Menu
Check out the folks who attended WordCamp Toronto 2014:
You can mark yourself as going to this camp in your account settings!
Shanta Nathwani
Content Architecture *NEW
with Shanta Nathwani
Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags. There is so much confusion about what types of things should be put on a page and what should be in a post. Static vs. Dynamic content is the best way to tackle this. An “About Us” page would be just that… A PAGE. If you are talking about something that is more time sensitive, then you want to do a post. Connected to this would be Categories and Tags. What are they? When creating a website, you can edit a menu to include not only pages, but also category archives that can create a more complete experience for small businesses.
Tom Auger
Contrib2Core: Sunday
It’s time to give back! Whether you’re a WordPress user or admin, a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us in the Community Room Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We’ll help you find a way to contribute to WordPress that’s appropriate to your level and interests.
If you’re a developer looking to address a bug in Trac (the official WordPress bug tracking software) we can help you find a ticket that you can work on. Learn how to do it from some of the experts in the room and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch, writing unit tests and documentation. Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!
Contrib2Core: Saturday
It’s time to give back! Whether you’re a WordPress user or admin, a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us in the Community Room Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We’ll help you find a way to contribute to WordPress that’s appropriate to your level and interests.
If you’re a developer looking to address a bug in Trac (the official WordPress bug tracking software) we can help you find a ticket that you can work on. Learn how to do it from some of the experts in the room and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch, writing unit tests and documentation. Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Dre Armeda
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Monika Piotrowicz
Accessibility – A feature you can build
With Monika Piotrowicz in the Accessibility track
Making a website or application accessible can be an overwhelming task for a lot of developers, especially if you’re not already an expert. Looking at all the complex regulations, specs, and articles on the topic, where should we begin? In this talk, I’ll walk through some of the challenges I faced when working through accessibility requirements for the first time. By thinking about accessibility as we would any other feature, it becomes less of a scary unknown requirement, and instead something we can plan for and implement to create a more open web for all.
Attendees of this talk will:
Brent Kobayashi
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Avery Swartz
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Robyn Larsen
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Denise Williams
WordPress Media Tools for Creatives
with Denise Williams in the User / Admin track
Put your masterworks up on a solid pedestal. Whether you need to build a home page for your band, a portfolio for your art, or a viewing hub for your videos, there are native and external WordPress tools for hosting, embedding, and presenting your multimedia content in ways that are easy, responsive, and cost-effective.
-WordPress.com portfolio post types and related themes
-image gallery options: what’s included in .org and .com, and what you can customize using Jetpack or other plugins
-audio and video: embeds and hosting
-promotion tools: widgets, plugins, and subscription services for interacting with outside content networks (like bandcamp, spotify, pinterest, more)
For beginner and intermediate bloggers and beginner site developers.
James Strang
How to take a free theme and make it yours
With James Strang in the User / Admin track
Not everyone can afford to have a custom designed theme for their WordPress website. Often we have to resort to the themes that are available for free or cheap. But how do we avoid having the website look the same as everyone else’s who used the same theme?
I will show you how to take the most common WordPress.org themes and turn them into the unique look you want. Google Chrome or Firefox recommended. No coding knowledge is required, but you will learn some basic CSS.
Participants will be able to:
Dawn Comber
Website Assessment clinic
with Ruth Maude and Dawn Comber in the Content and Business track.
Let two seasoned experts review your website and provide on-the-spot advice and insights into ways it can be improved!
This two hour session will give you feedback on your existing website with practical recommendations to improve it. Website assessments will include reviewing usability, messaging, SEO (search engine optimization) and design. We’ll address the principles of each as we review the websites of participants in the room.
Ruth Maude
Website Assessment clinic
with Ruth Maude and Dawn Comber in the Content and Business track.
Let two seasoned experts review your website and provide on-the-spot advice and insights into ways it can be improved!
This two hour session will give you feedback on your existing website with practical recommendations to improve it. Website assessments will include reviewing usability, messaging, SEO (search engine optimization) and design. We’ll address the principles of each as we review the websites of participants in the room.
