🇺🇸 WordCamp US 2015

​Minimalist web design requires a deep understanding of the needs of the people using your website. Clearing away design clutter and nonessential functionality leaves only the most important elements, creating a peaceful and focused environment for both the end user and the designer. This talk will cover visual design principles for creating a more peaceful user experience.

React has taken the JavaScript community by storm and is changing how we build UIs and write JavaScript. What are some cool things that you can do with React? Why did Automattic chose to build the new WordPress.com UI (Calypso) using it? And, how can you start using React today in WordPress to enhance your themes and plugins? Let’s see what we can come up with and imagine a future filled with easy to reuse components.

Council meetings sit empty until a road closes, a subway schedule changes, or property taxes increase. Suddenly, meetings are packed with concerned residents. It’s often too late by that time. Use WordPress.com as an interactive digital communication tool to engage the public before meetings are crowded. Incorporate the public’s voice in your local planning process with simple steps outlined in this session.

As one of the first museums to fully digitize its collections and make them available online for the public, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian has embraced open source tools to empower its audience and staff to discuss and experience art. We are counting to leverage this open attitude by working with a small group within Automattic to research, plan, and design the Freer and Sackler site. As a team, we are developing custom plugins and code in-house that will be made available to the public and other cultural institutions on GitHub in hopes of furthering open source within the cultural environment.

During the presentation, we will briefly discuss the democratization of art, review our planning and design process and how we are working to make sure the tools we develop are usable by others. We will finish with an open discussion on how cultural institutes can maximize their use of WordPress. While the case study will focus specifically on a visual arts museum, the lessons learned and tools used can be applied to any WordPress-driven website rollout.

Large community projects introduce constraints on how we program. Our biggest assets aren’t the hardware we run on or the language we use – it’s each other. How can we code in ways that respect each other and capitalize on that “asset” of the contributor-base? In this talk Dennis will discuss some techniques and patterns that lead towards fewer problems and improve a project’s overall health in these and any environments.

WordPress is one of the most, if not the most, recognized website platform available in the market. Dominating over 25% of the market, it’s no surprise that it’s the preferred technology by marketers, sales professionals, small and large business alike, and those intent in nefarious actions.

It’s popularity is often attributed to it’s flexibility, usability and of-course, community. With all the positive though, there is and continues to be an overarching security shadow that gets introduced into every conversation.

In this presentation, we look to educate and bring awareness to the real challenges the platform faces when it comes to security. We will also dispel rumors and myths, while providing a realistic, objective, overview of the current state of security affairs in the WordPress ecosystem.

The web is a constantly evolving domain, making even the most skilled security professionals faint at the idea of staying ahead of the latest and emerging threats. We will provide perspective, and educate the masses around the things that really matter and the things being done to improve the online experience for millions.

10up open sourced their WordPress Best Practices (PHP, JavaScript, tools, and workflows) in late 2014. As the Director of Engineering at 10up, I drove this project and am the lead contributor to the docs. These Best Practices allow developers to build sites that scale, perform, and are secure one sites receiving millions of page views per day. They also standardize development practices in such a way that facilitates team collaboration. This talk will highlight some important parts of the Best Practices and reveal some valuable tips about how we (10up) engineer some of the most complex and most viewed WordPress sites in the world.

The New York Times has been using the forthcoming WP REST API in production for over a year. It was initially developed for use during the 2014 midterm elections, but has become the de facto Breaking News platform at the Times. This talk will explain how the project sprang to life, why the REST API was an obvious choice, how WordPress interacts with it, Backbone, and React to power Live Coverage at the paper of record.

When asked, 100% of the developers asked respond that they are lifelong learners. Yet, a life is short while projects are long.

We see ourselves struggle with the overwhelming amount of new concepts, technologies, languages, frameworks, and tools. In addition to that WordPress development can be an island and requires extra effort learning something new.

In this talk we will see how few qualities can help us better structure and navigate our learning efforts.

WordPress is coming of age as an application platform. Plugins like WP-API 2.0 and the JSON REST API have arrived, opening up new opportunities for how websites and applications are constructed with WordPress as a CMS. More and more developers are discovering the benefits of “decoupled” development for websites and applications, where the front-end client (website, native mobile, desktop) is built as a separate system from the CMS itself.

