WordCamp Toronto 2015

Benjamin Moody: “As a developer of free plugins there is great excitement and pride when something you have put so much time in gains traction and starts to be used by 1000’s of fellow WP users. Along with this thrill is the sudden realisation that 1000’s of fellow WP users now rely on your plugin!

It’s not long before the time comes that you are spending large amounts of your free time just answering support requests and assisting users with bugs, etc. Then come the feature requests! You’d love to help everyone but it can be hard and take up allot of time, plus you gotta eat right!?

So what are your options? Rely on donations? Create new features as paid addons? Turn your plugin into a premium plugin? This panel will discuss how monetization affects the WordPress community. Would the WordPress community be as successful if not for free plugins? Can developers be rewarded for some of their time AND keep the plugins 100% free for all to use?”

Benjamin Moody: “As a developer of free plugins there is great excitement and pride when something you have put so much time in gains traction and starts to be used by 1000’s of fellow WP users. Along with this thrill is the sudden realisation that 1000’s of fellow WP users now rely on your plugin!

It’s not long before the time comes that you are spending large amounts of your free time just answering support requests and assisting users with bugs, etc. Then come the feature requests! You’d love to help everyone but it can be hard and take up allot of time, plus you gotta eat right!?

So what are your options? Rely on donations? Create new features as paid addons? Turn your plugin into a premium plugin? This panel will discuss how monetization affects the WordPress community. Would the WordPress community be as successful if not for free plugins? Can developers be rewarded for some of their time AND keep the plugins 100% free for all to use?”

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down.

Whether you’re a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us. We’ll help you find a ticket that’s appropriate to your level, and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch.

Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!

Wait, what is this all about?

It’s a #hackfest where developers will be coding solo or in small groups to fix WordPress bugs. Bring your own laptop!

Not a coder but want to contribute? You can: do Trac ticket triage, test new patches, offer user support on the forums, find bugs for the developers to work on. Bring your own laptop anyway!

BRING YOUR DEVELOPMENT LAPTOP! You should have your local development server installed and configured, have a good IDE and have some VCS installed (Git or SVN).

If you don’t know what the above means, or just want a little more background, be sure to attend Ryan Welcher’s talk A Noob’s Journey To The Core to see if this is for you!

To get yourself prepared, please familiarize yourself with the core contributor’s handbook.

Benjamin Moody: “As a developer of free plugins there is great excitement and pride when something you have put so much time in gains traction and starts to be used by 1000’s of fellow WP users. Along with this thrill is the sudden realisation that 1000’s of fellow WP users now rely on your plugin!

It’s not long before the time comes that you are spending large amounts of your free time just answering support requests and assisting users with bugs, etc. Then come the feature requests! You’d love to help everyone but it can be hard and take up allot of time, plus you gotta eat right!?

So what are your options? Rely on donations? Create new features as paid addons? Turn your plugin into a premium plugin? This panel will discuss how monetization affects the WordPress community. Would the WordPress community be as successful if not for free plugins? Can developers be rewarded for some of their time AND keep the plugins 100% free for all to use?”

Is your code vulnerable to SQL Injection Attacks, Cross-Site Request Forgery, or Cross-Site Scripting Attacks? Learn how to avoid letting hackers break your sites using these common techniques. Important for anyone developing writing their own themes and plugins in WordPress.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand Basic Code Vulnerability Types
• Sanitize and Escape Code
• Secure Forms with Nonces

A designer, a developer and a client walk into a bar… or more accurately, a meeting room. Hear from designer Avery Swartz, developer Linn Øyen Farley, and client Mark Aikman as they describe the process of getting the new Buddies in Bad Times Theatre website off the ground.

Forget the outdated “waterfall” method of designers and developers working on a site in hiding and then handing it over to the client at the end of the project. Discover the allure of the iterative web design process, where the designer, developer and client are all working openly, contributing to the site at the same time. It’s better, faster, and more cost-effective. It just requires one really important element (hint: it starts with T and ends with RUST).

After this presentation that’s part case study and part philosophy, you’ll want to try the iterative approach with your own clients.

The talk continues with an interactive, hands-on workshop.

See the full write-up here.

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down.

Whether you’re a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us. We’ll help you find a ticket that’s appropriate to your level, and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch.

Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!

Wait, what is this all about?

It’s a #hackfest where developers will be coding solo or in small groups to fix WordPress bugs. Bring your own laptop!

Not a coder but want to contribute? You can: do Trac ticket triage, test new patches, offer user support on the forums, find bugs for the developers to work on. Bring your own laptop anyway!

BRING YOUR DEVELOPMENT LAPTOP! You should have your local development server installed and configured, have a good IDE and have some VCS installed (Git or SVN).

If you don’t know what the above means, or just want a little more background, be sure to attend Ryan Welcher’s talk A Noob’s Journey To The Core to see if this is for you!

To get yourself prepared, please familiarize yourself with the core contributor’s handbook.

In the field of Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience Design (UX), there is a practice known as Usage Modeling, which maps user scenarios and stories to business priorities. This technique has been traditionally employed in software development to help define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for first candidate release.

In this session, you will learn how the Usage Modeling process can be applied to your or your clients’ website and mobile projects to:

• put the end-user first
• prioritize features
• scope out functionality you thought was important (but isn’t)
• determine an appropriate budget for the project

The format of this session is unique: part lecture, part hands-on simulation of an actual Usage Modeling Workshop in the boardroom so you can experience the methodology first-hand with a seasoned facilitator.

If you are considering a large web project for yourself or your organisation, or if you often quote on web work for clients, then this session is not to be missed!

