Sessions

Open Discussion About WordPress

I love Jetpack. You might not be a fan. So let’s open up the entire room and discuss our difference. You may just convince me why I’m wrong. I may convince you that’s I’m right! Everyone is invited. We’ll be talking about themes and plugins. We’ll open the floor up for questions, and the entire room can raise their hand and put in their two cents. This is going to be fun!

Opening Remarks

WordPress Scaling and Security

Mike and Chris from Quadshot Software have deployed sites that got over 10 million page views a month. Recently one site got 30 million in an hour. A customer sold 2500 tickets in 30 minutes using OpenTickets on WooCommerce.

Learn how to securely scale WordPress and WooCommerce to handle massive traffic and still sleep at night.

How to Get Killer Publicity For Free

Have you noticed that there are a LOT of blogs out there? All of them want the same basic thing – readers. Paid traffic can be great, and SEO is vital, but there’s nothing quite as effective as a direct referral from somebody who doesn’t even know you. It’s fairly simple to start making connections with other bloggers, and with a little bit of knowhow, those connections will translate into free advertising and endorsements for your blog that will make your traffic skyrocket. Once we cover the basics of how to network effectively, we’ll get into some tips and tricks to get the most mileage out of promotions, including posts on your blog and promos that other bloggers are doing for you. Learn how a little bit of effort can yield huge results.

Introducing WordPress Multitenancy

Did you know that running multiple instances of WordPress on a single server doesn’t actually require multiple instances of the codebase? In fact, as of WordPress 3.9, you don’t even need multiple instances of a plugin or a theme! Multitenancy can eliminate massive maintenance overhead in the right situations, think server-wide, near-instant updates that let you stay secure without keeping up with multiple sites. And that’s just the beginning of how it can help. In this session, I’ll show you how multitenancy can save time and energy while empowering your users. It’s simple, but powerful.

Keynote

Registration & Coffee Day Two

Registration & Coffee

Closing Remarks

Lunch

WordPress Upgrades: Ready, Set, Go!

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.

Take Control of Search Optimization with WP SEO by Yoast

It’s not enough to just create great content on WordPress. You want people to find your posts in search engines. But how exactly do you control the metadata that Google consumes before sending readers your way? You need to use WP SEO by Yoast. Widely seen as the top plugin for optimizing WordPress web sites, WP SEO by Yoast goes deep and broad with features that include a page edit tool. Mari Kane will show you how to used that page tool, as well as other features of Yoast that help optimize your site for search engines.

Extending the WordPress REST API

The WordPress REST API is one of the most exciting new features of WordPress, but it is more than just the default routes and endpoints that it adds automatically to your site. It is also an awesome tool for creating your own RESTful API. We will look at how powerful this tool is, look at some practical examples of extending the REST API and learn how to create custom routes and endpoints. When you leave this talk, you’ll be prepared to create your own custom APIs, the WordPress way.

WordPress for Lazy People

What are some of the ways to quickly get a WordPress site up and running with a minimal amount of effort? An over view of page builders and themes as well as the latest cutting edge software to help even the unmotivated get a high quality WordPress Site up and running. Also a tongue and cheek humorous presentation that reveals the pitfalls of shortcuts and the final assessment of what it takes to get a WP based site live.

What I Learned in 14 Years About Blogging

Ive been blogging for over 14 years now. Ive seen a lot of things go on, and experienced failure and success. Ive seen a lot of bloggers, even ones that I had come to know as friends, just give up. However, even after 14 years, I love blogging. I want to share with you my tips that I learned throughout my long blogging journey well, the abridged edition at least. 😉 I hope that with my own experience, you will be able to find it useful in what to look out for, what to avoid, and what you probably should be doing. Whether you’re a new blogger, or have been blogging between 1-5 years, hopefully my mistakes and my discoveries will help you rock out your blog for decades to come.

Developing WordPress Sites Using The Genesis Framework

My presentation will cover a few examples of how to use the Genesis Framework to develop custom themes. Time permitting I plan to discuss the following… – Some of these sub-topics will include how to use the different hooks and filters specific to Genesis. – How to set up child themes with Genesis. – Tips for building on top of the Sample theme to create something entirely custom – Awesome Genesis specific plugins to speed up development

Corporate Blogging Secrets, Strategies and Horror Stories

Corporate blogging and content marketing are experiencing an unprecedented boom, and smart companies realize blogs are an incredibly powerful tool to connect, communicate and persuade. In this session, we’ll explore how to navigate difficult corporate cultures, create a blog strategy and voice from scratch, exploit SEO opportunities and generate brilliance while keeping the bean counters happy.