This method of development has many applications:

• Coordinate front and back-end development in parallel via “the API Contract”.
• Use lean/elegant markup and best-of-breed front end development tools.
• Build rich interactive experiences leveraging modern JS frameworks like AngularJS or React.
• Support native mobile applications, the “internet of things”, and other web services.
• Provide content for applications in museum/gallery installations.

If you’re a developer who has been looking to try out some of these use-cases, or follow some of these new practices, there’s no better time than now to get started. This presentation will:

• Introduce you to decoupled development
• Showcase examples where WordPress serves as the CMS for websites, native iOS/Android applications, and museum touchscreens
• Walk through a simple example of creating a decoupled WordPress CMS that provides JSON to a variety of front-end applications

The presentation will draw from the following case studies:

• Haruki Murakami (http://www.harukimurakami.com/): AngularJS front-end enabled complex transitions from page to page.
• Bethlehem Steel’s Hoover Mason Trestle (http://www.hoovermason.com/): AngularJS application to “walk” the elevated steelworkers’ trestle
• Slavery at Monticello (http://app.monticello.org/): iOS/Android native application that chronicles the lives of slaves along Mulberry Row in Monticello (Thomas Jefferson’s estate)
• James Ensor: The Temptation of Saint Anthony touchscreen: Cinder (C++) touchscreen for Art Institute of Chicago

WordPress is coming of age as an application platform. Plugins like WP-API 2.0 and the JSON REST API have arrived, opening up new opportunities for how websites and applications are constructed with WordPress as a CMS. More and more developers are discovering the benefits of “decoupled” development for websites and applications, where the front-end client (website, native mobile, desktop) is built as a separate system from the CMS itself.

This method of development has many applications:

• Coordinate front and back-end development in parallel via “the API Contract”.
• Use lean/elegant markup and best-of-breed front end development tools.
• Build rich interactive experiences leveraging modern JS frameworks like AngularJS or React.
• Support native mobile applications, the “internet of things”, and other web services.
• Provide content for applications in museum/gallery installations.

If you’re a developer who has been looking to try out some of these use-cases, or follow some of these new practices, there’s no better time than now to get started. This presentation will:

• Introduce you to decoupled development
• Showcase examples where WordPress serves as the CMS for websites, native iOS/Android applications, and museum touchscreens
• Walk through a simple example of creating a decoupled WordPress CMS that provides JSON to a variety of front-end applications

The presentation will draw from the following case studies:

• Haruki Murakami (http://www.harukimurakami.com/): AngularJS front-end enabled complex transitions from page to page.
• Bethlehem Steel’s Hoover Mason Trestle (http://www.hoovermason.com/): AngularJS application to “walk” the elevated steelworkers’ trestle
• Slavery at Monticello (http://app.monticello.org/): iOS/Android native application that chronicles the lives of slaves along Mulberry Row in Monticello (Thomas Jefferson’s estate)
• James Ensor: The Temptation of Saint Anthony touchscreen: Cinder (C++) touchscreen for Art Institute of Chicago

If you’ve ever had experience growing a community (WordPress, Open Source, or otherwise), you know that every community has its ups and downs. From trolls in comments sections, face to face name calling, and general toxic personalities, no group is perfect and no one knows how to deal with everything.

In this talk, we will discuss the basic principles of healthy communication as laid out by Suzette Haden Elgin and how you can apply it to your community growth to keep your community happy and engaged all while keeping you safe and healthy.

Educational technologists often find themselves in the unenviable position of tech-change communication at their institutions. While there came be a lot of enthusiastic educators advocating for such change, there can be just as many who regard a school’s adoption of new technologies like learning management systems as an imposition on their profession. A WordPress blog can serve both audiences as an information resource and training tool. This session will look at the University of Pennsylvania’s use of a WordPress blog as a case for serving such functions, as well as discuss how to apply this type of blogging to other tough tech-change-communication contexts (business, NGOs, etc).

Earlier this year, we released a bug fix for one of the most complex and severe security issues WordPress has ever had – the Trojan Emoji bug. (So good it got its own name!)

In this talk, we’ll take a look at the initial report, reconstruct how we got to the eventual solution, and discuss what we learned along the way.