An excellent topic for developers using WordPress for the first time. Also suitable for people building a website for the first time. This is a case study of a first-time WordPress development project for the website defeatharper.ca. My talk will outline how the ideas behind the site evolved as the requirements changed and the environment it was designed to play in kept shifting. How did we manage the change? How do you keep forward progress in development?

This was my first “real” WordPress project as a developer. I will be sharing my trials and tribulations in trying to get WordPress to “act like a proper CMS”, and then my ultimate insights into the “WordPress Way” of doing things. I have mixed feelings about the two major plugins we used, and will share those findings with you as well.

Sometimes saving time takes a lot longer.

Learning Outcomes

• The importance of working with and consulting senior programers.
• Planning your time.
• When you are doing something for the first time everything is unknown (see point one).
• How generic coding skills apply to WordPress (for better or worse!)

The introduction to using WP-Cli, including: How to get it setup. Some helpful basics about the shell/command line. Some of the very useful things you can do with WP-Cli. Audience is Power users or administrators.

Communities—like the one we have in WordPress—don’t just happen overnight. For them to be successful, they take people to show up, contribute back, grow with it and most importantly to incorporate new people into the fold. It is ongoing, it requires attention and it needs people like you and me to speak up.

A small fraction of people carry the weight of helping it thrive, but the great thing is that despite all that, we all benefit from the community no matter who contributes. In this talk I will cover some known, and unknown tips and tools for making the community work for you and your business, and also help to put back more into the community than what you take from it.

Learning Outcomes:

• Empower them to take the next step in giving back by leading a meetup, teaching someone how to understand a plugin, or by developing a talk for a WordCamp.
• Show them easy ways for them to take the skills they currently have to help others grow their knowledge of WordPress.
• Help them leverage others knowledge to build their business up.
• Point out key networking tips to help them maximize their current efforts.

Many new users of WordPress are confused with and when pages are used and when posts are used. Are posts made to pages? Are posts pages in a site or blog? It’s such a mystery. In my session, we will solve the mystery of pages vs. posts with the help of Scooby Doo and the gang from Mysteries Inc.

Well go through step by step what each are and why and when they should be used. We’ll uncover clues and put those clues together to solve the mystery once and for all. We’ll even enjoy some Scooby Snacks along the way. Zoinks! Totally not kidding.

Learning Outcomes:

Attendees will have a clear understand of what pages are for, what posts are and do and when either should be used and how.

In WordPress 4.1 the “Theme Customizer” was changed to the “Customizer” with the intent that it could be used as the interface for any settings for customizing WordPress themes or plugins. Very few developers are taking advantage of this built-in options panel. Through some examples, we will see how easy it is to use the Customizer API.

Prerequisites:
Some understanding of WordPress actions/filters, php and javascript.

Learning Outcomes:

• Be able to add settings to the Customizer for custom plugins and themes.

Migrations can be a scary thing with so many things to do and think about. I’m going to talk about the common tasks to have on your checklist before moving from one host to another. Also, I’m going to discuss how to migrate your site from a local install up to a publicly viewable server.

Learning Outcomes

Migrate your domain name, WordPress install, database, media files from one host to another.

Anyone who manage a WordPress site and with basic HTML knowledge should be able to create simple HTML and CSS sites using the WordPress API REST JSON to retrieve content; a simple approach to build brochure sites and landing pages.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand why APIs.
• Understand why WordPress API.
• Create one- or multiple-page standalone HTML sites using WordPress API to retrieve content.

Education, Media, and Public Service are having their business and service delivery models disrupted. Sometimes, they haven’t fully internalized customer, student, or patient-centric business drivers, and sometimes they can’t justify budget line items related to user-centered design in this fiscally constrained environment.

The result is that designers may need to “disguise” user-centered design methods behind other processes, and play it fast and loose with research methodologies to get the job done, while speaking to clients in a language they can both understand and get behind.

In this session, Christine will illustrate how she has enlisted scenario planning, a facilitation methodology used in strategic business planning, as a tool to effectively create user personas and journey maps with simple and clear implications for adaptive content delivery. She will walk through how a traditional sales and marketing funnel became a powerful model to structure just-in-time content delivery for a healthcare client to progressively disclose information at exactly the right level of complexity for the user. And how she has used process design exercises to enlist active participation of clients in the UX design process that has helped them improve their service delivery.

When we mashup user experience design practices with strategic planning and other, sometimes non-traditional business processes, we add value to organizations that goes well beyond the user experience. It helps them to be better at doing what they do.

This session will be of interest to project leaders who want to better understand how to “sell” user experience design, as well as user experience designers who want to learn about new ways of approaching clients who may not understand what they do. Knowledge of standard user experience design methodologies is a must, as is a desire to learn about new ways to work with business leaders to help them derive more business value from their website or app design.

The rallying cry for WordPress has become an Apple take-off “there is a free plugin for that”. So the premium plugins have to offer substantial value to win over developers. Here are two image grid plugins, Justified Image Grid and Essential Grid, that offer just such value.

• Responsive image grids that work well on mobile and desktop screens.
• Ability to incorporate portrait, landscape, and varying dimensions images in the same masonry layout image grid.
• Add styled captions, links, and shortcodes to images.
• Use a variety of image sources including WP gallery, NextGen, FaceBook, Flickr, Instagram, etc.
• Provide an image grid of feature Posts based on taxonomy, category, or date.
• Provide a variety of lightboxes for magnification of images with captions.
• Allow for page or load more infinite image scrolling.
• Provide filtering of images displayed in the grid with buttons along the top for All, Tagged, Category, Etc filters.
• Provide a variety of styling options for individual images and the grid as a whole.
• I compare the best of the free image plugins with these features.

