Sessions

WordPress for Big Media Organizations

Presented in Panel.

How do media companies big and small make the most of WordPress? In this panel session, we’ll discuss the unique opportunities and challenges of using WordPress for media outlets, and also highlight some resources that could benefit your next media project.

 

Panelist:

Brian James Kirk, Cofounder of Technical.ly and Director of Business Development
Neil McGinness (Automattic)
Paul Wright (Comcast), EveryBlock
Adam Schweigert (remote via Skype), Director of Technology at the Investigative News Network and Founder of Media Toybox
Brad Williams, Co-Founder of WebDevStudios

Moderator:

Davis Shaver, technology strategy at Digital First Media and creator of Onward State

WordPress Security

Presented by Tony Perez in Power User.

The key to website security is awareness, is what will be achieved in this talk. Getting down to the basics and sharing insight that very few can share through the experiences we have ascertained at Sucuri. The latest threats and trends will be shared, and of course, some good, hardening takeaways and recommendations.

How to Tweak Your Site Without Breaking It: Custom CSS & Intro to Child Theming

Presented by Lisa Yoder in User.

Ever wonder how to make that column just a little bit wider or change a font? Are you totally overwhelmed by files upon files of PHP? There are some simple and effective ways to tweak the design of a site without breaking anything. We’ll cover ways to add custom CSS and the whys and hows of a basic child theme.

How to Be a Designer that Developers Love

Presented by Sal Ferrarello in Designer.

As a developer, there are designers I love to work with and there are other designers.  The designers I love to work with don’t just design things that are beautiful, they design beautiful things that translate well into code.  By designing with these techniques you can reduce your development time & cost, improve the code quality of your theme, and become the designer developers want to work with.

Working From Home

Presented in Panel.

Many previous WordCamps have had panel discussions with variations on “how to start a WordPress business” or “how to run a distributed company”. At WordCamp Philly this year, we wanted to try a little something different, something that comes at these issues from the other side, namely: how can you best be a part of a distributed company? We’ve heard from CEOs, founders and product-makers and have gotten a lot of good input on how to stay sane while running a WordPress business. Let’s help each other stay sane when working for those sorts of people.

We’re hoping to talk about

  • time management
  • keeping up communication with your teammates
  • maintaining proper work/life balance
  • advantages and disadvantages of working from home
  • tax implications
  • making the leap from a traditional office environment

…and any other issues that our speakers bring to the table.

This panel will include: Anthony Bubel (@anthonybubel), Tom Rose (@slurve), Liz Lockard (@lizlockard), Kelly Maguire (@kellbot), David Dashifen Kees (@dashifen), Andy Stratton (@theandystratton) and moderated by Doug Stewart (@zamoose).

KEYNOTE

Presented by Helen Hou-Sandí in Designer, Developer, Power User, User.

How I convinced my boss to let me work on WordPress full-time

Contributing to WordPress does more than help the software and the community – it can make you and even your company better. I’ll talk about how we at 10up manage to donate back to the software that powers our business, and how anybody (not just developers or businesses) can benefit from giving back in any number of ways.

Teaching a Designer to Use GitHub

Presented by Jeremy Pry, Liam Dempsey in Designer.

As a tag-team of developer and designer, Jeremy Pry and Liam Dempsey will talk through how designers can embrace version control to better manage their WordPress code. The talk will cover not only a bit of “how to get started” but also a discussion of work flow.

Advanced Topics in WordPress Development

Presented by Andrew Nacin in Developer.

An Introduction to wp.media

Presented by Eric Andrew Lewis in Developer.

One of my favorite WordPress releases is 3.5, when Daryl Koopersmith banged out umpteen lines of JS to gives us the new Media experience. It was a game-changer for the admin interface experience, and will echo in WP eternity. A utilitarian fill-out-form-and-submit-page will (probably) never go away. But Javascript (with an MV* framework) is key to building user interfaces to deal with complex data in user friendly ways. Let’s go there.

The Users We Forget About

Presented by Aaron Jorbin in Developer.

We create applications for our users. If there are no users, there generally isn’t a passion to create. Once your start actually have users, it’s easy to forget that our users come in many forms. They have different skills, different styles, and different abilities. They use our sites in many different ways. Let’s discuss the way that users use our site and remember the users we forget.