Al Davis
WordPress 101
With Al Davis in the User / Admin track
This presentation is aimed at those who are new to WordPress and want to get a guided headstart. We’ll be looking at the WordPress landscape, some basic terms and terminology that will really help you get started, and tips and tricks acquired over years of teaching WordPress in a classroom setting.
Stephane Boisvert
Everything you know about AB testing is wrong
With Stephane Boisvert in the Developer track
This talk is more advanced than most testing talks in that it goes in depth on why you need to be careful about statistical significance and not getting caught up in early results.
http://www.slideshare.net/StephaneBoisvert/word-camp-toronto-41626168
Kyle Unzicker
Back To Square One: Building A WordPress Starter Development Kit
With Kyle Unzicker in the Agency track
The back-end and front-end teams at Modern Tribe set out to create a WordPress starter development kit in order to speed up development and help keep uniformity among projects. So, how did we build it? Why didn’t we use “________” framework instead? What does the code look like? Is our universe real? What is true happiness? This session will attempt to answer at least 60% of these questions.
Jacques Surveyer
WP Front-End Editors
With Jacques Surveyer in the User/Admin track.
Drag and drop Visual Designers have a checkered history in software development: too proprietary, too complex to learn, generate low-performance spam code, etc. But there is no doubt that Visual Design tools like Microsoft Visual Studio,various versions of Eclipse, NetBeans, Sencha Visual Designer, and others retain allegiance among very large groups of developers.
Now in the past 3-5 years WordPress has seen the emergence of frontend Visual Theme Designers that can be applied to both posts and pages. Headway Themes, Pagelines DMS, Ultimatum and Bakery’s Visual Composer are among these tools.
http://www.slideshare.net/jbsurveyer/wcamp3
This presentation will examine the question – is there a rock solid WordPress Visual Designer?
All attendees will benefit from the general review and demo of WordPress Visual Design tools. WordPress designers and developers will get specific insights on the features and methods used by the major tools:
David Colburn
Billy Gregory
Use ARIA Now!
With Billy Gregory in the Accessibility track.
In this session we will jump right in and use ARIA and HTML5 to create modern, accessible web applications. Starting with the basics, and working up to some more advanced examples, attendees will learn how to start using ARIA right away.
Rick Radko
Multisite for Multilingual
With Rick Radko in the Beginner Developer track
This talk is about creating a multilingual WordPress site using WordPress multisite. The talk will cover: the basics of setting up multisite, some plugins to make it easier to create a multilingual site, pros & cons of using multisite for multilingual sites, and some tips and tricks to help with your sites.
Chris Van Patten
WordPress Project Management 101
With Chris Van Patten in the Agency track.
I’ll be focusing on how you can manage a WordPress development project from start to finish: writing great proposals, working with project management software, learning to communicate with clients, and more.
Shawn Hooper
Save Time By Managing WordPress from the Command Line
With Shawn Hooper in the Developer track.
WP-CLI is a set of tools that allow you to manage your WordPress installation from the command line. Many of the features of WP-CLI are huge timesavers. I’ll demonstrate the installation of WP-CLI and explain many the features that come with it. I recommend this presentation for anyone designing or developing in WordPress.
Brian Layman
It’s ALIVE!!! – Using AJAX to bring WordPress sites to life.
With Brian Layman in the Beginner Developer track.
There was a time when every action taken on a website involved staring at a white screen for 5 seconds as the entire page was reloaded. If, for your clients, that time was last week, you should attend this session.
We will learn the basics of using AJAX to improve the speed, performance and presentation of your website. This session will involve writing source code. A basic understanding of editing plugins, themes, hooks and filters will be helpful, but may not be required.
Alex Rascanu
Demystifying SEO
With Alex Rascanu in the Content & Business track.
Discover what SEO best practices and resources can help you win in the long run, while complementing your current WordPress development processes. Learn how to incorporate our key take-aways to improve your organic search results and generate more customers for your brand.
Lucas Cherkewski
Designing Creativity
With Lucas Cherkewski in the Designer track
Speaker notes from the presentation
Design doesn’t have to be something that requires special talent, nor is it something limited to so-called “creative” people. Design is a skill, to be learnt and practiced like any other.
