🇺🇸 WordCamp US 2022

Being able to extend and customize the editorial experience for users has been a part of any WordPress developer’s toolbox since hooks were introduced in WordPress 1.2. We have come a long way since then and now with the Gutenberg Project, we have a new tool available to us – SlotFill.

The SlotFIll system can be used to extend blocks and the UI for the Block Editor and Site Editor screens making it a critically important tool for any WordPress developer. This talk will take a deep dive into how this system works, show how and where you can currently extend WordPress, and finally how to create your own custom SlotFills!

Two years ago, Sally had never heard of a WordCamp, MeetUp, Wapuu, or GitHub. She was too intimidated to touch or edit a website, yet alone explain Digital Accessibility. Many people don’t know where to start learning about Accessibility, which can be overwhelming. When many of her friends were retiring, Sally started an unexpected, yet rewarding and fulfilling new chapter which will hopefully inspire you.

If you can never seem to find time to redesign your own website or launch a new service because you’re too busy with client work… you’re not alone, and this talk is for you! Attendees will leave with a (1) better understanding of why it’s so hard to move our businesses forward when we’re busy with client work, (2) a clear strategy to address this very common issue, and (3) the motivation to make it happen!

There’s no question that Gutenberg has become an extremely powerful tool for building websites. But as Spiderman’s various family members have told him in various reboots of the franchise, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Using core blocks in a custom site helps streamline development and keep the customer’s cost down, but it can also give clients too much ability to break a carefully crafted design. This Lightning Talk will be extremely useful for anyone developing WordPress sites for clients or WordPress themes for the public, and will address the various ways of customizing core Gutenberg blocks in order to keep a site’s administrators and content editors within the guard rails established by the designer.

In this session, Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress, will answer live questions from WordCamp US attendees.

The most visible companies participating in Five for the Future are typically larger organizations that can dedicate several people to supporting WordPress core teams. In this session we will talk about the challenges of participating in Five for the Future as a small organization, how to set up a program for success, and the benefits of contributing.

The nonprofit organization WebAIM published a report in March 2022 about the state of accessibility in the top one million websites. This report flagged the six most common WCAG errors. These six errors covered 96.5% of all accessibility errors found. Learn how to find and fix these issues on your WordPress site.

Personal branding and online presence are made easier with full site editing! Do you have a personal site? Is it attractive? Is it current? No more excuses, full site editing makes it too easy not to put your best website out for the world to see. Put up a photo with a few links, a resume, recent projects, a collection of your favorite social media, a simple linktree, etc. We’ll go through some fun examples and see some blocks and block patterns to quickly get up and running.

Are you a developer looking for a way to have more fun with your work? Let’s dig into how I got started as a webdev streamer, how it forever changed my life, and how it can do the same for you and other developers. In our time together I’ll share my personal experience as a streamer, the things I’ve tried, the lessons I learned, the ways I’ve grown, and how you can build on these lessons yourself.

Getting the right perspectives at the right time can often be a challenge, especially when it feels like everything is catering towards the programmers. In this workshop, we’ll dive into how you can leverage the power of Design Thinking in your WordPress projects and experiences as a content writer, designer, or enthusiast looking to build out a passion.

With the numerous plugins, themes and integrations on WordPress, WordPress provides the platform with little barrier to entry for any young person to build an online presence, business or even virtual assets. Helping their youthful creative minds to explore, grow and earn.

Cognitive disabilities are among the most prevalent types of disabilities, yet experts have struggled to provide web accessibility best practices around this area due to cognitive disabilities being such a broad category. However, recent work by standards groups has begun to address this deficiency. In this session you’ll learn about the challenges people with these disabilities experience on the web and learn design patterns that will empower you to make your digital work more accessible to them.

This talk will explore communicating across aisles. Whether you need to speak to advanced developers, those just learning WordPress, or better understand how you communicate to those on your own skill level, this session is for you. We will also consider the exciting elements that neurodivergent individuals bring to WordPress and how neurotypical individuals might better collaborate with and empower neurodivergent individuals. Finally, we will discuss how a community of employers, coworkers, and friends can provide platforms of discussion and learning that invite those of different backgrounds into the field, in particular people of color. Let’s learn to get comfortable with talking about uncomfortable things.

In October 2021, Decker began work as a Project Manager in a digital marketing agency. While this was not her first exposure to WordPress, it was her full-time introduction to WordPress developers and clients. It was also her first experience working in a mostly white, male-dominated company and field. Her previous positions, including within her own business, were situations where women in leadership and women of color were much more common.

Join Cami Kaos as she shares with us the basics of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging and get uncomfortable of why the work of DEIB is the responsibility of all. Let’s learn to do this work together to make ours a more inclusive and welcoming community where everyone can feel a sense of belonging. 