(Disclosure: I am not now nor will be in the future be an affiliate for either of these vendors or their representatives. The motivation: several times for $28 or less these plugins saved my bacon by lowering cost of development by hundreds of dollars while delivering advanced and winning features to clients.)

Learning Outcomes:

• Outline the key uses of image grids in WordPress development.
• Demonstrate the advantage of responsive grids in mobile design.
• Show how image grids can display mixed size plus portrait and landscape images well in a masonry layout.
• Create a visual sitemap for a website.
• Create an instant shopping cart grid for an array of products.
• Help answer the question when to consider a premium plugin.

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down.

Whether you’re a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us. We’ll help you find a ticket that’s appropriate to your level, and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch.

Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!

Wait, what is this all about?

It’s a #hackfest where developers will be coding solo or in small groups to fix WordPress bugs. Bring your own laptop!

Not a coder but want to contribute? You can: do Trac ticket triage, test new patches, offer user support on the forums, find bugs for the developers to work on. Bring your own laptop anyway!

BRING YOUR DEVELOPMENT LAPTOP! You should have your local development server installed and configured, have a good IDE and have some VCS installed (Git or SVN).

If you don’t know what the above means, or just want a little more background, be sure to attend Ryan Welcher’s talk A Noob’s Journey To The Core to see if this is for you!

To get yourself prepared, please familiarize yourself with the core contributor’s handbook.

We all have created the odd WordPress that has turned out to be fast but how do we do this each and every time? In this talk I am going to explore some of the techniques and choices that will make your site feel fast and also talk about how to automate / streamline your development process so that you can do this each and every time, no matter how rushed you are.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand what slows code down.
• Realise how an SQL calls slow the site.
• Understand that perceived speed can be more important than real speed.
• Learn how to automate deployment.
• Discover that it’s the small items that count.
• Know what caching is, know how cache works in WordPress.
• Understand the problems that caching causes and how to work around them.

WordPress has built-in support for storing location information on posts, but no real way to make use of it. The Geo Mashup plugin enables deep, powerful geolocation in WordPress, letting you easily add geolocations (coordinates) to almost any content type.

It also displays locations on maps you can embed in your theme, posts or widgets, with a dizzying array of options for what to show and how to display it.

This talk will start with the default geolocation system in WordPress and how Geo Mashup integrates with it. We’ll then cover the basics of setup and adding locations on posts, then the different map types and situations where you’d use them. We’ll finish with some dev considerations for displaying maps as elegantly as possible.

Prerequisites:
This talk is aimed at anyone planning a site and considering geo integration. There will be developer speak (PHP/HTML/CSS) at times, but there will be lots to consider for anyone building custom WordPress sites.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the premises of geolocation and mapping as they apply to WordPress content.
• Identify valuable features in geolocation plugins.
• Grasp the complex feature set of Geo Mashup as a full-suite plugin.
• Identify content that makes sense to geolocate and/or map.
• Plan out ways of collecting geodata and displaying it using various types of map.
• Be ready to overcome the initial platform and design hurdles specific to Geo Mashup.

A designer, a developer and a client walk into a bar… or more accurately, a meeting room. Hear from designer Avery Swartz, developer Linn Øyen Farley, and client Mark Aikman as they describe the process of getting the new Buddies in Bad Times Theatre website off the ground.

Forget the outdated “waterfall” method of designers and developers working on a site in hiding and then handing it over to the client at the end of the project. Discover the allure of the iterative web design process, where the designer, developer and client are all working openly, contributing to the site at the same time. It’s better, faster, and more cost-effective. It just requires one really important element (hint: it starts with T and ends with RUST).

After this presentation that’s part case study and part philosophy, you’ll want to try the iterative approach with your own clients.

Understanding how HTTP works fundamentally is a huge help when dealing with REST APIs which is becoming a huge trend. Learning about HTTP in general and then how to use it with WordPress will allow users to communicate with services like Twitter and will allow them to better understand the WordPress API.

Learning Outcomes

Users will understand how HTTP works and will be able to use the WordPress HTTP API to talk to REST APIs (Twitter will be a specific example).

Intended Audience: Users who want to experiment with WordPress on their computer instead of a live site. 

Covered:

1. What you need?
Setting up a local installation is easier than any developer or coder will ever explain. The software is free, easy to install, and requires no knowledge of MySQL or Apache.

2. Install WP Mutlisite
Choose where you want to install WP Multisite, type one command into the Command Line program, and edit one file that’s already on your computer. Then you’re all set to go.

3. Create your site
You have a completely functional WordPress site on your computer that is NOT connected to the internet. In this section, we cover some very handy pointers for getting the most out of WP Multisite.

4. Migrate to Live Server
One plugin does the whole job for you. Just type in the URL for your site, and let the plugin do all the work. And it’s a free plugin, too.

Benjamin Moody: “As a developer of free plugins there is great excitement and pride when something you have put so much time in gains traction and starts to be used by 1000’s of fellow WP users. Along with this thrill is the sudden realisation that 1000’s of fellow WP users now rely on your plugin!

It’s not long before the time comes that you are spending large amounts of your free time just answering support requests and assisting users with bugs, etc. Then come the feature requests! You’d love to help everyone but it can be hard and take up allot of time, plus you gotta eat right!?