We’ll learn how to apply the principles of problem solving to a real design project to remove the necessity of a “creative” mind, and gain some tips for good design thinking along the way.
(Targeted at anyone interested in design, especially those who feel like it might be unapproachable or impossible for them.)
Matt Smith
Multilingual WordPress – How to make your WordPress site multilingual
With Matt Smith in the track
This session will provide a detailed overview on how to get your WordPress site multilingual ready. We will discuss the types of multilingual plugins and how they compare, auditing your site for multilingual readiness, preparing for multilingual content, considerations for plugins and themes, and finally options on how to leverage service providers for additional multilingual automation.
The intended audience includes people that needs to know what to do to make Worpress sites multilingual OR plugin developers and themers that need to learn how to make their plugins or themes multilingual ready.
David Hamilton
A Quick Guide to Long-form Content on WordPress
With David Hamilton in the Content and Business track
Blog post on the presentation subject matter
It’s widely believed that all online content should be short to contend with diminishing attention spans. In fact, a common online response to long-winded pieces of writing is “TL;DR” (or “Too Long; Didn’t Read”).
Yet, there are many vibrant examples of how long-form content is being consumed and shared online, and even driving traffic. Many of the most popular websites include long, in-depth content, and communities like Medium and Narratively are built around the idea that people crave long content – as long as it’s worth their time.
However, keeping an audience hooked is a crucial aspect of long-form storytelling, which requires specific strategies to keep them engaged. This presentation will go over some of the fundamentals of long-form content, what stories are best suited to long-form, and what tools and techniques can be used in WordPress to create compelling long-form pieces.
Luca Sartoni
Powering Business Sites with WordPress
With Luca Sartoni in the Agency track
Full blog post summarizing the talk
I’ll be addressing all the code poets, the WordPress consultants and business owners who powers their business sites with WordPress. I’ll be showing them how to define their business goals and structure a methodology based on WordPress to implement all the tools to meet those goals. I’ll be covering case scenarios: restaurants, gyms, local businesses, consultants, pro-bloggers, etc.
The Ghost of Metadata Past, Present, and Future
With Scott Kingsley Clark In the Developer track
We will be going over the new Metadata UI / API project (http://github.com/wordpress-metadata/metadata-ui-api) and the far reaching impacts it will have once it reaches adoption into WP core in 4.2+.
Attendees will learn about the process of starting the project, considerations for going through the process of WP Core adoption, how we researched existing plugins and libraries out there to eventually land on the approach we took, and some mind-blowing use-cases for the API once it’s adopted.
Dara Skolnick
Levelling up your development workflow
with Dara Skolnick in the Developer track
Interactive slideshow on GitHub
“About a year ago I realized that my WordPress development workflow wasn’t nearly as efficient as it could have been, so I took steps to make it far better, and I think that sharing what I learned would be really useful for other developers. Here are some of the things I might talk about:
This talk would definitely be most useful for people who are already WordPress developers.
I wrote a couple of blog posts on the topic of developing locally, which can give you an idea of some of the things I might talk about:
I think what participants would learn is already covered above. In sum, they’d learn to develop more efficiently than they are currently.
Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help clarify anything!
Renee Moore
19 Plugins You Should Be Using
With Renee Moore in the User / Admin track
Slide deck from the presentation
This talk will cover 19 of my favorite plugins that are especially useful for those who are selling products or services from their WordPress website.
Tammie Lister
So You Want to Be a WordCamp Speaker: A practical workshop for beginners
with Kathryn Presner and Tammie Lister in the Community track
Sunday, November 16, 9:30 am-noon – special 2.5 hour hands-on workshop
Have you considered presenting at a WordCamp but thought you didn’t know enough or felt like an imposter? Does the idea of speaking in front of a group set your knees quivering and your heart racing? During this hands-on session we’ll look at what’s stopped you from speaking in the past – and explore how to move past your fears. We’ll delve into practical techniques for choosing a topic, writing a proposal, crafting presentation content, and making great slides. We’ll discuss how to avoid common public-speaking mistakes and techniques for battling stage fright. We’ll help you navigate the dreaded post-presentation Q&A session and gather post-talk feedback. Each participant will come out of the workshop with a WordCamp or meetup talk proposal – and more confidence to submit it.