According to some statistics, WordPress is used on nearly 25% of the entire World Wide Web; and is the content management system (CMS) of choice for nearly 2/3 of websites using a CMS. While the numbers within higher education may or may not match those, WordPress is heavily used within that vertical.

Many institutions are using WordPress to present their whole public-facing websites; some are using it to build large commons for their students and communities; some are using WP as a tool to help students build digital portfolios; and some are even building living textbooks with WordPress.

Within this talk, we’ll take a look some examples of WordPress as it’s used in higher ed, we’ll discuss some of the contributions that higher ed has made to WordPress over the years, we’ll explore some of the challenges faced in higher education, and we’ll look toward the future of WordPress usage in higher ed.

You’ve got the basics of CSS down, but you are ready to kick it up a notch and add a bit more pizazz and interactivity to your websites. In this session we’ll explore the fundamentals of CSS transforms, transitions, and animation. What are the basic building blocks that make up these capabilities? What is the difference between a transition and a transform? What does browser support look like? Most importantly, how can you put these tools to use in your next project and where can you find good resources to learn more? We’ll answer these questions and more as we explore the basics of how to add some of the more truly dynamic elements of CSS to our websites.

Building things is one of the most powerful kinds of learning experiences a person can have: so what do people learn when they build websites using WordPress? The answer depends on what’s in their toolkit.

Content development tools can be designed to help people understand the technical infrastructure of the Web while they build compelling content. One example of such a tool is our WordPress Plugin, Snowball, which helps people build immersive WordPress articles that integrate data and media while exposing them to basic computational features of web development like tagging, nesting, and CSS. We have developed Snowball to support journalistic presentations inspired by the New York Times, including their interactive article “Snowfall” and the more recent “Greenland is Melting Away.”

Our team includes members of Drexel University College of Computing and Informatics, Mozilla Foundation, and University of Nebraska at Omaha and is based at the Expressive and Creative Interaction Technologies (ExCITe) Center in West Philly.

Delivering a fast, performant website is one of the most important elements of building websites and web applications today. The first few seconds of load time can determine whether a user engages with or leaves a site. In this talk, we will look at advanced techniques for optimizing the front-end performance of a WordPress driven website. Including ways to defer and async JavaScript; lazy load images, videos, and other types of content; prioritizing the critical rendering path css for multiple content types; and testing performance.

A lightning intro to Backbone.js: how it’s changing WordPress and how you can leverage it in your next project.

Outline

• Backbone is Awesome!
• Backbone + WordPress = Happy
• Backbone and the JSON REST API
• Go forth and Backbone!

WordPress and open source software have powered Penn Manor School District’s websites for 7 years. But can WordPress, and open source principles, help teachers transform classrooms and inspire kids to build remarkable learning communities? The answer may surprise you. Discover how our schools use WordPress, open source software, and a unique student technology apprenticeship program to prepare the next generation of writers and hackers for careers, college, and beyond.

In 2012 and again in 2013, I hit the blogger’s dream — one of my posts went viral. As of today, it has over a million views and has been shared on Facebook 450,000 times:

During the two separate instances when it went viral, I learned a bunch of lessons on both blogging and hosting a website. The goal of the talk is to share these lessons and help bloggers be prepared should they go viral, too:

1. My hosting plan left my site woefully unprepared for spikes in traffic. What were some things I could have done to prepare?
2. My ad network shut down my account for alleged fraud, and I lost potentially thousands of dollars worth of ad revenue. Was there anything I could have done differently?
3. Tons of sites started republishing the post without permission. I even had to deal with a blatant case of plagiarism, when someone not only republished my post in its entirety, but changed the title and author. What was the best way to handle this?
4. I was also contacted by a few reputable sites (USA Today, HuffPost) to republish the post in its entirety. Was it worth it to grant permission?
5. Of course, the virility of the post drew the requisite trolls. What were some of the productive — and unproductive — ways to deal with them?

We want code that is easy to understand, re-usable, and flexible. But we are always up against deadlines, so we rush, and end up with code that is messy, buggy, hard to maintain, and makes us go slower even though we’re trying to go faster.