Trust: Your Most Valuable Asset

Trust is important in any relationship and absolutely critical in a work-for-hire one. Trust takes a long time to earn and can be broken in a split second. Steve will examine this and discuss techniques for building trust, maintaining trust and what to do when trust is lost.

The Plugins That Can Help Your Business Sink or Swim

As a Small Business owner, you have taken the first step and decided that WordPress is the engine for your online business. But customizing your business website can be difficult – especially if you don’t know which are the right plugins to use to maximum effect. This presentation will help you find what types of plugins to use for which type of business, and how to customize them.

Sell All The Things with WooCommerce

The flexibility of WooCommerce allows you to sell many different types of products. In this session, Michael Tieso will go into detail and demo the different product types you can use with WooCommerce such as subscriptions, memberships, and bookable products all with the power of using WordPress and WooCommerce.

If You Build It (Right), They Will Come – Creating truly valuable WordPress products and services

Solutions that solve real world problems start with an idea; but not just any idea, a good one. How you build and iterate upon that idea is what ultimately determines its success or failure. WordPress is an excellent platform for entrepreneurs. It powers close to 25% of the Internet, is flexible, and has a bright future. Thus, it serves as an excellent springboard to launch new, exciting, and profitable solutions. Whether it be in themes, plugins, or services, there’s plenty of room for innovation and disruption. Learn how you can take advantage of WordPress’s popularity and flexibility to enter the market faster, with less investment, and more opportunity. The session examines our unique industry and how you can build a successful business creating solutions for WordPress. We will review real world success stories, how to take advantage of your strengths and weaknesses, and the basics of launching a successful product or service in the WordPress space.

Lunch

Tips & Tools for Building Your Community with WordPress

A community is a group of people sharing common characteristics or common interests. WordPress is the perfect platform for building an online community because of the many tools and services available for it.

There are many reasons to build your community with WordPress including supporting your sales and eCommerce functions, supporting your client base and interacting with your active followers.

In this panel discussion, Andrew DiMino (CarbSmart.com), Billie Hillier (BillieHillier.com) and Tamara Floyd (NaturalHairRules.com) discuss tips, techniques and tools they use to grow, manage, and support their online communities built on WordPress. Topics will include:

List Building: The most valuable part of your WordPress business is your list and we will show you how to list build from your community and how to convert your list to readers, customers, and clients.

Commenting: Tips and tricks for managing quality discussions with comments.

Newsletters: What do you do with that awesome email list your building? Communicate with your community with scheduled newsletters.

Converting Sales: Whether you’re selling products, information, or services, managing an active community can help you sell to your community.

Freelancer Survival School

Finding success as a professional freelancer can be a difficult and challenging journey! You have to know the right stuff and have the proper skills in order to survive in the freelancing economy.

James Dalman will share critical strategies so that you’ll be able to survive – and even thrive – in your own freelancing career. Get ready for a no holds barred, honest session that will hit you where it hurts. All lessons are based on 27 years of experience as a professional freelancer and are applicable no matter where you’re at in your journey.

Q & A time at the end of the session. Eating grasshoppers during the session is optional.

Meeting Your Customers Where They Are At

This WordCamp Presentation is designed for WordPress product developers, or site admins who provide support to their visitors. Support is the best way to get to know your customers better and to learn from their experiences and get educated and informed feedback on your product. But in order to do that well, you need to provide several easy and convenient ways for your users to interact with you.

Why You DON’T Need to Learn HTML or CSS

My talk will be based around my story of building a successful web design business without knowing any HTML or CSS… I literally know how to make things italic and bold… that’s it. I’ll be showcasing some of my websites and giving solutions for businesses and individuals for creating and editing their own websites. I’ll also touch on Visual Composer and how I’ve built my business around it.