Check out http://getspeak.in/ for a sneak peek.
Level up: review themes on WordPress.org
With Tammie Lister In the Community track
From entering the newbie zone to beyond, this talk will guide you through how you can unlock the achievement of being a theme reviewer. Theme reviewing levels you up as a themer, allowing you to tackle anything themes throw at you. My own journey has taken me from a learner theme reviewer to working at Automattic.
I will go through how to become a review and the tools you need. I’ll look at the world of theme reviewing. I’ll give some tips on how to refine your skills as a theme reviewer so you can be the best reviewer you can be.
In this talk, I’ll show how by reviewing themes for WordPress.org you can become a better themer. I will show why it’s important to review themes.
People will leave knowing what you need to do to become a theme reviewer. They will learn how important it is for themers and how you can grow by being a theme reviewer. I hope to also show contributions don’t just have to be core or for development. I will show how they can contribute and why they should.
Roy Sivan
WordPress and Client Side Web Applications
with Roy Sivan in the Advanced Developer track
The intended audience are developers and those interested in learning more about building client side web applications with WordPress.
My presentation will focus on the merits of client side applications, why they are “better” in some regards, and why it is helpful to use them in certain use cases. I will go into more detail about how to build one using WordPress utilizing AngularJS code and the JSON REST API (WP-API).
I will spend some time going over the code itself, doing a short demo of some of the things I have built using AngularJS + WP-API + WP, including:
http://www.roysivan.com/angular-wordpress-theme
and a more robust web application:
http://www.codingofficehours.com (beta)
I will also be touching on how using AngularJS can be easy and does not mean a full Single Page Application is needed, in the case of my plugin:
http://wordpress.org/plugins/angularjs-for-wp/
which allows you to utilize AngularJS technology in simple shortcodes on a per-page or per-post basis.
Janis Yee
How to Perform an Accessibility Audit
With Janis Yee in the A11y track
In my experience, I worked as a self-made accessibility advocate when AODA came down the pipe early this year. With limited time, and resources, I had to develop a strategy on my own as to how to perform this audit and work with developers to implement the changes. As the field is so new, and there were no local leaders I could turn to as a mentor, I waded through much of this on my own. This is my chance to pass along these lessons as things I wish I knew when I started out.
Brief Intro:
The Meat:
Step by Step Process – How to perform an audit?
Intended audience:
General but with some basic front-end dev knowledge such as understanding CSS as some parts will require knowing how to use “Inspect Element”
Participants will:
Brian Hoke
Sass and WordPress
With Brian Hoke in the Designer track
I’ve used Sass, the CSS preprocessor, more and more lately in my work, particularly after authoring an online course on the topic. My presentation would highlight the benefits of using Sass, particularly with WordPress: code organization and reuse, leveraging the power of outside libraries, more-efficient update and redesigns in the future, and more.
My talk would definitely be aimed at coders, but not at the highest technical level. I’d present code examples and highlight both the benefits of effective use of Sass and some pitfalls of using it poorly.
Kate Newbill
Disaster-Proof Your WordPress Site
With Kate Newbill In the Beginner Developer track
Description: How much money and credibility would you lose if your website went down for a week? A day? An hour? Let’s take a look at some of the most common things that can go wrong with a WordPress site and discuss plans and processes to prevent disaster.
Intended audience: Business owners who use WordPress for their websites; beginning/intermediate WP site managers.
Note: This is not a sales pitch for anyone’s services. There will be a legitimate list of resources (no affiliate links) to help business owners prevent disaster and, in worst cases, recover from it. I’ll cover both free and premium solutions and discuss why I suggest each.
Elida Arrizza
Wireframe Secrets Revealed
with Elida Arrizza in the Designer track
Wireframes. Such a mysterious and elusive term. You may have heard rumours that they exist deep in the depths of waste bins napkins to top secret security compounds. Legend states that wireframes transcend powerful benefits of website creation. But some say could be dangerous to use or almost extinct. Could this be all true?
If blueprints are to a building, what wireframes are to a website, you could be missing out on fundamental knowledge. Let us embark on a LoFi to HiFi journey, discovering wireframe types, tools and much more.
