Sessions

The internet is the single most effective information sharing tool in all of history. We can build on the work and progress of others in a completely unprecedented way. The implications for the progress of humanity are both serious and exciting!
But it’s also in danger. Find out why Aaron thinks open systems and the open web will steer our future or how the lack of them will ruin it.

If you are new to WordPress or have just been using it “out of the box,” you may want to learn about some easy ways to add useful functionality to your website using popular WordPress Plugins. This talk will briefly review what plugins are, and how to select and install them. Tara will share her “go to” plugins for adding things like forms, events, and image galleries to your WordPress site, as well as go over plugins which will help your website perform better.

This talk is designed for WordPress Beginners.

This talk will cover how JavaScript has been used with WordPress in the past, and how it will be used going forward. Instead of proposing one single method or framework to use when coding JavaScript, we will go through a few different combinations you’ll see in the wild in both older and more forward-looking WordPress plugins. Examples will cover AJAX with jQuery, ES6, the Heartbeat API, REACT, and Gutenberg blocks.

After this talk, attendees should feel more comfortable opening up any JS file they come across in the WordPress world and knowing a bit more about how to work with the various frameworks and patterns in use.

WordPress is probably the easiest CMS you can develop for. Its simplest plugins consist of a single function and some header data, and anyone with determination and a grasp of programming basics can create their own.

But there’s a gap between mastering technical essentials and acquiring a degree of wisdom about what makes for a successful plugin or theme. This talk offers advice to developers about pitfalls to avoid and ways they can create better plugins or themes.

You missed the boat on Gutenberg. Either you believed its release would never actually happen, you thought there would be time to learn about it once it was out (and didn’t), or you didn’t really pay attention to what Gutenberg was and how it would impact you and your work until it was released this past December. Now you’re worried because you feel behind professionally and you’re not sure how to fill the gaps in your Gutenberg knowledge. Most importantly, you think: are you too behind to catch up? Do you need to find a different career? A different content management system?

The short answer is: no. Gutenberg is here to stay and, just like anything else, you can learn what you need to learn in order to continue your work with WordPress. We’ll talk about creating your own personal curriculum to “learn Gutenberg” by working through how to identify the gaps in our own knowledge and then how to identify resources to fill those gaps. In doing so, we’ll cover the basics of what Gutenberg is and how incorporating its existence into our workflows will impact different types of experts including content managers, project managers, designers, and developers.

As a case study, we’ll look at how I (a developer) “caught up” on Gutenberg after a 2018 where I didn’t have the time to focus on the ever-changing landscape of the Gutenberg project until right around its release.

All of the data for your WordPress site is stored in the database. We’ll look at what this means and how this information is organized. Understanding the WordPress database has allowed me to perform emergency maintenance on sites and made me a better developer. Join me for this light-hearted romp through the WordPress database (no prior database experience necessary).

How does a front-end developer that doesn’t write React create custom Gutenberg blocks to meet unique needs? There are plugins that offer extra out-of-the-box components, but for the greatest customization, we’ll focus on leveraging Advanced Custom Fields 5.8 (currently in beta) in a custom theme.

When it comes to search results, sometimes the competition against your website is in the millions, and sometimes earning the top spot is downright impossible. Learn how to make your posts stand out, especially with structured data, even if you can’t gain that coveted number one position.

With much fanfare React.js has overtaken the post editor, and this is just the beginning. As we enter phase two of the Gutenberg project, we find that change has begun for widgets and even menus. While the thought of building our own editor blocks from scratch may be too daunting for many of us to want to undertake, WordPress delivers React to us in a way that allows us to add our own flavor to existing blocks. React is designed with modular units for easy reuse, and in this talk we’ll review key components of blocks and different ways to enhance or redefine blocks using the set of filters available in the WordPress namespace.

Whether you’ve been blogging for a decade, or you’re just starting out… creating great content for brands is one of the best ways to make money. Throughout this session, you’ll discover ways to use your own skill-sets to bring value to brands, regardless of what your own personal following might be! You are able to provide value whether your content lives on your own platforms, the brand’s platforms, or both; and it’s your job to get creative with how you package your value. My goal is to answer the following questions…

What services should I offer?
Chances are that your blogging experience has turned you into a one-stop-shop media company! And there are many ways that you can bundle those skills into services that companies are willing to pay for. We will discuss a variety of specific and marketable services as well as ways to figure out which services will be the best fit for you personally.

How can I market those services?
Once you have a clear idea of what you’d like to provide to brands, you need to convince them that you are the best person for the job! The good news? There are endless ways to market your services, and we will dive into various strategies that you can start implementing right away. The bad news? They all take time, effort, and consistency. There are clear paths to success, but there aren’t any shortcuts.

Who should I reach out to?
This part of the process is so crucial! After putting in so much time and effort into the services and the marketing strategy, we are just ready to throw it out into the world and see what happens. Unfortunately, if you don’t have a massive following already, this method won’t get you very far. Instead, we want to be strategic about finding new direct contacts that are a great fit for what we are offering. Again, this is time-consuming (and oftentimes brain-numbing), but it works!

The beauty of this process is that any blogger can follow it and find a new source of income. Once we start thinking of ourselves as mini media companies, a whole new world opens up!

The number one goal of any nonprofit website is to help the organization meet its mission. Whether it’s driving donations to help bring access to clean water or recruiting volunteers to build new homes and restore playgrounds, a nonprofit’s website can greatly help with this. This session goes into how to use WordPress to drive and collect donations and recruit volunteers as well as tips and tools on how to maintain a healthy WordPress website over the long-term.

When building a custom theme, we pay a lot of attention to how everything looks on the frontend — but what about in the editor? This talk will explore how to make sure what your users see in the backend matches up to what visitors will see in the frontend.

WordPress has been around for over 15 years. During that time the thinking about templating and themes has evolved as WordPress has grown. This talk will cover the various approaches around getting data from WordPresss to rendering a beautifully structured webpage. From templating tags to templating engines like Twig, what are the pros and cons of these different approaches? My thinking on templating has certainly changed over the years and this talk hopes to open your eyes to new possibilities to templating and WordPress.

Routine maintenance is crucial for keeping any WordPress site healthy. Whether your a site owner, web designer/developer or maintenance professional, this talk will be applicable for you. Will explore the vast world of WordPress maintenance. From “Why maintenance is necessary”, “How WordPress got here” and “Tips for keeping maintenance lean”.

All too often, we let our eyes get too big for our stomachs — technologically. We over buy, over plan, over work, and then things fall apart. In this talk, you’ll understand the advantages to starting small, growing slowly, and how this can better prime you for success.

Online Courses are becoming increasingly popular and more people are looking for the right tools to start teaching. It turns out that you can build and sell online courses quickly, affordably, and with little custom code using WordPress, WooCommerce, and LearnDash. In this session, you’ll learn how.

What does it mean to be an “intermediate developer”? Not a senior, not a beginner, but someone in the middle, at the top of the bell curve.

Let’s look at what it means to move beyond being a beginner. Explore some of the skills that help you move up the career ladder. There won’t be much code, but that doesn’t mean this won’t be a technical talk.

Having little experience with WordPress or Web Development, a need to manage data online brought me to WordPress. With a few key plugins, WordPress becomes an amazing information management tool. This presentation will demonstrate how a real life need to manage associated data was modeled in WordPress. Presentation topics will highlight techniques for capture of associated data, how to present data on the Front End, and some valuable plugins to simplify some setup tasks. Techniques for using Custom Post Types and the Advanced Custom Fields plugin will be highlighted, along with how to display associated data on the Front end of an application.