WordPress for Beginners
This intro session is geared towards bloggers, writers, and users who are new to WordPress. We’ll cover dashboard customizations, content management (posts, pages, etc), media (images, videos, and files), link management, and comments & discussions. We’ll also cover basic plugin and theme installation and recommendations. If you are new to WordPress, or just want to learn more about the webs most popular publishing platform, this is the session for you!
Scaling & Optimizing WordPress
Everyone wants to get something out of nothing, and those that have something often want to get more out of it as well. Scaling is key to growth on the web as well as preventing downtime from unexpected traffic spikes.
In this session Pete Mall and Matt Martz will discuss techniques for optimizing, planning for scaling, and increasing performance in your WordPress hosting environment. They will cover shared hosting up to large multi server environments.
UI Design for Themes and Plugins
User interface design is both a science and an art. The developers and designers who volunteer to work on WordPress put a lot of thought into the approach. We’ll discuss how the WordPress UI can influence your theme and plugin UI designs.
eCommerce & WordPress
Have you wanted to sell your products using WordPress but just not quite sure where to start? Never fear – Shayne will walk you through the process and talk about the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress and cover features and capabilities of each. He will then do a live demonstration of each plugin showing you how to configure and add products, payment gateways, etc followed by some Q&A. By the time you leave the session you’ll be ready to start your own store using WordPress!
Speed Dating – why a faster website is your biggest advantage in SEO
Speed matters when it comes to blogs and websites. Search engines and visitors spend more time on fast sites. This session will review why speed is important, provide bloggers with easy, actionable ways to make their sites blazing fast, and provide an introduction to basic industry terminology. Not sure what SEO, SEM, CPC all mean? This session will leave you familiar with all the basics to ensure a fast and profitable site.
Take-aways:
1. An understanding of why website speed matters
2. Easy ways to make your blog twice as fast
3. Introduction to basic industry terminology to ensure a fast and profitable blog
Customizing the WP Admin for fun and profit
Customizing the WordPress admin table found on almost every admin screen is fun and easy! Attend Jeffrey Zinn’s hooks and filters session as a primer, and directly after we’ll put those skills to use by adding custom columns, displaying custom data, making them sortable, adding filters, and adding a ‘Quick Edit’ field.
Power Content Panel
Three experienced bloggers talk about selecting, creating, and managing the content for your blog. Aaron Hockley, John Lynn, and Gregory Taylor will address a lightweight content writing system; choosing topics and feeding the content beast; and knowing your goals, audience, and keywords. After their mini-presentations, we’ll open up for questions and discussion around the sometimes-challenging topic of effective content production for a blog.
Hooks and Filters: WordPress Magic
Hooks and filters are two weapons that make WordPress such a great and extensible platform. Unfortunately they are often underused, so I’d like to spread the word for the betterment of the WordPress programmer community as a whole. The topic will cover definitions of hooks/actions and filters, how to use them and why to use them.
Core Plugability vs Function dot PHP
Whats the difference between the two, why should you put functions in a plugin and/or why should you put functions in a theme.
Building an App theme
WordPress is a powerful tool for building websites and powering blogs but it is also a wonderful framework for building full applications. Have you ever wanted to build your own Reddit clone, job board, information directory or a members-only website? Creating an “app theme” with specific styling and functionality can help you achieve these kinds of web apps quickly without reinventing the wheel! WordPress has your back!
Building a Responsive and Progressively Enhanced Theme
Of course you want to use the latest responsive and adaptive design techniques, HTML5, CSS3, SVG, ARIA and other hotness in your WordPress theme, but there’s, well, IE6. Learn techniques for taking advantage of all the latest modern browsers have to offer without breaking your theme for users with out-of-date browsers. We’ll cover setting up a baseline that will work for just about any device, browser or operating system out there and then progressively enhance that baseline to provide an enhanced experience for users with more capable browsers.
An introduction to child-themes
In this session, John will be going over the basics of how to create a child theme for WordPress. He’ll cover things like file structure, overriding styles from the parent theme, customizing page layouts and adding your own functionality.
Your Site Is A Product: Optimize It By Experimenting
I work on our features and UI experiments for WordPress.com and would love to share the tools and processes we’ve built. We run lots of experiments, some big some small, to try to constantly keep making the site a little better each day. We assume we often don’t know what users want, and validate everything with data.
I’ll cover the basics of why to run experiments, how to do it (hopefully including a plugin we’re going to open source soon) and how to analyze/interpret the data.
Podcasting with WordPress
Attendees will learn how to setup a podcast from beginning to end using WordPress. We’ll cover recording tips, audio editing, where to get music for intro’s, setting up an RSS feed specific to your podcast, and publishing tips for WordPress and submission to iTunes!
In addition to outlining the technical details of setting up a podcast with WordPress, we’ll talk about how to land interviews with prominent authors.
WordPress and Music
In an era where DIY is the buzzword in music, there are more tools than ever for musicians to reach their audience. WordPress is one of those tools…but in order to use WordPress successfully for musicians, designers and developers need to understand the specific challenges involved in customizing WordPress to fit the needs of musical artists.
Website End-User Security
Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet?
WordPress End User Security by Dre Armeda will cover basic information security principles to consider even before you start a WordPress driven site, and a run at the top 10 WordPress security tips.
Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.
Moving Time! All About WordPress Server Transfers
Are you looking to move your WordPress blog from wordpress.com or from one web hosting company to another?
This session will focus on the basics of moving your files and database from one server to another and not breaking it or losing your content in between.
At the end of the session you will be able to successfully move your WordPress site from one place to another without wanting to pull your hair out.