Tom Sommerville
1000 sites: MultiSite as an intranet hosting platform
With Tom Sommerville in the Beginner Developer track
Case study of OPSpedia, which uses WordPress MultiSite as a hosting platform for numerous Ministry and enterprise intranets, as well as a blogging platform and professional networking site for Government of Ontario employees.
Intended audience: MultiSite users or wannabes; people using WordPress to host intranets and/or employee networking tools.
Paul Bearne
Contrib2Core: Sunday
It’s time to give back! Whether you’re a WordPress user or admin, a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us in the Community Room Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We’ll help you find a way to contribute to WordPress that’s appropriate to your level and interests.
If you’re a developer looking to address a bug in Trac (the official WordPress bug tracking software) we can help you find a ticket that you can work on. Learn how to do it from some of the experts in the room and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch, writing unit tests and documentation. Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!
Contrib2Core: Saturday
It’s time to give back! Whether you’re a WordPress user or admin, a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us in the Community Room Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We’ll help you find a way to contribute to WordPress that’s appropriate to your level and interests.
If you’re a developer looking to address a bug in Trac (the official WordPress bug tracking software) we can help you find a ticket that you can work on. Learn how to do it from some of the experts in the room and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch, writing unit tests and documentation. Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!
Setting up Vagrant for Unit Testing
With Paul Bearne in the Sunday Developer track
Learn how create and run unit tests using a Vagrant development server
We will cover creating units test in core, Plug-in and Themes.
We will cover the basic phpUnit commands
James Archer
The Human Side of UX Design
With James Archer in the A11y track
I’ll explain why empathy and emotion are crap-tons more important to overall user experience design than parallax, front-end frameworks, and even the hamburger icon. I’ll also explain why design is too important to leave to the designers, and why developers, and others should be directly involved in the process.
Attendees (including non-designers) will quickly come to understand the key difference between effective design (that changes peoples behavior) and merely attractive design, and I’ll explain the step-by-step process that gets them there. I’ll provide a number of real-world project examples to illustrate exactly how it’s worked in the past, and why this process gets such good results.
Karl Groves
Next-gen A11y Testing Tools
With Karl Groves In the A11y track
Since the invention of the Web, we’ve never experienced the kind of explosion in new techniques for developers to ensure efficiency and quality of their work – from JavaScript task runners to unit testing & acceptance testing, to continuous integration and automated build & deploy systems. Modern web developers can and should leverage these toolsets to make their work better. This talk will discuss how Tenon.io uses many of these tools to create our product – an automated web accessibility testing API.
Participants will learn about an array of items in the modern web developer’s toolkit.
Nicole Arnold
Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist
With Nicole Arnold in the Developer track
With thousands of functions in the WordPress codebase, it’s virtually impossible to remember all of them. We’ll cover some overlooked WordPress core functions that you may not know exist. We’ll walk through some practical examples for their use, and give you a variety of new gems you can use every day.
Jordan Quintal
Organizing fully accessible communities
With Jordan Quintal in the Community track
Most of us have discovered that WordPress.org has made efforts into making the WordPress platform more web accessible to those with physical and mental challenges, as a website publishing platform, but what about WordPress communities?
My presentation will discuss how to make your WordPress community or WordCamp event more accessible. I will cover what accessibility is, and why it is important. I will cover who accessibility affects, and how accessibility can help those affected. I will also discuss what it means to me as a person with a physical disability, and share some life experiences and real life challenges. From there, I will share some informative tips on how any community leader can go about making their WordPress communities and WordCamp events more accessible.
WordPress Theme Accessibility
With Jordan Quintal in the A11y track
The focus of this presentation will be on making a WordPress theme more accessible for those with disabilities. This presentation will be programming specific, and cover various HTML and CSS requirements to ensure any WordPress theme is accessibility-ready. I will cover accessible images, media, link text, headings, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, skip links, and forms; and how a developer can program these aspects to meet WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.
David Bird
Google Analytics and WordPress for Beginners
with David Bird in the Content and Business track
Google Analytics produces thousands of different numbers, metrics and statistics. There’s so many numbers it can be more confusing than enlightening trying to figure out which ratios should be taken into account, which stats are the most important.