Using the right WP actions and hooks could make or break your site’s performance and reliability. Whether it’s validating backend fields or targeting specific users, make sure you’re firing the right time, on time, every time.

Learn a new framework for technical support that retains more customers, attracts new customers, and all without falling into the common trap of becoming a free developer for entitled users. This philosophy of technical support is fun for technicians, empowering for customers, and will have your support team experiencing big wins.

The rise of the website creator economy over the last few of years has introduced a number of new creator-focused platforms and approaches to building.

How does WordPress fit into this new world? Let’s learn from some of the real-life experiences about what has worked with small and large creator & newsletter-focused sites across various platforms and WordPress. And we’ll answer the question: How do you explain the value that WordPress adds and if it’s the right choice?

Have you ever wondered if your website is useable for people with disabilities or those using assistive technology? Would you like to make your plugins or themes more accessible? 



This workshop will introduce website accessibility testing and teach participants how to identify accessibility problems using both automated testing tools and manual auditing techniques with keyboard-only navigation and a screen reader. Participants will leave with an understanding of the following:

• Required standards for meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA conformance.
• Recommended tools to use when performing accessibility audits, including WordPress plugins and browser extensions.
• Common accessibility problems that cannot be identified with an automated testing tool and that need to be found manually.
• How to keyboard test a website.
• How to test a website with a screen reader, including basic usage and common keyboard shortcuts for the screen reader relevant to their computer (VoiceOver on Mac or NVDA on Windows).
• Recommended places to find assistive technology users for user testing.

Attendee Requirements:

This will be an interactive workshop. Please bring a computer and headphones so you can participate fully in the workshop. We recommend having Chrome or Firefox installed on your computer for testing. Windows users, please install the current version of the NVDA screen reader on your computer before attending so you can maximize your testing time during the workshop.

Have you ever wondered if your website is useable for people with disabilities or those using assistive technology? Would you like to make your plugins or themes more accessible? 



This workshop will introduce website accessibility testing and teach participants how to identify accessibility problems using both automated testing tools and manual auditing techniques with keyboard-only navigation and a screen reader. Participants will leave with an understanding of the following:

• Required standards for meeting Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.1 AA conformance.
• Recommended tools to use when performing accessibility audits, including WordPress plugins and browser extensions.
• Common accessibility problems that cannot be identified with an automated testing tool and that need to be found manually.
• How to keyboard test a website.
• How to test a website with a screen reader, including basic usage and common keyboard shortcuts for the screen reader relevant to their computer (VoiceOver on Mac or NVDA on Windows).
• Recommended places to find assistive technology users for user testing.

Attendee Requirements:

This will be an interactive workshop. Please bring a computer and headphones so you can participate fully in the workshop. We recommend having Chrome or Firefox installed on your computer for testing. Windows users, please install the current version of the NVDA screen reader on your computer before attending so you can maximize your testing time during the workshop.

WP-CLI is the command line interface for WordPress. A text-based tool that allows you to control WordPress at scale. It is useful for local development, for remote control of your servers, and for automating menial & not so menial tasks. If you have been convinced that WP-CLI is the right tool to level up your mastery of WordPress, but you’ve had a hard time getting started using it, then this Workshop is for you!

We’ll start by setting up the environment and take a look at the basics of WP-CLI. Then we will slowly dive deeper to understand how you can remotely control multiple servers with the push of a few keystrokes. Finally, we’ll explore how you can progress from manual tasks to fully automated scripts that let you shave minutes, or even hours, off of repetitive tasks. You’ll leave this Workshop with a new tool in your tool belt ready to get you to a new level of productivity.

All about images on the web: current formats, how browsers load images, and upcoming formats – when and how to use them. This talk will start with a review of image formats commonly used on the web today – jpeg, git, png, SVG, and webp. What are they each good for? When and how should sites use them? Next, we will dig into the surprisingly complicated loading process of pages and images in the browser and the implications for site optimization. Finally, we will dive into newer formats like AVIF, JPEG XL, and WebP2, learn what promise they hold and how site owners can start using them today.

Block themes, the catalyst by which the full block editing experience lands in WordPress, introduces many new concepts for editing and publishing with WordPress. Let’s dive deep and explore the foundation of block themes, patterns, templates, parts, and style variants — all the bits that encompass this new era of WordPress.

On Mar 16, 2022, Google Announced the end date of the current version of Google Analytics (commonly referred to as GA-3/Universal Analytics). Google’s announcement has left marketers and business owners scrambling to figure out how Google Analytics 4 will affect their current (and future) marketing and data efforts. Now is the time to begin learning more about GA-4—and collecting the data you’ll need to make year-over-year comparisons.