So what are your options? Rely on donations? Create new features as paid addons? Turn your plugin into a premium plugin? This panel will discuss how monetization affects the WordPress community. Would the WordPress community be as successful if not for free plugins? Can developers be rewarded for some of their time AND keep the plugins 100% free for all to use?”

Unit testing is an important part of verifying that code works as expected. However, how many tests do you need to write before you can be confident that you’ve done a good job? Where should you be spending your time writing tests, and how do you know when you’re done?

In this talk, we discuss a systematic approach to unit testing WordPress plugins using phpunit. We show how to set up a simple test suite, to examine the code coverage options, and to identify the most risky areas of our code that are in need of tests.

Learning Outcomes

• Build a scaffold for unit testing WordPress plugins
• Write meaningful unit tests for WordPress plugins using phpunit
• Use completeness coverage to show how well a test suite covers a plugin’s functionality
• Show how code coverage exposes potentially dangerous areas
• Encourage everyone to write unit tests, because they’re great and cool. 🙂

Writing blog posts without a clear direction is typically a waste of time for bloggers and businesses that are trying to grow their audience. If you aren’t sure how to reach your ideal audience and need actionable tips to gain traction, this is the session for you.

You may already be engaged in content marketing without even knowing it. It’s a great way to increase readership, brand awareness, search engine visibility, social media networking opportunities, and sales. During this session, the concept of content marketing will be explained and attendees will discover key concepts and learn important tactics which they can implement right away to reach their ideal audience.

Find out who wants to consume your content and how to beat the competition at figuring it out. Topics such as search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing will also be touched on. Relevant plugins and other online tools will be highlighted.

Learning Outcomes

• Follow clear steps to better content marketing.
• Implement actionable content marketing ideas.
• Find ideal content opportunities.
• Practice smart content marketing.

“Content is EVERYBODY’s problem: it’s a problem for the content creator, and a problem for the developer. Without content, there is no website. Without the website there is no client. Yet.. how is it content always gets left for last? In this talk I will teach you the core practices of the field known as Content Strategy.Truly thinking “Content First” from the beginning will completely transform your workflow and give everyone a grasp on creating, managing and structuring content, in time and on budget. Get started on this process early so you have enough time to write engaging, thoughtful content and get it published on time.

This talk is equally valuable for content creators, agencies and freelancers alike. Everyone wants to avoid the horror situation of scrambling to get content together two days before going live. It’s a nightmare for the author and a nightmare for the developer to implement. Learn how to integrate Content Strategy into your entire web process, resulting in quality content, organized and delivered on-time.”

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand and communicate the value of content as a true business asset.
• Organize your site build process around real content, not lorem ipsum.
• Better identify the organization’s content requirements to build a stronger CMS architecture.
• Build a content calendar to ensure your company/client is able to stay on top of content needs throughout the site build process and beyond.
• Set yourself apart from the competition by offering Content Strategy services to your clients.

“In my years of developing and managing WordPress sites I’ve discovered that many end users don’t keep their sites as updated as they should. This usually stems from not being sure how things work and/or the fear of breaking things.

My talk will focus on the real-world management task of plugin and WP core updates: what WP does automatically and what you have to do yourself; how the update system notifies you; deciphering update version numbers and descriptions; how to do the actual update.”

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand plugin and WP version numbers.
• Learn how to keep WP up-to-date.
• Learn how to keep plugins up-to-date.

Most small organizations have a challenge with how to leverage their basic WordPress site into a full marketing platform. My presentation takes the audience from a discussion about the marketing problems they face, to a digital marketing platform design pattern that they can use, and then ultimately through a discussion about which WordPress plugins they can use for the different components.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand how to transform a WordPress site into a conversion funnel used to collect leads and make e-commerce transactions.
• Understand how a WordPress site can be used for Content Marketing and SEO.
• Understand the value of Social Media and how to connect it with WordPress.
• Understand the importance of collecting email addresses for use in marketing campaigns.
• Understand how digital advertising can be used to bring more traffic to a WordPress site.
• Understand the importance of using traffic analytic tools like Google Analytics to track site traffic and conversion goals.
• Understand which WordPress plugins can be used to build a Digital Marketing Platform for your business or non-profit organization.

Web Accessibility is not just for developers, there are plenty of things people can do to get involved. This presentation will focus on the different ways you can contribute to Web  Accessibility and how you can help spread the word. We will cover some Web Accessibility fundamentals and why it’s important.

From there we will go over the various way you can communicate and increase exposure to Web Accessibility using various terms and avenues. Next we will discuss WordPress Accessibility specifically and the different aspects surrounding it. Finally, we will go over the different ways you can contribute to WordPress Accessibility.

It’s well-known that there is power in numbers, so the more we can advocate the more we can evoke change.

What makes websites, mobile apps, and other digital media products go from ‘good’ to ‘great’? Or ‘very great’? How about ‘really, really, really great’? In this session, we will be looking at the Kano Model to unlock the secrets of companies who have turned their products from a new market offering to something that captures their users in total delight.

We will be exploring what makes digital media products successful offerings in the marketplace, what is this thing called “user research” and how to prioritize product features based on what your users really want and what you can deliver.

Walk away with three ways you can immediately apply the Kano Model as well as some resources on how to get started with a full-blown Kano Analysis.

This session is perfect for designers, developers, digital strategists, project managers, business analysts, product owners, and everyone who loves a great and delightful user experience – YOU!

Learning Outcomes:

• Get a high-level introduction to user research and how it contributes to a great user experience.
• Identify your product’s “exciters and delighters” against its “satisfiers” and “basic expectations”.
• Map out your user’s product needs versus the service you intend to deliver.
• Use the Kano Model to drive product decisions anchored on user research.