What is clean code? In this talk I’ll provide some answers to this question, and introduce you to 10 good habits that will help keep your code clean, such as the use of meaningful names for your variables and functions, and following the “Boy Scout Rule” (leave the code cleaner than you found it). I will even try to persuade you that using a lot of code comments is a sign that there are problems with your code. I’ll also discuss the particular challenges of applying some of these techniques in the WordPress environment.

We talk a lot about all the things you can do with WordPress. But what about what you should do? Let’s talk about making better software design decisions that communicate intent and enable better user and developer experiences.

React has taken the JavaScript community by storm and is changing how we build UIs and write JavaScript. What are some cool things that you can do with React? Why did Automattic chose to build the new WordPress.com UI (Calypso) using it? And, how can you start using React today in WordPress to enhance your themes and plugins? Let’s see what we can come up with and imagine a future filled with easy to reuse components.

How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools.

Despite the varied and plentiful choices for WordPress hosting that are available, there is still something liberating about running your own servers. Providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services have reduced or removed most of the barriers for those that want to take the leap, but Systems Administration remains an art of its own.

Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances.

My session will introduce Ansible, touch on vagrant and cloud hosting, show how to deploy WordPress using Ansible, and demonstrate how we can re-use these tools across multiple environments.

This talk will cover a few key “Aha” moments that you should have about the way WordPress works. We’ll talk about things like the template hierarchy, what’s going on in wp-config, where WordPress content is stored (the database vs. the file system), how posts and pages and custom post types are represented in the database, what folks are talking about when they talk about hooks and filters, and just generally review the “behind the scenes” mechanics of how WordPress works. We’ll also touch on a few “tricks of the trade” that you might not realize are out there (version control, staging sites, caching, Vagrant, and other fun tools to make development with WordPress just a little bit easier).

This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still haven’t figured out some of the details behind the scenes.

If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this talk will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. And if that’s you, you should be able to walk away with a solid mental model of how WordPress works “behind the scenes” and be in a much better position to do development with it

Interested in contributing to WordPress but aren’t sure exactly where to start? The WordPress Meta team is responsible for all the official sites for the open source project and community. Websites such as wordpress.org, wordcamp.org, wordpress.tv, developer.wordpress.org, codex.wordpress.org and many others are continuously being maintained and improved by volunteers on the Meta team. There is a lot that needs to be done and more help is always needed. All skill sets are welcome. In this session we’ll discuss what the Meta team does, what is needed and how you can get involved.

Documentation can be one of the most challenging things for a developer. You can write the most amazing code that’s incredibly easy to use, but without a good set of documentation no one beside you will use it! But times are changing. You can have the robots write the documentation for you! Or at least very nearly.

The WP_Parser project has given birth to the incredibly useful developer.wordpress.org/reference site based on the massive amount of internal documentation work that has been going on in core over the last years. This is an exploration of how other developers can take that work and leverage it into their own reference site taking advantage of all of the internal code docs they have already written.

The plugin ecosystem & REST API push our creative limits for what we can imagine building with WordPress – and it’s time we looked at powering physical devices using open source platforms like LittleBits and Arduino. This talk will examine use cases and methods for building real-time physical displays powered by WordPress.

Accessibility is so much more than just catering to screen readers. What goes into making a website accessible? Many government contracts require websites to be accessible. A variety of companies and brands want them. It can affect the “magic” of SEO (ranking, search-ability, search engine karma, etc). How can you determine whether or not your website is?

Ultimately, it’s really not that hard, doing even one thing is better than nothing at all, and it’s never too late to start thinking about it. This presentation will discuss both tools and techniques that can help you build accessible websites.

CSS in itself can be pretty difficult even when it’s just one person writing it on a project that is small in scope, but what happens when things get bigger? What naming conventions scale well? How do you work on it with a large team? What are the considerations needed for an open source project or really any project? What tools should be used? I’m going to be answering these and discussing a few other issues that may spring up when working on complex projects. I’m also going to talk about things that might drive you crazy, but don’t actually make an impact on your project.

GitHub is that awesome thing everyone says you’ve gotta use, but how many of us can make heads or tails of it? If you’re tired of pretending to understand when someone talks about “merging the latest pull request” or want to know what the heck forks have to do with code, this rundown’s for you.