What do the tech giants teach us? These marketplaces drive conversions for a reason, take 5 small steps to follow in their footsteps and support your local community with an eCommerce store that is rearing to thrive. Why deals don’t need to be about giving away, quick payments that your customers love, shipping or curbside pickup, and creating a loyalty scheme. An inspiring Lightning Talk for any eCommerce developer, maker, or merchant.

Block development can be challenging, but getting started with block development couldn’t be easier. In the past few years, WordPress contributors have created tools to simplify the process and make building blocks more accessible to those without advanced knowledge of JavaScript and React. Coupled with core components, native block supports, and a bit of guidance, every WordPress developer can add custom blocks to their repertoire. To demonstrate, let’s build a custom block from scratch in under 15 minutes. Start the clock!

Levering the WordPress CMS (self-managed) and Zapier, you can plan content and schedule them to be posted to your business social media pages.

Technology is so powerful. It unites us together as a society no matter our background or ability. Access to knowledge and information without barriers is crucial for equality and advancement. As designers, how can we do our part to make sure that what we are creating is accessible to as many people as possible?

In this talk, I’m going to speak about designing for accessibility – how we can design to WCAG standards, and create a beautiful inclusive web.

This talk is best suited for designers working in a layout tool such as Figma – but can also be useful for individuals doing site audits for design and accessibility.

We will learn:

• Color contrast ratios and tools to use
• Best practices for typography
• Accessibility checklist
• Transcripts, descriptors, and alt tags
• Dark Mode
• Accessibility-focused handoff

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

Tim Berners-Lee

Can games, learning theory, and psychology help us make our content more engaging? We’ll share real-world examples of how gamification can improve blog posts, online courses, landing pages, membership sites, and more. And we’ll highlight how the block editor makes creating interactive content easier than ever.

The business ecosystem around WordPress is multicultural and distributed. The strive for diversity, autonomy, and location independence that governs the open source world is what businesses have been successfully adopting so they can win clients all over the world and hire amazing talent. But why is it that even though global business speaks English, we’re so often struggling to understand what the other is trying to communicate? Remote companies operating in different regions, like the one I work for, often fall short when it comes to effectively implementing practices that seem to work equally well in the West and in the East. What drives success in the US and Canada seems likely not to deliver the same results in Central or South East Asia, or not even Europe. How do you navigate the minefield of culture-based misunderstanding?

In this talk, we’ll dig into some of the big invisible boundaries of global business and look at ways to help bridge them based on the experience of a former rookie who joined the Polyglots WordPress team consisting of 20 000 contributors speaking 200 languages on a whim, and at the same time found herself resource managing a team of 50 engineers and project managers across APAC, Americas, and EMEA.

Remember the famous “5 minutes installation” process for installing WordPress? Let’s see what WP-CLI can do in 5 minutes. And everything else that can happen in the terminal in 40 minutes. We might actually make WordPress instances more secure. Or just break it. This is not your usual presentation talk. This is a live terminal commanding; SSHing your WordPress administration and development; and releasing the Kraken or two.

WordPress is awesome, but everyone runs into issues now and then. Whether you own, maintain or build WordPress sites, troubleshooting is a skill set that will save you time and money.

In this session, you will:

• Learn about the types of WordPress issues you may encounter and how to diagnose them.
• Discover the step-by-step processes that will help you find the root cause of an issue.
• Learn what your next steps are once you know the source of an issue.
• Learn what information you should be provided when interacting with developers or your web host to help speed up the problem resolution process.

Suggestions and strategies on perfecting your website by using proper keyword/image ratios, proper navigation, proper WordPress plugins, speeding up website, keeping content interesting, simple, clean, proper use of color and how the emotional side of color has an effect on how people think, CALL TO ACTIONS and why they are important,  and many more tips and tricks.  You’ll leave with a great understanding on how to make simple improvements to your website to get clients to stay and interact!

The lines between the physical and digital worlds have converged, impacting the ways in which commerce operates. The shopping experiences that customers want and expect are dramatically different than they once were. Consumers expect to purchase whenever they want, from anywhere in the world, and in their preferred local payment methods. So how do merchants, and the agencies and developers that support them, adapt to a digital-first and borderless world?
This talk will explore how commerce has evolved, the trends we are witnessing in customer behaviors and expectations, and how merchants, and those who support them, can adapt to the new normal by meeting their customers where they are.

You’ve put in a lot of work researching, writing, and optimizing your blog posts for your target audience and keywords. Now is the time to capitalize on that effort by turning your blog posts into videos. Video is a huge opportunity to reach a new audience, get more visitors to your site, and slide into the top spot on Google’s search results.

In this session we will cover how to validate if a blog is worth converting to a video, video SEO research to tap into video content gaps, when to use Shorts/TikTok and when to use YouTube, how a video script is similar and different from a blog post, specific tools and gear to produce high-quality video on any budget and skill level, and how to publish & optimize videos to send traffic back to your blog.