WordPress Admins and Super Users may get to the point where they’d like to move to the next level of understanding and exploiting their WordPress systems – but talk of hooks, loops, and APIs is still gibberish that causes their eyes to glaze over.

This session will provide a gentle introduction to how dynamic websites function, learning to identify and begin breaking apart relevant programming languages, and investigate what and where WordPress’ moving parts are.

This presentation is suitable for anyone who 1. wants to start rolling up their sleeves and get their hands dirty; or 2. is curious and simply wants to understand how WordPress works behind the GUI scenes. Best practices and next steps will be outlined for further exploration.

Learning Outcomes:

• Identify the source files of a WordPress installation.
• View source files from the Dashboard.
• Follow best practices (i.e. child themes) for editing source files.
• Form a mental model of how database-driven web applications process and output content.
• Understand the core functional elements of a WordPress installation (i.e. database and individual php files).
• Understand the purpose and function of a WordPress theme and theme files and how themes interact with the WordPress core.

Presentation will cover: Why content is important; website content and how to start developing it; how blogs enhance a website and why not to be afraid of blogging; delve into blogging strategies, tips and topics; take a vertical dive into writing – basic concepts on grammar, sentence structure, voice, etc. to make content better; content driving SEO, with specific focus on the Yoast SEO plugin and how to use it.

The intended audience is WordPress users and bloggers, and anyone who struggles with putting pen to paper (fingers to keyboard).

Learning Outcomes

• Develop content for websites based on the less-is-more approach keeping responsive design in mind.
• Improve the quality of content on their website.
• Use the Yoast SEO plugin to improve content and SEO for pages and blog posts.
• Think about different ideas for which they can use their blog.
• Overcome the fear of blogging.

You’ve bought a fancy new WordPress theme, but now your site looks like everyone else’s. So how do you make that fancy new theme look a little bit more… you? You create a child theme. Child themes build on top of the original theme, letting you change as much… or as little… as you want, while keeping all of the snazzy theme options and functionality built in to the parent theme.

Learning Outcomes:

Customize and personalize their site without having to start from scratch or learn a ton of code.

Have you ever cried yourself to sleep unable to find the cause of a horrendous bug in your WordPress site? Cry no more, your tears will be reshaped as blinding swords as we explore uncharted territories laced with mystical creatures.

Debugging is an often avoided topic due to the uncertainty of how best to accomplish it and the lack of powerful introspective tools. This talk will explore new territory and showcase tools that help you debug complex and difficult issues in your WordPress site.

You may have missed it; the biggest update to the HTTP protocol in over 15 years was finalized this year. The long awaited HTTP/2 update is finally here and you can take advantage of it now, but what does this change mean for you, a builder of the web?

In my talk, I will break down the important aspects of the new HTTP/2 protocol, how it differs from HTTP/1.1, and ways in which you can take advantage of the HTTP/2 performance improvements today.

Whether you realize it or not, HTTP/2 will affect your life in the near future and I will help you understand what it all means.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the differences between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/2
• Explain how latency impacts web performance
• Develop websites with low latency impact
• Begin to contemplate switching sites to use HTTP/2
• Understand key concepts regarding web performance

To start a company is a noble thing! To start an online company, nobler still. A distributed workforce (or even a workforce working in an online “space”) has special requirements. There are nearly endless possibilities where expansion and direction are concerned, but finding and maintaining a workforce in those environments is a task that can be made simpler through a few key components.

To be discussed:

• Finding the right “fit”- choosing candidates that can grow with you.
• Training and resource management – resource acquisition and expansion.
• Putting people in positions that allow them to excel.
• Facilitating communication, facilitating ongoing improvements.
• Data collection – what is working, what isn’t, and “why”.
• Issue resolution and workflow.
• Consistently considering “what’s next”.

Managed WordPress is a vibrant category of web hosting that specializes in doing 1 thing only: ensuring your WordPress websites are reliable, secure and well-maintained.

In this presentation, Alex Sirota (@alexsirota), Director of NewPath Consulting (@newpathtech) will describe the different types of hosting available for WordPress with a focus on the ever evolving managed WordPress hosting space.

This will be a non-vendor biased presentation but will help web developers, designers and their customers understand the value proposition that a Managed WordPress hosting company can offer.

Objectives:

• Describe the difference between shared hosting & Managed WordPress.
• Demonstrate some of the very cool features in several Managed WordPress systems including GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress Solution (part of GoDaddy Pro), DreamPress from DreamHost, FlyWheel, Pantheon and WPEngine.
• Present a new survey of more than 20 Managed WordPress hosts across the world.

There are many plugins that can help your site to be optimized for the search engines. However, knowing the basics and some of the insider tricks can help to beyond what the normal plugins can do.

Topics covered: keyword research, onpage ranking factors, off-page ranking factors, blogging for rankings, good SEO plugins.

Ideal audience business owners who want to promote their web sites.

“Online storytelling continues to evolve, with more complex and engaging forms appearing every year. What began as long-form online news articles has branched off in diverse directions, ranging from websites that expand the universe of an upcoming Hollywood movie, to a loose fabric of apps and sites that together reinterpret a classic Victorian novel.

This session will explore the boom in online storytelling and examine how both developers and users are leveraging WordPress to uniquely support such storytelling. We will touch on such WordPress solutions as the Aesop Story Engine plugin and themes specifically designed for storytelling, such as Storyteller, Longform and Radcliffe.

The intended audience consists of WordPress power users who want to tell engaging online stories, as well as developers interested in creating WordPress themes and websites geared toward storytelling.