I’ll show you how a little dose of science fiction is the key to understanding Version Control. There will be teleportation, time travel, there may even be a victimless murder as you learn the difference between a Fetch and a Pull, why Rebasing changes history, and how merging branches can magically reconcile conflicting code.

Whether you develop, design, or just care about content, Git, GitHub, and Version Control can be some of the most useful tools in your kit. After this primer, you’ll see why Git and GitHub is for everyone, including you.

Integrating Accessibility (a11y) into the project process can be downright scary. In this session, I’ll cover basic web accessibility principles for web designers, developers, and site owners, then show how to turn seemingly daunting and confusing accessibility requirements into understandable, actionable tasks and techniques. The talk will cover some of the accessibility-specific WordPress plugins and themes available, as well as some quick, easy tests to integrate into design and development workflows.

Are you doing all you can before your website becomes accessible to billions of people? This talk is an overview of major elements to take into account before launching a successful WordPress website. Topics discussed include functionality, responsiveness, search engine optimization, speed, security, and backups.

Style Tiles are a simple and effective way to help clients separate design decisions from content, so you can make sweeping changes before they become time-consuming and expensive. If you design websites, or work with people that do, this presentation will explain how Style Tiles can promote buy-in and a sense of ownership from the client, helping them feel like the final design was their idea all along. You will learn how Style Tiles fit into the design process and development process. And to get you started, a Style Tile template and some basic survey questions will be available for download.

Recently I created a “game” using the WordPress.com API to house the data. This talk will go over how the WordPress.com API can be utilized to create custom JS applications. Talk would cover integrating with the API in node.JS applications using the wpcom.js library.

As the editor of a WordPress news website geared toward industry professionals, I spend most of my days analyzing WordPress products and services. I see hundreds of launches every year, and get pitched to cover new offerings constantly. I also regularly communicate with successful WordPress business owners, and discuss what is working for them and what isn’t.

My aim with this talk is to share what makes for a compelling WordPress product or service: from website design, to user experience, the human touch, code quality, and more. Attendees will receive actionable steps for improving their products, services, and positioning in the WordPress space.

With the platform’s towering shadow across the web, WordPress sites are always on the radar of spammers from every corner of the Earth. And with greater extensibility and integration than ever, opportunities to the let the wrong in are growing. This presentation explores the current spamscape, how the numbers add up, and troublesome trends to keep an eye on.

WP_CLI is a powerful tool, even right out of the box. But it can be made to do so much more. This talk will discuss extending WP_CLI by adding your own commands. Whether for simple site maintenance or helping to manage clients learn to utilize WP_CLI to it’s maximum extent the right way with tips on adding commands, handling input and output and making sure that users can figure out just what your command is doing. This is an advanced talk appropriate for intermediate to advanced developers.

What are the ingredients needed to create a committed WordPress Community in your city. Learn secrets to choosing topics, getting speakers, creating comraderie and keeping people active and involved. Then ask your questions!

Every technically minded person needs to know how to communicate technical knowledge clearly and effectively. This talk examines the fundamentals of “explaining hard things to humans,” including:

• What makes technical communication uniquely difficult, and uniquely important.
• Avoiding two major impediments to technical communication: arrogance (relating to gaps in knowledge as a hassle or irritation) and breeziness (attempting to ignore gaps in knowledge altogether).
• How and why to make technical communication both audience-aware and strategic: tailored to both the knowledge level of the audience and the goal of the communication.
• The value of analogies in technical communication.
• Principles of clear technical writing.

You’ll leave the talk better able to communicate what you know, and to diagnose and work with common failures in technical communication.

As one of the first museums to fully digitize its collections and make them available online for the public, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian has embraced open source tools to empower its audience and staff to discuss and experience art. We are counting to leverage this open attitude by working with a small group within Automattic to research, plan, and design the Freer and Sackler site. As a team, we are developing custom plugins and code in-house that will be made available to the public and other cultural institutions on GitHub in hopes of furthering open source within the cultural environment.

During the presentation, we will briefly discuss the democratization of art, review our planning and design process and how we are working to make sure the tools we develop are usable by others. We will finish with an open discussion on how cultural institutes can maximize their use of WordPress. While the case study will focus specifically on a visual arts museum, the lessons learned and tools used can be applied to any WordPress-driven website rollout.

Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asyncronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

For many years, the stack that WordPress sites have been built on has remained rather stagnant. PHP hasn’t released a new major version since 2004. The HTTP/1.1 spec was first released in 1997. Browsers have continued to evolve, yet much of the JavaScript and CSS written fails to take advantage of these evolutions. This is all changing and at a very rapid pace. 2015 marks major updates to multiple underlying technologies for WordPress and the web in general. This talk will explore PHP7, HTTP/2, HTTPS, ECMAScript 2015, and CSS4. We will look at what you need to do to prepare your code and help you get excited about taking advantage of new technologies today. The web is moving forward, if you don’t move with it, you will be left behind.

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.

Last November, The New York Times challenged news sites to fully support HTTPS in 2015. What does it mean to meet that challenge? This session will discuss the problems we encountered moving to HTTPS (and how we solved them). We’ll then give you hands-on help with anything you need: server configuration, certificates, mixed-content warnings, CDNs — even ads, analytics and A/B tests.

A look at people in our community that have had their lives changed by being involved with WordPress.

It’s 2020 and the majority of Internet traffic is mobile. Billions of the world Internet users have never owned, touched, or seen a computer larger than their pocket. Just as we were inquisitive kids, tinkering with Kid Pix and Geocities themes, the digital natives of today will be builders on the same platforms they use for consumption. Can you install and configure WordPress via your phone? Theme it? Create custom plugins? Launch it? Spoiler: I did, and I’ll show you how.

This talk is both a trend forecast thought piece and a proof-of-concept demo. I’ll share some technical learnings, discuss why they matter to our profession, and hopefully inspire you to attempt something just as crazy.

This session will cover the severe need for low-tech access to WordPress, but for content production and consumption – a problem somewhat unique to the developing world. It will cover use cases, user groups, and a few proposed techniques for making both content and publishing tools available to those without high-speed Internet, 3G connectivity, or traditional desktop publishing tools.

Attendees will achieve a deeper understanding of potential, unreached user demographics and the tools/techniques they can use to reach these groups.

From the basics of using a simple membership plugin to evaluating several premium courseware plugins, we’ll look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of courseware creation.

From the technical “know-how” of creating online courses, to the business angle on possibilities and what to teach, this session will provide the details to help create a successful training course.

Downloadable guides will be available to provide attendees information that extends beyond the single session.

Page caching doesn’t work for everyone! Sites that handle a large number logged-in users like Membership sites, Multisite networks, BuddyPress sites, or bbPress forums need special treatment to scale effectively. I’ll share my experience in building and managing large Multisite networks to give tips and tricks to speeding up your dynamic websites and coding for scale.

I was a mild-mannered developer until that fateful day: the day I submitted my first patch to WordPress. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was that moment that would begin to change the way I thought about development, community, and what it meant to be a contributor to an Open Source project.

My contributions to WordPress have taken the form of talks, patches, code reviews, and documentation, but they’ve nearly all started in the same place: solving a problem that I (or someone close to me) had at the time. Together we’ll learn some ways for you to find a way to become a contributor and, just maybe, help scratch someone else’s itch at the same time.

Freelancers, small and even established businesses often overlook the value of event marketing mostly because they are usually a significant investment that is difficult to measure. In this talk I’d like to share several tips that will help both individuals and businesses to create the ultimate connected brand experience by attending conferences and generate valuable business as a result. Attendees will leave the sessions with specific actionable items on how to prepare for a conference, what strategies to implement for the best results and how to take the most from the event after it’s over.

Good user experience in WordPress themes can make the difference between frustrated or happy users. Yet, it’s often overlooked. A solid user experience can feel just right, creating sound expectations and delight. We still see themes with misleading screenshots and demos. Themes with tons of options and complex setups too. This leaves users with false hopes and countless ways to fail. In this talk, we’ll explore user research, theme setup, theme options and more. By the end, you’ll know what makes up a theme’s user experience, and how to set your users up for success.

“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.

You’ll be on your way to testing godhood in no time.

Vagrant, Composer, and Gulp. Oh my. So many tools, how does one sort them all out? This talk will walk you through the tools you can use to create the perfect WordPress development environment, what they’re for, and why they’re important.