With the new WordPress performance team that was formed in late 2021, WordPress now has a dedicated working group focused on tackling performance in the CMS. While performance enhancements are obviously nothing new and have been landing in WordPress core throughout the years, in order to truly make an impact at the massive scale of the WordPress ecosystem, it cannot stop there. WordPress core actually performs quite well out of the box, but with more than 60,000 plugins and themes available and endless combinations between them activated on individual sites, the situation looks a lot worse. We cannot realistically expect every plugin and theme developer to be familiar with all the latest performance best practices.

So despite that, how can we as a project improve performance at scale? While introducing solid WordPress core APIs and documenting and promoting them for third-party developers remains essential, it takes automation mechanisms centralized in WordPress core to orchestrate all active plugins and themes in a way that they operate well together – the block editor plays a central role for this as well. In addition to that, administrators need to have the tools to make educated decisions on plugins and themes to choose and monitor their performance. This session will take a closer look at the different pillars of enhancing performance at scale.

Evolve your eCommerce business from a single website to an omni-channel customer acquisition experience. Will cover which channels are best for different industries and how to keep commerce data connected between them.

Building websites and creating content doesn’t have to be hard. But with the web’s growing focus on end-user experience, we’ve started to lose sight of the first and most frequent users of the tools we create: the content creators that build with them.

Join Helen and Phil as we unpack the importance of editor-first content creation experiences, explore common anti-patterns that cultivate hostile editorial UX, and share practical tips and tricks for building intuitive and easy-to-use content creation tools in the block editor.

Building websites and creating content doesn’t have to be hard. But with the web’s growing focus on end-user experience, we’ve started to lose sight of the first and most frequent users of the tools we create: the content creators that build with them.

Join Helen and Phil as we unpack the importance of editor-first content creation experiences, explore common anti-patterns that cultivate hostile editorial UX, and share practical tips and tricks for building intuitive and easy-to-use content creation tools in the block editor.

Would you like to know the secrets to secure code? For starters, it is easy as long as you know what to look for. Follow me in this workshop at WordCamp USA where I show developers the steps to follow to perform security code reviews. I will list what the most common misused functions in WordPress are, common pitfalls and mistakes, and you will walk away with knowledge of how to spot security bugs, and how to code defensively.

Taking the time to create a brand style guide will help get your marketing team on the same page and will cut down on the time you spend editing content in the future.

In this workshop, Maddy will walk attendees through the basic structure of The Blogsmith Style Guide, which has helped her scale her writing agency to a team of 25+. This session will focus on creating guidelines that are actionable to collaborators, and sharing detailed rules to follow for consistency. Working through a provided template, you’ll leave with the foundation for your own brand style guide.

Are you curious about Block Themes and how they are made? This Workshop will provide you with tangible experience with an entirely new way to think about how WordPress websites are designed.

In this hands-on workshop, you will learn about the files used in a block theme and how to create them. At the end of the workshop, you will have a simple but fully functional theme. We’ll look at theme.json, Templates, Template Parts, and more as we build a simple Block Theme that can be developed further after the conclusion of the workshop.

Whether you are a seasoned theme developer, a designer, or a WordPress enthusiast that would like to build a theme in a guided environment this workshop will get you started.

This lightning talk will walk through the efficiencies of Google Tag Manager and how it helps to improve internal processes regarding data and event tracking for WordPress websites. We will cover best practices when it comes to setting up a Google Tag Manager container along with some of the base tracking items that every website should include in order to gain insightful data from Google Analytics. This would include items like tracking Universal and GA4 analytics, click tracking, and form tracking among others. We will also go into the new Google Analytics 4 requirements for websites in 2023 and how Google Tag Manager allows users to track events all in one platform without the need for heavy development coding. Finally, we will touch on the overall benefits of the platform including its flexibility, faster site loading times, and experimentation opportunities.

When designing WordPress themes, one of the biggest challenges stems from a core component of WordPress itself: the ability for site owners to change, modify, and build new content themselves. This simple yet powerful capability was a driving force behind the adoption and popularity of WordPress, but theme designers are faced with a difficult task: designing for content and functionality that doesn’t yet exist.

As content and functionality become even more modular thanks to advances like the block editor, and as we look ahead to the adoption of Full Site Editing, theme designers will have to accommodate even more flexible ways of visualizing and presenting the information. How do we anticipate and accommodate the needs of a constantly evolving website while providing visual solutions that are clean, thoughtful, and consistent?

We will walk through the entire design thinking process as it relates to themes, and you’ll leave with a thorough checklist of steps and tools for designing themes that support WordPress core functionality, custom templates and content, common plugins, and an array of standard and custom Gutenberg blocks. This process is useful both for custom theme builds, and designing themes for sale as a product.