Learning Outcomes:

• Use WordPress to empower your storytelling efforts.
• Compare and select a WordPress theme for your storytelling website.
• Install and use the Aesop Story Engine plugin.
• Understand how custom themes can utilize the Aesop Story Engine plugin.
• Continue a 50,000 year tradition of storytelling.

For all of its simplicity, WordPress requires many pieces to come together to end up with a functioning, complete web site. This talk will take attendees through a visual roadmap that acts like the photo on a puzzle box to help you pull it all together. We will review a series of diagrams of the environment in which WP is installed as well as visual guides to find the right place inside WP to make the changes you need.

Many people who use or want to use WordPress are not web site developers. To beginners, the WP environment gives little hint about which option to pick to make a change on their site: Dashboard? Theme? Plugin? CSS? Hosting Control Panel? mySQL? Etc.

Even with 13 years of experience behind me in creating web sites, it took significant effort for me to learn WP and be able to handle its challenges and surprises.

This presentation gives participants a road map (available nowhere else that I can find) that helps them figure out what to change and where to make the change when their site needs something updated. Then they can either do it themselves or find someone to help.

Learning Outcomes:

• Get the big picture of how all the major pieces come together to create a WP-run site: hosting, WP, themes, plugins, CSS, HTML, etc.
• Know where to look to find the correct place to change the desired characteristic of the web site.
• Conference participants will have online access to download the slides and a cheatsheet for navigating the various tools supporting their WP web site.

NOTE: This presentation will NOT go into detail about how to choose the options available in each supporting function. It’s meant to help people at least find the right place to make the change because they’ll have a good idea of the keywords to use in a search.

In my travels, I have discovered that there is not much documentation on using CSS3 specifically in WordPress. While not many of the new CSS3 modules have reached official recommendation by the W3C, support is very good across all of the latest browsers.

This session will aim to inform, enlighten, and delight attendees with the right way to include CSS in your WordPress theme using child themes or a plugin such as Jetpack, and we will also cover some of the best new features of CSS3 that you can put to work right away.You should have a basic understanding of HTML and some familiarity with CSS.

Learning Outcomes

• Use the Chrome Inspector to inspect HTML and CSS of existing pages
• Create a child theme and add your own CSS to it
• Install a plugin to add custom CSS to your theme
• Enqueue your own stylesheet the proper way in functions.php
• Use the new CSS3 features to create gradients and animations on your site
• Use the new color specifications to specify colors of elements on your page

Tips on how to improve the security of your WordPress site and develop better security posture. I’ll explore the motivations behind why WordPress sites get attacked and how to protect, detect and respond to these threats.

Learning Outcomes

• Understand the motivations of attackers and why they would want to hack your blog.
• Protect your website from the bad guys.
• Improve attitude and posture towards security.
• Effectively monitor your site environment for anything amiss.

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down.

Whether you’re a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us. We’ll help you find a ticket that’s appropriate to your level, and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch.

Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!

Wait, what is this all about?

It’s a #hackfest where developers will be coding solo or in small groups to fix WordPress bugs. Bring your own laptop!

Not a coder but want to contribute? You can: do Trac ticket triage, test new patches, offer user support on the forums, find bugs for the developers to work on. Bring your own laptop anyway!

BRING YOUR DEVELOPMENT LAPTOP! You should have your local development server installed and configured, have a good IDE and have some VCS installed (Git or SVN).

If you don’t know what the above means, or just want a little more background, be sure to attend Ryan Welcher’s talk A Noob’s Journey To The Core to see if this is for you!

To get yourself prepared, please familiarize yourself with the core contributor’s handbook.

You have a plugin, theme, or site and suddenly your worst fear comes true; you get an E-Mail informing you of a security vulnerability. What should you do? How should you respond? What responsibilities do you have? What do you disclose and when? Find out how to handle these tense times and protect yourself and your users.

Learning Outcomes

• Handle security reports.
• Properly communicate with reporter.
• Know what to expect, what to ask for, and what you should and should not share publicly.

This session focuses on the do’s and don’ts of using the WordPress editor. Also, it will provide tips to improve a user’s content creation process, as well as how to fix problems that can occur.The intended audience is beginning users.

Learning Outcomes:

• Use the WordPress Editor in an efficient manner.
• Fix issues caused by improper editor practices.
• Take time while working with WordPress to avoid mistakes.

So many devices, so little time! Learn how to efficiently and effectively design your website so it will look amazing… from mobile to big screen (and everything in-between)! A combination of strategy, design and code tips for designing for all devices. a little something for everyone (and most technical levels).

A new wave of website tools now allow us web designers to collect an abundance of data on our users behavior and actually associate it with an individual. While we’ve been using general tools like Google Analytics to refine our user interfaces and page designs for a decade, we’re now able to actually understand how each individual interacts with our website.

Imagine how you, and your clients, can use that information to improve the sales process!

In this presentation, I’ll show you how to uncover what customers want based solely on how they use your website. Specifically, how to better define sitemaps and website architecture for clients whose goal is lead generation.

Learn about the new tracking software that you should be recommending to your clients and learn how to implement this strategy through examples and real case studies.

This presentation is best for web designers, marketers and entrepreneurs.

Learning Outcomes:

• Better understand marketing automation software packages.
• Design more effective websites with WordPress.
• Have stronger communication with sales and marketing (or clients) about lead generation through their website.

Think only coders can make a living using WordPress? Think again! There are a surprising number of ways to make a career using WordPress without knowing a single line of code. This presentation will tackle some of the barriers that discourage beginners from using WordPress professionally, like a lack of technical skill and feeling like an impostor.