The Open Innovation Toolkit, part of the Obama Administration’s Second Open Government National Action Plan, harnesses public ingenuity to help address scientific and societal challenges. The first half of the toolkit, focusing on citizen science and crowdsourcing, was developed in collaboration with over 20 government agencies and built on the WordPress Multisite platform. This session will be a case study review of the project, challenges, and lessons learned. We’ll cover how the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy leveraged WordPress as a CMS and federal volunteers to create a low-cost resource to facilitate open innovation within the U.S.

This session covers the basics of the WordPress HTTP API. More often than not, custom code uses clunky cURL functions to make remote requests. WordPress has a built in API to make this much simpler. Why not use it?

I had a writer’s block and it was horrible: I felt uncreative, watched my blog dry up, crawled in the corner and cried. I felt like a loser. But I’m NOT a loser. So I fixed it. I created a blogging plan that involved only 10 minutes each day. My writer’s block disappeared, my blog stats climbed, and I now know how to turn it around when I find myself neglecting my site.

Whether you are a personal blogger or run a business website, this talk will give strategies for adding content without huge time investments. Learn how to eliminate writer’s block, create material relevant to your site’s purpose, compile content for later publication, and build a regular publishing habit.

As designers we’re searching for the best – the best method, the best look, the best font. We have a continuous battle to create brands that are unique but that have a longstanding presence. We make tough decisions constantly, question our instincts, and settle. We fight and we strive to make long lasting beautiful, smart and informed design. How do we get there?

In this talk, seasoned Creative Director Sara Cannon is going to dive deep into the designers struggle. She’s going to share different processes that can make our work better. We’re going to discuss philosophy, methodology, and execution from the creative mind stand point. Hopefully by the end of the talk, you will be inspired to push your own creative limits and learned some tips on how to get there.

Take your WordPress blog content to the next level when you re-purpose it into a digital eBook! eBooks are the new hot trend in marketing your website’s content, and you can assemble one easily using tools you likely already own! Learn about free vs. paid distribution options and how each style can benefit your website promotion strategy!

What’s going on with e-commerce. How hard is it to set up a store? What needs to go into a store? Is it mostly technical knowledge, marketing, or product knowledge? What are the WordPress options and how do they differ from some of the bigger hosted services on the market?

Three years ago, WordCamp Europe was held for the very first time. But besides bringing together thousands of people from all over the world, this international event had another unforeseen result. WCEU gave a few local WordPress communities unexpected momentum as a consequence of the unique environment it created. As a co-organizer of WCEU 2015 and a member of the Italian WordPress community, I will trace the extraordinary journey from stalling local community to thriving ecosystem of meetups and enthusiastic members, using real case studies from the German and Italian WordPress communities.

BuddyPress is a powerful plugin that adds a social network to your site. But as users who haven’t used BuddyPress much or at all, we might not realize it’s power and flexiblity. This talk will introduce you to BuddyPress. Then it will show you how to start seeing the possiblities BuddyPress can offer and how to creatively intergrate it into sites you’re building for agencies, small businesses, enterprise clients, higher-education, and even your own personal projects. When we’re done, your mind will be filled with exciting new ideas of how to build better and cooler websites for your clients and yourself… all thanks to BuddyPress!

From bloggers to designers, developers to customer service experts, the bulk of our day is often spent sitting at the computer. Over the years, this can lead to injuries and health problems, since our bodies weren’t designed to be sedentary. We’ll go over a few stretches and exercises to keep your spine and neck healthy.

Digital Project Management is one of the fastest growing career fields in tech today. While it doesn’t require the ability to push change to a code base, it does require a high level of technical proficiency. This talk will cover tools and best practices for 21st century digital project management and would be appropriate for a business track.

I’ll talk about roles, states, and properties: what they are, how you use them, and how they can help us by creating more internally consistent HTML that’s also better for people with disabilities.

Our worst clients challenge us. They push us to defend our work. They demand our full attention. They make unreasonable requests – knowingly or otherwise.

Our worst clients serve as a constant reminder of why we do the work we do. Whether overly communicative or radio silent – difficult clients push us to be better versions of ourselves.

Find out why good clients are good, but bad clients are better.