Choosing a WordPress Host

Presented by Jeff Matson in Power User.

Choosing a WordPress host can be a challenge in itself. With millions of hosts out there and new ones appearing every day, users from novice to advance can often be confused in which host to choose from. In this session, Jeff will be discussing the best methods in find a host that appropriately suits your needs.

You won’t believe this one weird trick to blogging success: keep writing good stuff

Presented by Vicki Boykis in User.

There are a couple key disrupting forces at work in new media: shorter attention spans, discussions now going on in social media instead of comment sections, and large-scale new-media efforts monopolizing traffic with short, sensational bursts. (Buzzfeed, Upworthy, etc.) This session is about how you should ignore all of that and just still focus on creating great content. Rough outline: 1) Blogging landscape history 2) Blogging today 3) Blogging tomorrow 4) Why you have to continue to create good content 5) What’s good content?

Congratulations! You’re having a WordPress Website!

Presented by Joe Rozsa in User.

Many new users get frustrated when they first start using WordPress because they’ve either not been told or shown how to do various things. When I give presentations, I like to draw parallels with real-life situations. So this session would take on a spin of having a new baby and all the things that new parents need to learn and/or figure out. I’ll walk new users through the process of all the things new “parents” will need for their WordPress site.

Optimizing WordPress Performance: PageSpeed and Load Times

Presented by Doug Yuen in Power User.

What does a slow website truly cost? Site speed is a ranking factor in Google, and for good reason. Visitors have a short attention span, and will quickly leave a slow website, especially on mobile. I’ll discuss essential tools and techniques for measuring and improving your page load times and PageSpeed score. I’ll cover topics such as caching, image optimization, and plugin performance.

WordPress for non-profits: For when your Operations Manager is also your Webmaster

Presented by Alx Block in User.

Building a great web presence is as much about making your work easier as it is engaging the next generation of donors. This introduction to WordPress for your non-profit will cover the following fundamentals: Plugins for accepting donations online, syncing with your donor database, building an email marketing list, finding the right theme, and building a primary marketing hub for your cause. This presentation is geared towards any non-profit employee who has ever worked on a website and the consultants who support them.

Don’t Just Build Pretty Websites — UX in the Real World

Presented by Sonja Leix in Designer.

Everybody’s talking about User Experience, but how can you release your inner UX mojo today to improve the usability and experience of your website? Time to share some practical, real-world examples and tips to boost your WordPress design skills. Don’t just build pretty websites, make smart design decisions and add UX best practices to your workflow. Ask smart questions like: Do I really need a large slider on my homepage? Are there clear nav menus and Calls-to-Action to guide my visitors? How does my site displays on other devices? A good UX job continues after launch. Use mad tools to analyze and improve your UX Design.

How I Spent the last 5 years playing with WordPress and Building PewResearch.org

Presented by Russell Heimlich in User.

You can do some pretty crazy things with WordPress. This talk will cover why we chose WordPress and showcase some of the custom functionality we built to make PewResearch.org and it’s sibling sites work. This talk aims to inspire the audience with what’s possible using WordPress.

Moonlighting With WordPress

Presented by Erica Sterling in Power User.

Moonlighting is having a second job in addition to one’s regular employment. It our case our second job will be a WordPress freelance business. This presentation will discuss how to start or maintain creating WordPress sites for clients by customizing WordPress themes while keeping your full-time job.

From Zero to WordPress Hero

Presented by Ben Lobaugh in User.

Do you love WordPress and are interested in getting involved with the community but bewildered at how to “get in”? Wonder no more! In this session I will walk you through freely available resources to help you get involved in any aspect of the community that interests you and take you from an unknown zero to a WordPress hero! This session will be geared towards anyone and is therefore difficult to session track. You decide 🙂

Preventive Development and Maintenance

Presented by Rami Abraham in Power User.

This talk will focus on preventive development and maintenance practices when developing WordPress sites, as well as helpful maintenance tips when many sites are under your care. This will cover a range of topics, from version control and backups, usage of project management tools, to using unique namespaces and classes when writing code. I will make several attempts at humor, which will likely fail.

Super-Charged Themes with a Template Language

Presented by Jared Novack in Designer.