Shed the fear and discover different career options and simple WordPress tips while learning to leverage your unique skill set for the tech industry.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be encouraged to use WordPress professionally.
• Participants will be inspired to keep learning and pursue tech.
• They will be able to market their skills for the tech industry.
• They will have resources on how to learn to code and how to build up their knowledge and experience.

Speeding up a WordPress site (or any content site) is economical, boost rankings, and most of all, improve the user experience. We will briefly discuss the LAMP stack and present some strategies to make your site more speedy or suck less if you are inheriting a mess.

Developers of all abilities will benefit from the tips and tools to make your WP instance healthier and faster.

You’ll learn:

• Understand why a speedy site is a good site for all.
• The anatomy of page load.
• Content / code caching strategy.
• Various places to optimize (web server, PHP engine, code, database, etc.).
• Examples of how I made some sites suck less without too much coding.

If we had a dollar for each time someone asked us which plugin to use for a multilingual WordPress site, beer would be on us for everyone attending our talk. At this time, there’s no be-all end-all answer to the multilingual question.

In this talk, we will review the best practices involved in creating a multilingual site, then we will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we’ve (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you’ll feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

Learning Outcomes:

• Master the best practices in multilingual sites conception.
• Understand the different approaches and tools used in WordPress.
• Choose the best tools for each project.
• Work better with translators and external resources.

If we had a dollar for each time someone asked us which plugin to use for a multilingual WordPress site, beer would be on us for everyone attending our talk. At this time, there’s no be-all end-all answer to the multilingual question.

In this talk, we will review the best practices involved in creating a multilingual site, then we will walk you through the benefits, drawbacks and pitfalls of current approaches to multilingual content with WordPress. Yes, we’ve (pretty much) tried them all. We hope that by the end of our talk, you’ll feel at ease if multilingual projects come your way.

Learning Outcomes:

• Master the best practices in multilingual sites conception.
• Understand the different approaches and tools used in WordPress.
• Choose the best tools for each project.
• Work better with translators and external resources.

A designer, a developer and a client walk into a bar… or more accurately, a meeting room. Hear from designer Avery Swartz, developer Linn Øyen Farley, and client Mark Aikman as they describe the process of getting the new Buddies in Bad Times Theatre website off the ground.

Forget the outdated “waterfall” method of designers and developers working on a site in hiding and then handing it over to the client at the end of the project. Discover the allure of the iterative web design process, where the designer, developer and client are all working openly, contributing to the site at the same time. It’s better, faster, and more cost-effective. It just requires one really important element (hint: it starts with T and ends with RUST).

After this presentation that’s part case study and part philosophy, you’ll want to try the iterative approach with your own clients.

In this session, we will be going over how to design and secure your site, so that your users trust your site (and you), and then teach you some basics on how to make sure that you aren’t betraying that trust.

We will cover some thoughts on why users trust what they do, and then some practical things that you (as the shop owner) can implement to keep your visitors’ info safe and secure, as well as convey that to your customers.

Learning Outcomes:

The user that attends this session should walk away with an understanding of the importance of gaining your user’s trust in e-commerce, and then various ways to help grow that, as well as make sure that you don’t betray their trust.

Want a better-looking site, stronger writing skills and better visibility? You have a powerful resource at your fingertips: the WordPress community. Whether you’re a novice or seasoned professional, learn ways to tap into the community to make your site stand out.

Community feedback gives your site more visibility and lets you know what people are looking for — from stunning images to catchy content. Discover tips, tricks and resources that will make your site stronger and get your voice heard.

This presentation will highlight offerings from Blogging University, forums, local meetups and WordCamps.

This is the next step in Content Architecture. What happens when you have huge amounts of information or posts that can be put into more than one category at the same time? This talk will describe how you guide users from multiple paths to the same content. The intended audience are for those people who have their sites up and running, but need to rethink their content organizational structure.

Learning Outcomes

• Why you would want to use FacetsWP
• How to organize your information on a flatter hierarchy
• How to implement FacetsWP

“But this worked the other day!” We’ve all had those moments (maybe you even had one today). It’s so frustrating when things that used to work break. Sometimes, you feel a bit silly. Other times, you’re ready to flip a table. Well, put that table back down!

Let unit testing save you from this nightmare. It’s a lot like coding with a safety net (or body armor if that’s how you roll). It lets you go a bit crazy while minimizing repercussions (as long as the police don’t show up).

Want to try something new? No worries! It’ll let you know if something isn’t working as it should. That’s how most paid plugins maintain a high level of quality over the years.

If that sounds good to you, then you’ll love this talk. We’ll go over what unit testing is and its benefits. We’ll also look at how to get you started and how to write your first test.

Learning Outcomes:

• Explore the concepts behind unit testing.
• Understand the benefits of unit testing.
• Install PHP unit test libraries.
• Write a unit test for a WordPress plugin.
• Run your plugin unit test suite.

Good plugins provide actions and filters to allow others (like you!) to modify some of their functionality without having to either create a whole new plugin from scratch or hack away at the original plugin, losing your changes when that plugin gets updated down the road. Learn how to find these actions and filters in other plugins, and use them to bend the plugin to your will.

Learning Outcomes:

• Know what actions and filters are, and how they can be used.
• Be able to create a functionality plugin to modify another plugin’s functionalities.

