificates, PCI compliance, basic WordPress security tips and a lighting review of popular e-commerce solutions for WordPress.

Local businesses face global competition. Markets are moving faster and faster. Businesses want results not excuses. Everything is going digital.

The session will explore effective marketing practices in a digital world and how the integration of social media within the overall marketing strategy is a key success factor. We’ll look at companies like Mountain Equipment Co-op who have capitalized on the evolving digital landscape to build lasting relationships with their customers.

There are hundreds of thousands of WordPress themes floating around and a whole cottage industry built on theme selling.  This presentation is about how to evaluate a premium WordPress theme and what to look for when shopping for a theme. This presentation focuses on tradition themes and will not go into detail on frameworks such as Headway, Thesis, etc.  The presentation assumes participants are fairly new to WordPress.

Which WordPress is right for you? We’ll compare the differences between WordPress.com and WordPress.org to help you understand if you should stick with WordPress.com or move to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation. Bloggers who start out on WordPress.com may later decide that a self-hosted WordPress.org site is a better choice for them. If you’re in that position, this session will help you to make the move.

The huge range of over 20,000 plugins is one of the most valuable features of WordPress.org – and also one of the most overwhelming. How do you determine what’s a safe and effective plugin without getting lost in a sea of choices? In this session we’ll look at how to make an informed decision about which plugin to use and how to troubleshoot any conflicts that may crop up, exploring factors including the likelihood of getting support if something goes amiss. We’ll review some recommended plugins, from common types to a few of the lesser known, including security tools and SEO plugins.

In this case, size does matter! But sizing photos and graphics doesn’t have to be complicated or scary. This will be an informative review on sizing photos and graphic elements for WP blog posts and site pages.

How do you better protect a WordPress installation from being hacked? There are lots of steps that can be taken to turn WordPress into a veritable bank vault, and Victor plans on providing those in a clear and concise talk.

Which approach is right for you? This session explores different methods to deliver a mobile version of your WordPress-based website.

How do you create child themes, and what can you do with them? In this workshop you will learn how to safely tweak your child theme while still getting updates from the parent theme you have chosen.

WordPress’ roles seem simple enough on the surface, but behind the Administrator, Editor, and the other default roles is a powerful system that can be customized extensively. While some have said that other CMS’ have an advantage when it comes to security and customizing capabilities, I’ll demonstrate in this talk that that isn’t true.