This session is a beginner’s guide to best practice set up of Google Analytics and navigating the user interface so you can look at your traffic more critically. We’ll also talk about how Google Analytics WordPress plugins simplify your set-up and analysis.
Kathryn Presner
So You Want to Be a WordCamp Speaker: A practical workshop for beginners
with Kathryn Presner and Tammie Lister in the Community track
Sunday, November 16, 9:30 am-noon – special 2.5 hour hands-on workshop
Have you considered presenting at a WordCamp but thought you didn’t know enough or felt like an imposter? Does the idea of speaking in front of a group set your knees quivering and your heart racing? During this hands-on session we’ll look at what’s stopped you from speaking in the past – and explore how to move past your fears. We’ll delve into practical techniques for choosing a topic, writing a proposal, crafting presentation content, and making great slides. We’ll discuss how to avoid common public-speaking mistakes and techniques for battling stage fright. We’ll help you navigate the dreaded post-presentation Q&A session and gather post-talk feedback. Each participant will come out of the workshop with a WordCamp or meetup talk proposal – and more confidence to submit it.
Check out http://getspeak.in/ for a sneak peek.
Getting Comfortable With Child Themes
With Kathryn Presner in the Beginner Developer track
Child themes are a simple but powerful way to customize a pre-made theme. Learning how to use them properly means you’ll never risk losing all your modifications when the developer releases a new version and you update the theme. Using easy-to-follow language, I’ll walk you through the steps to set up a child theme and we’ll get started making some tweaks – from CSS look-and-feel adjustments to more substantial changes in functionality.
Jasmine Vesque
Typography in Web Design
With Jasmine Vesque in the Designer track
This presentation covers typography basics and best practices, examples of typography in web design, trends, personalities of type, an introduction to Google Fonts and different ways to enable fonts on your WordPress website.
The ideal audience is anyone looking to better understand Typography and how it relates to web design. They don’t need to have a coding or design background, but that would be an asset.
Joe Rozsa
Congratulations! You’re having a WordPress site!
With Joe Rozsa In the User/Admin track
Congrats. You’re having a WP Toronto
I’ve often found when people first start to use WP that frustration sets in very quickly. It’s not the fault of WP, but more by the fact that these new users and admins haven’t been shown how things are done within the WP dashboard. When I do presentations I like to try to tie a real life experience into what I’m presenting about WP. This session compares having/launching and new WP site to having a baby. There are so many unknowns that you need to find out about both. It’s a fun, light-hearted session about not getting frustrated. No one really knows how to change a diaper, but they learn quickly. The same holds true with many things associated with a new WP site. Hopefully by the end of the session, I give new users hope that the frustration is only temporary.
I want people to leave my session knowing that things that they don’t know about WP are only temporary and there’s no need to get frustrated. I will have explained and compared things within WP to those of having a new born baby. Once they get the hang of things and how to do them, they become second nature.
Adam Silverstein
Put a little Backbone in your WordPress!
With Adam Silverstein in the Advanced Developer track
Backbone (and Underscore!) are bundled with WordPress – explore how you can leverage their power to deliver complex user experiences while keeping your code organized and maintainable. When and why should you use Backbone? How can WordPress help? We will delve into a sample Backbone project and review major WordPress core components built with Backbone – including media, revisions and themes.
Brian Rotsztein
Agency Panel
This is often one of our most popular sessions, so show up early because the room fills up fast!
Are you curious about the business of designing / creating / developing WordPress websites? We’ve created this session for you. We’ve handpicked experts across a wide spectrum of WordPress-related businesses, from freelancers through web development studios to large agencies. They will be your panel, in a moderated question-and-answer format, where you can ask your questions and hear a variety of (possibly conflicting!) answers from some outspoken folk in the know.
Expect to hear discussions around:
The topics are varied and the audience is broad. The focus of this 2-hour session is based on your questions!