It’s 2015, and there’s no longer any debate that website performance is crucial to success. Study after study has shown that the faster site wins, and with more browsing time happening on mobile devices, as well as site performance beginning to factor into search rankings, the days of multi-second pageloads are over.

Luckily there are also settled best-practices for getting speedy results. It’s not a research project or an arcane mystery to unravel. It’s not something that needs to be debated. Software is a science, and the computer scientists have the answers.

This session covers the indisputable what and why of high-performance websites:

Page cache
Object cache
PHP tuning
Database configuration
Front-end optimization

For any developer or systems administrator responsible for satisfying the need for speed, this session will deliver specific, actionable, practical answers.

So much attention is paid to the code that goes into making WordPress a stellar product, but you don’t hear much about the human side of it. While you will find the occasional blog post or random tweet talking about mental health and happiness in the WordPress community, most overlook the best way to contribute to WordPress…paying attention to your mental and physical health, and taking care of each other. Give back to WordPress by stepping back from the code and look around you.

LeeAnn will give you a brief overview on the principles of accessible front-end design and show you how easy it is to start building a better web experience for everyone. We will cover what accessibility means in WordPress design and development and go over a few simple steps to audit a website for accessibility. You will be provided with tools and tips on how to easily add accessibility into your workflow and will walk away with a better understanding of how you may be excluding certain users from your sites and immediate actions to prevent it from happening.

Mirroring WordPress data to Elasticsearch enables breaking some of the constraints that MySQL imposes on performance and relevancy. There is a high barrier to entry, but some strong benefits. I’ll survey the different use cases I’ve heard about, compare some plugins and libraries, and talk about the impact I’ve seen Elasticsearch have so far.

We often forget when designing and developing websites that there are actual users on the other side of the screen. Whether through ability, age or cultural differences, there are a lot of ways that we can inadvertently alienate users. We sometimes forget that we’re making websites for our clients and customers, not ourselves.

In this presentation, I’ll give a brief rundown of considerations that should be given to make your website as effective to as wide a range of users as possible. Accessibility, internationalization, UX and UI changes will be covered, as well as some tips on how to determine your goal, and make your website work toward that goal for you.

Do you think you don’t know enough about WordPress to help out someone else? Come with me on my journey through the techie continuum – swinging through Self-Doubt Boulevard and taking a leisurely jaunt through Imposter Syndrome Alley. We’ll find out how I finally realized I know enough to contribute – and so do you.

Today, developers are well into embracing WordPress to enable the next generation of applications: creating rich native applications, powering home automation devices, supplying data to video games, and powering the data behind 3D applications.

With very few exceptions, much of these applications are widely unknown to a site owner in 2015. Similar to how custom post type functionalities are now well-known among the masses, what does the world look like when clients begin demanding these new possibilities? When developers start building them?

What does a residential home powered by WordPress really look like?

How could the concept of a social network change in 50 years, and how would that change how people interact with BuddyPress?

How would the WordPress UI team address design and development for augmented-reality interfaces?

What does a conversation between a WordPress developer with 46 years experience and a developer born in 2040 sound like?

These and other questions are explored with completely dramatized videos and images of this future, as well as (hypothetical) code examples, along with contextual commentary from Rami Abraham.

Attendees of this session don’t require any programming experience at all. However, there are a few brief notes that would benefit from an attendee having intermediate to advanced WordPress development knowledge.

Posts & Pages might have some obvious differences to you but to new users, they seem exactly the same. When teaching WordPress, the goal is to make sure the user feels comfortable, so never assume! In this talk I’ll go over some of my tried and true methods for introducing and training people on WordPress

A practical step-by-step of using the WordPress REST API to power a simple WordPress Theme using a little PHP as possible.

For many years, the stack that WordPress sites have been built on has remained rather stagnant. PHP hasn’t released a new major version since 2004. The HTTP/1.1 spec was first released in 1997. Browsers have continued to evolve, yet much of the JavaScript and CSS written fails to take advantage of these evolutions. This is all changing and at a very rapid pace. 2015 marks major updates to multiple underlying technologies for WordPress and the web in general. This talk will explore PHP7, HTTP/2, HTTPS, ECMAScript 2015, and CSS4. We will look at what you need to do to prepare your code and help you get excited about taking advantage of new technologies today. The web is moving forward, if you don’t move with it, you will be left behind.