The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

Learning Outcomes

• Set up Google Analytics in WordPress
• Understand SEO basics
• Understand how to read reports in Google Analytics
• Know the meaning of metrics, dimensions, and filters
• Create custom reports
• Create custom segments
• Identify important metrics for website SEO and diagnostics

WordPress upgrades, they bring us new features, faster sites, and better security. But pushing that upgrade button can be a scary moment, unless you’ve ensured your site is ready and compatible. I’ll show you the best practices for ensuring your site is ready including a simple strategy that works whether you manage one site or hundreds.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the important of keeping WordPress upgraded.
• Create a 5 step test plan to ensure their site is ready to upgrade.
• Test their sites on beta and Release Candidates to provide feedback to the community.

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down.

Whether you’re a developer who has never contributed to core, or a seasoned contributor, make a point of joining us. We’ll help you find a ticket that’s appropriate to your level, and we’ll walk you through the process of submitting a patch.

Here’s a little bonus: Submitters of committed patches get their names on the credits page on every install of WordPress worldwide!

Wait, what is this all about?

It’s a #hackfest where developers will be coding solo or in small groups to fix WordPress bugs. Bring your own laptop!

Not a coder but want to contribute? You can: do Trac ticket triage, test new patches, offer user support on the forums, find bugs for the developers to work on. Bring your own laptop anyway!

BRING YOUR DEVELOPMENT LAPTOP! You should have your local development server installed and configured, have a good IDE and have some VCS installed (Git or SVN).

If you don’t know what the above means, or just want a little more background, be sure to attend Ryan Welcher’s talk A Noob’s Journey To The Core to see if this is for you!

To get yourself prepared, please familiarize yourself with the core contributor’s handbook.

My presentation will focus on sharing practical tips and advice based on my experiences in becoming a core contributor. While there will be some technical aspects of how to contribute, my intention is to share what I have learned along the road to getting my first props and to provide practical, real-world advice on how to get into core contribution. My audience would be developers of any level who want to start contributing to core.

Learning Outcomes:

• How to setup a local contribution environment.
• Understand the importance of being a part of the community and how it helps their efforts contributing to core.
• Become familiar with trac.
• Code limitations with WordPress core.
• Various other tips and pieces of advice.

A great website design is nothing without a developer to bring it to life, and a developer can only do so much with a design that’s not prepared properly. This talk is about helping designers help their developers help them.

By learning how to audit their potential developer, ask the right questions at the beginning of the project, prepare their design files properly, and keep common website issues in mind as they’re working, designers will be able to work together smoothly with developers to create awesome WordPress websites.

Learning Outcomes:

• Know what questions to ask at the start of a project.
• Prepare WordPress and developer friendly design files.
• Consider WordPress-specific and general front-end issues while designing.

CSS preprocessors make developing clean and semantic stylesheets effortless. My talk will take someone through a basic structure for organizing Sass within a WordPress theme, using the Bones theme framework as an example.

I will go through some of the benefits and cool tricks you can implement with this structure including breakpoint includes, variables, functions, nesting, and mixins.

Finally I will address perhaps the greatest hurdle to immediately implementing Sass in your WordPress theme — compiling. I will take people through the common methods of doing this including Grunt, Compass, and WordPress plugins like WP-SCSS.

Learning Outcomes:

• Look at their current workflow and ask the question: Why am I repeating myself? And how can I automate it?
• Embrace a CSS workflow that is made up many small components instead of one large component.
• Gain familiarity we core features of Sass like nesting, variables, mixins, functions, and imports.
• Feel confident in using a library like Bourbon to write stylesheets that have better browser compatibility, all while writing less lines of code.
• Be aware of build tools like Grunt/Gulp, which can be used to compile Sass in addition to many other front end tasks.
• Feel confident in implementing Sass in a WordPress theme immediately.

This is not a marketing presentation on how to get more conversions. In this presentation we’ll walk through best practices for integrating A/B testing tools and plugins like Visual Web Optimizer and Optimizely for WordPress. We will also look at how to properly setup template pages, embed tracking codes and how to manage your content and media for testing across multiple devices.

Learning Outcomes:

• Use WordPress to develop Landing Pages.
• Integrate 3rd party tools for conversion and landing page optimization.
• Turn WordPress into a marketing machine.
• Create A/B tests on posts and pages.
• Design pages and content with conversion design principles.
• Integrate WordPress with other marketing vehicles efficiently.

Did you know the average user will wait only 2-3 seconds waiting for a webpage to load before abandoning it forever? Having a fast website is critical to its success. How do you ensure your site loads fast and reliably, to all kinds of users around the world? In this presentation we’ll discuss seven strategies for increasing your WordPress site’s speed.

Covering caching, content delivery networks, image optimization, file optimization, database cleaning, and hosting and theme choices, you’re guaranteed to leave this presentation with concrete next steps for improving your site’s performance.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand many components that go into determining site speed.
• Use free tools to measure and monitor speed and performance of WordPress-based websites.
• Create and modify websites to perform faster, better, stronger!

“We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do.

With great power, comes great responsibility. During this talk, Taylor will step through the do’s and don’ts of Multisite Networks. He will share how WordPress Multisite can be your best friend or worst enemy… but usually both… at the same time.”

Learning Outcomes:

Expect pro-tips, eureka moments, and hard lessons learned from his experience setting up and running multisite networks for small private company intranets, all the way to global enterprise brands.

By the end of this talk you will know the pros and cons of WordPress Multisite Networks, best practices for setting up and running a multisite, and know about alternatives if multisite isn’t a fit for your next project.

An introduction to using Ecommerce with WordPress. Session attendees will have a working knowledge of how to set up a basic ecommerce store in WordPress.