Robyn Larsen from Robyn Larsen Development
Avery Swartz from Avery Swartz Web Design
Brian Rotsztein from Rotsztein.com
Brent Kobayashi from Kobayashi Online
Dre Armeda from WebDev Studios
Grow Your Audience with Savvy Content Marketing Tactics
With Brian Rotsztein in the User/Admin track
You’ve been blogging, tweeting, and otherwise creating content seemingly forever but no one is paying attention. As a result, you’re not benefiting from social media sharing or getting the website traffic you were hoping for. You’re not alone. Your work may be suffering from a lack of quality, direction, and purpose which means there’s no compelling reason for you to get the attention you were anticipating. It’s time to learn more about what content marketing can do to remedy this situation. Content marketing is one of the hottest buzzwords in the online world and for good reason. Properly implement, content marketing plans can increase search engine visibility, social media networking, brand awareness, personal branding and sales, while decreasing costs. WordPress is a great platform that businesses and bloggers can harness to achieve these objectives. Topics such as social influence, guest posts, and social signals for SEO will be discussed. Key plugins and relevant online tools will also be highlighted.
Patrick Dunphy
Sean Yo
Fixing Inaccessible Content
With Sean Yo in the A11y track
Learn about common web accessibility problems and be introduced to the WCAG 2.0 Sufficient and Advisory Techniques for resolving these problems.
Learn to identify common web accessibility problems and develop an understanding of the authoritative code solutions published by the W3C for these problems and be familiar with the How To Meet WCAG 2.0 resources.
David Newton
Improving Performance with Responsive Images
With David Newton in the Advanced Developer track
Speaker notes from the presentation
I will be speaking about the web’s hunger for more, bigger, and higher-resolution images, and the performance problem this creates. I’ll give a brief history of the new (and occasionally controversial) `picture` element, and discuss some other exciting new standards and techniques that are on the horizon. Attendees can expect concrete examples of how `picture` works, and to learn how they can use responsive (and responsible!) images right now to improve performance and deliver the best possible experience to their users.
Mo Jangda
The Database Schema
With Mo Jangda in the Advanced Developer track
Learn how the database schema of WordPress is setup, including a walk-through of the tables and how WordPress stores the data and helps you interact with it via its APIs. We’ll also dive into the benefits and dangers of the schema and how to adapt it to go beyond just blog posts.
David Hickox
Designing for Content
With David Hickox in the Designer track
In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.
The intended audience is designers who use WordPress as their CMS, but it has css and code elements that should resonate with front end developers as well as general typographic and structural principles that are helpful for content creators.
Mendel Kurland
Pump up your search visibility with structured data
With Mendel Kurland in the Content and Business track
Intended audience are pressers who have been using SEO plugins like Yoast, but want to take their search listings to the next level. Also those that run local businesses or do travel / photo / event blogging will find this beneficial as well.
Google and other search engines use schema.org formatted structured data to power rich snippets in search results. These rich snippets make a search listing stand out, and therefore make it more likely someone might click on your listing. This talk focuses on the PODS framework and how it can be used to easily add schema.org structured data information to your WordPress content to improve the Google search listing for your content.
Alan Lok
Pick the right CMS for your job
With Alan Lok in the Agency track
Over the last 6 years, Alan has tackled content management system projects for small and large companies, and the question of what content management system is right for the project. Ask yourself these questions and know when is the right time to pitch WordPress in your RFQ and defend your choice in front of your client. In the presentation, Alan will be sharing insights on where WordPress make things easy, highlight areas that other CMS packages may shine, and help clients dispel the myth that WordPress is for small sites only.
Intended audience: WordPress developers, content consultants, business owners
James Hipkin
WordPress for Designers
With James Hipkin in the Designer track
WordPress for Designers provides an overview of what sits under a WordPress site, so that designs won’t be in conflict with WordPress’ inherent capabilities, and can efficiently design effective WordPress themes that are equally efficient to build. The presentation is broken into four sections: how web sites are built, how WordPress functions, implications for designers, and tips, tricks and pitfalls. It’s based on our experience as a production studio that specializes in building custom WordPress themes for designers. In this role, we’ve seen all the mistakes.
David Herrera
Writing Cleaner, Sturdier Code With Unit Testing
With David Herrera in the Developer track.