Unleashing WordPress: Make Your Dream a Reality

For the past year, I’ve been building and collecting a variety of use-case scenarios from store owners, startups, and entrepreneurs who want to use WordPress and WooCommerce, but have no idea where to start, or are unsure if WordPress is even a viable platform for them. The simple answer? Yes – you can do _anything_ with WordPress, and I’ll share the secrets to get started. Built and refined over four WordCamps and literally thousands of user interactions and sites, in my talk I’ll briefly cover what makes WordPress tick to establish a base understanding of best practices, then immediately dive into a huge range of solutions – all of them publicly accessible as demo sites with instructions to replicate. From simple portfolios to complex, membership-based eCommerce storefronts (and even fully-operational Role Playing Games!), anything is possible in WordPress with the right approach and mentality… So bring your notepad, bring your questions, and let’s see just what we can cook up. Some specific examples (some may be cut due to time or relevance): – Building a simple storefront – Selling and distributing your digital content – Setting up a Podcast site with premium memberships and forums – Setting up a tiered membership e-Learning platform with badges, awards, and forums – Creating a text-based, multi-player RPG system based off of custom d6 and d20 pen & paper rule sets – Creating extensive databases in WordPress (without using an external call) – Creating fast web apps to simplify daily activities As a special note, in the Q&A period I would LOVE for the audience to throw out their own ideas and aspirations – with a recommendation or different perspective, hopefully we can start you down the right path. I’m not afraid to be stumped, so bring your best!

Building Web Tools for Social Good

WordPress is a really powerful platform and the fact that it is so accessible makes it a perfect fit for nonprofit and social good organizations. While a lot of social good organizations already use WordPress for their website, there are some pretty interesting new tools emerging that are built specifically for managing your organization. From fundraising tools to donor management; multilingual tools and geotargeted content, there’s a lot you might be missing out on! In this talk we’ll take a deep dive and look at why some large organizations are jumping on the WordPress bandwagon!

Grandchild Themes for Framework Child Themes

A walkthrough of building a grandchild theme for a Genesis child theme. But surprise, it’s a trick! We’ll really be writing a plugin to add the functionality and design to a child theme that keeps child theme changes safe. And if you hate the changes, simply deactivate. This talk might be a gateway to plugin writing.

Rocking SEO for WP

If you build a website, will they come? Or should you probably optimize it for search engines to start getting traffic? WordPress comes with a ton of great built-ins for handling the basics to search indexing, but we’ll go through some additional tips and tricks to make sure you’re doing it just right.

Jetpack: The Swiss Army Knife of Plugins

Jetpack now has more than 30 modules that cover an extremely wide array of useful features and functionality. In my talk I will cover as many as I can possibly cover in 45 minutes.

Complex Registration Forms

Nonprofits take registration forms for all kinds of things from fundraisers to summer camps (and small businesses can have registration needs too!). Gravity Forms, with addons and plugins can help you create complex registration forms, with early & late payments, questions that display only when certain boxes are ticked, signatures for releases, pretty PDFs of the submission created and emailed to a registrar, CSV (Excel-readable) exports of the registrations emailed to anyone automatically, and more! I will outline the possibilities for what can be done with WP to create complex registration forms, with screenshots from client forms (who have given permission, of course).

How to Build Online Courses Using WordPress

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. The session will include both the basics How-to of creating courses with the business acumen. From the technical “know-how” of creating online courses, to the business information on possibilities and what to create, this session will provide the details to help create a successful site. Offline, downloadable guides will be available to continue the information.

Senior-Friendly Design

An American turns 50 every 7 seconds. Those aged 50 and older represent 45% of the U.S. population. One-third of the internet users in the U.S., are adults aged 50+ representing the Web‰Ûªs largest constituency. WordPress sites must be designed with this in mind. You will learn how to meet seniors‰Ûª needs from one of their own.

You have two hands

Community – WordPress doesn’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.

Best Friend & Worst Enemy: WordPress Multisite

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.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.

Actions and Filters

Hooks are one thing which intermediate programmers struggle with the most. Mastering actions and filters will elevate intermediate developers to advanced ones. However, much of the documentation about hooks are hard to understand, and the standard examples are insufficient. I’m a big fan of putting a different spin on lectures and using analogies which no one else has in order to make things more understandable. I explain the difference between the two by drawing a parallel to a shopping trip. Filters are when my wife calls me to ask me to pick something new up from the store I’m going to; actions are when she asks me to go to a completely different store. I then go into how to use hooks from a developer side – add_action and add_filter – as well as how to use them from a “builder” side – apply_filters and do_action.