Twig, the most popular PHP template language, unlocks new possibilities for theme designers. In this session, I’ll introduce the benefits of working with Twig and some of the coolest features that empower template developers entirely new concepts to manipulate their WordPress themes. I’ll provide specific examples in how major media companies use WordPress and Twig to make sustainable themes that can live-on and be extended for years to come.

Strawberry Custom Fields Forever

Presented by Matt Banks in Developer.

Learn how to leverage the power of WordPress custom meta boxes and fields to better organize your site, make it easier to update content, and manage your data more efficiently. We’ll cover how to set everything up in code using native WordPress functions, plugins that will speed up the process, as well as ways to display all the data on your website. We’ll also touch on the new Metadata API being developed as a feature plugin in WordPress Core to see what’s coming in the future.

It Doesn’t End at Ship: Why You Should Give Great Support

Presented by Elizabeth Urello, Karen Arnold, Deborah Beckett in Power User.

So you’ve had a plugin or theme accepted to the WordPress repository. Awesome! It doesn’t stop there. We will discuss why great support matters and give 5 simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing your time spent.

Easier, More Secure Deploys with Docker and Dokku

Presented by Dave Ross in Developer.

Isolate sites in their own secure containers. Deploy code with a simple “git push”. Dokku combines the ease of Heroku with the low cost of a VPS and the power of Docker, and developers can start using it today without a lot of sysadmin experience. Learn how to set up a Dokku server in minutes, then deploy WordPress sites with ease.

Automating Theme Development with Gulp, Yeoman, and Friends

Presented by Zoe Rooney in Developer.

The future is now, with tools popping up left and right to take over the grunt work of theme development! This session introduces developers to some of the most useful task runners and other tools, showing how Sass, Grunt, Gulp, and Yeoman can help handle some of the tasks that take away from time spent actually coding. Attendees will leave understanding when and why they’d want to use these tools in a WordPress theme-specific context, and how they play together in a real-life workflow.

Your Ultimate WordPress Website Checklist

Presented by Courtney Robertson in User.

Getting the graphics and content into your website are just the beginning. There are a lot of other things to set up and configure for your site to really get found and work as it should. Get an overview of what else you need to do: *Accessibility *Measuring your traffic *What is schema code or rich snippets? Why and how can you implement it? *Determining how links to your site look and work when previewed on social media sites *Does your site look good on mobile? Do your links help your mobile visitors? *Performance, Speed, Backup, & Security

Responsive Images and Other Fun Code for RWD in WordPress

Presented by Joe Casabona in Designer.

I will go over some of the core content from my book, Responsive Design with WordPress, which teaches you how to leverage WordPress to get the most out of responsive design. I will be focusing on some code heavy stuff, including how WordPress handles images, RESS, and more.

Make your clients happy with modular themes

Presented by Chris Van Patten in Developer.

Ever handed over a site to a client, only to return a month later and find it barely recognizable? Tired of calls asking you to add a link or replace a logo? Stop those calls—and protect your design—by using core WordPress features (and a few select plugins) to create a modular theme anyone can edit. You’ll also learn how to document these features within WordPress, so help is always at hand for forgetful clients.

BuddyPress: An Enterprise Solution

Presented by Tim McKenna in Power User.

WordPress is a business solution and BuddyPress can offer business a unique experience for their customers, their employees and their members. Learn how WordPress can work for enterprise level clients and view a case study of how its working for family physicians in Pennsylvania.

CSS Preprocessors + WordPress

Presented by Tracy Rotton in Designer.

Subtitle: Learn how to write CSS in a whole new way Heard about CSS preprocessors but don’t know what the fuss is about? Think you can’t use them with WordPress? Think again! This session will go through the highlights of using CSS preprocessors (we’ll mostly focus on Sass), their awesome features, and how to integrate them into your WordPress theming workflow

6 Ways to Up Your Theme Game

Presented by Tracy Levesque in Designer.

Are you a front-end designer who searches the free WordPress theme directory, finds something similar to the design you’re looking for and then modifies it to suit your needs? A lot of WordPress theme designers start off this way, but soon it’ll be time to take it to the next level. This presentation will give you 6 ways to boost your WordPress theme building skills.

June 7-8th, 2014

WordCamp Philly 2014 is over. Check out the next edition!