The code you wrote today seems like it plays nicely with the code you wrote yesterday, and you’re pretty sure it will be easy to work with tomorrow. But can you be more confident about it?
Writing unit tests for your code can give you more confidence. Configuring your WordPress development environment for unit testing, though, can also mean confronting many unfamiliar tools at once, including the WordPress core test suite and PHPUnit.
This session will gently introduce unit testing and the tools involved in it. We’ll set up your development environment and scaffold unit tests for your code with WP-CLI, write your first tests with PHPUnit, and learn more about unit testing with the core test suite.
The intended audience is developers with some experience at the command line.
Aaron Campbell
Integrating WordPress with External APIs
With Aaron Campbell in the Advanced Developer track
WordPress is amazing, flexible software, but it doesn’t do everything. Facebook, PayPal, MailChimp, Basecamp, slideshare, and Google Maps are just a few examples of places that are already doing something well, and you can integrate your WordPress site with them through their APIs. However, there are right and wrong ways to do this, especially if you want to distribute your solution to others. I start from the beginning, introducing people to the WordPress HTTP library helper functions, then bring lots of code examples from my plugins show start to finish how to integrate the right way.
Community: Getting Involved
There are a ton of ways to get involved with the WordPress project and give back. Whether it’s design/ui, code, answering questions in the forums, writing documentation, translating, or testing, it all needs to be done and everyone has the ability to pitch in and help somewhere. I run through the reasons you might want to contribute, ways you can work it into your schedule and workflow, and how to get involved in each area. I’m a developer through and through, so I spend a little extra time talking about testing (in my opinion our biggest need), and what out release cycles look like and how each stage will affect what the various contribution areas look like.
With Aaron Campbell
Linn Øyen Farley
Don’t Fear the Custom Theme: How to build a custom WordPress theme with only four files
Commercial WordPress themes have to be ready to handle thousands of use-cases, but your custom theme doesn’t. Reducing a theme to its essential components – index.php, style.css, and functions.php – gets your design into the browser as quickly as possible and allows for rapid prototyping based on client feedback. It’s also an easy way for beginners to start developing with WordPress, without getting lost in dozens of files.
With Linn Øyen Farley
Brian Hogg
Introduction to Backbone.js
Heard of Backbone.js but have yet to use it in your WordPress plugin or theme? Get an introduction to Backbone.js (and Underscore.js), why you should be using it, and how to add it to your next project.
Have you seen that Backbone.js (and Underscore.js) were bundled with WordPress, but have yet to use it in your theme or plugin development? This will give you an introduction on what backbone.js is, and how to start using it to better organize your front-end code.
Adrian Roselli
Selfish Accessibility
With Adrian Roselli in the Accessibility track
We can all pretend that we’re helping others by making web sites accessible, but we are really making the web better for our future selves. Learn some fundamentals of web accessibility and how it can benefit you (whether future you from aging or you after something else limits your abilities). We’ll review simple testing techniques, basic features and enhancements, coming trends, and where to get help. This isn’t intended to be a deep dive into ARIA, but more of an overall primer for those who aren’t sure where to start nor how it helps them.
Marc Benzakein
How to Rock a WordCamp Even if You’re a n00b
I’ve now been to about 20 WordCamps and discovered that they all have the same problems. Newbies seem kind of lost and by the end of the day they seem to feel like their head is going to explode.
In this talk I would cover 12 steps on how to get the most out of your WordCamp as well as how to start giving back to the Community on Day One.
If you are new to WordPress or WordCamps, set yourself up for success by making sure you don’t miss this great kick-off to our two-day event!
These are the people that make this event happen. They work tirelessly for weeks and months to plan, coordinate, and execute the best event possible. If you get a chance to thank them, please do!
Tom Auger (+ add me)
Brent Kobayashi (+ add me)
Andy McIlwain (+ add me)
Details TBD.
The WP World is generously supported by:
WordPress® and its related trademarks are registered trademarks of the WordPress foundation. This website is not affiliated with Automattic, Inc., the WordPress Foundation or the WordPress® open source project.
Marcus Burnette is employed by Bluehost. However, this site is an independent project created and managed solely by Marcus. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Bluehost and is dedicated to supporting the WordPress community.
