Are you a WordPress freelancer who’s not quite living the dream you had in mind when you started? Are you working long hours making small sites for too little money? In the past year, I’ve studied with some of the most successful entrepreneurs both in and out of the WordPress ecosystem. I’ll share the cliff notes on everything I’ve learned that can help you transform your business and start doing higher value work for better clients to build the life you want. Come learn how to get off the freelance roller coaster by giving your customers what they need instead of just what they’re asking for.

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There are two common methods of building WordPress themes. First, popular themes like _s and the default themes are primarily HTML combined with some template tags. This method is easy to understand and is great for beginners and projects that don’t need to be extensible. Second, there are powerful theme frameworks that recreate the entire theming system. These are great for extensibility, but come with a steep learning curve. In this talk, I would like to explore a third option that uses the WordPress hook and filter system to find a comfortable middle ground. Using this method, the index.php file is used as starting point, with all of its output added via hooks and filters. Additional page templates simply add or remove actions from these hooks and filters. This methodology allows new templates to be created quickly and easily. Existing templates can also be modified on a per-use basis. To get the most out of this session, familiarity with WordPress Theme development and PHP are recommended. Knowledge of the WordPress hook/filter system will be helpful, but not required.

Sure, you could improve yourself or promote your project the normal way, with hard work and years of slow, incremental progress. Or you could use some of the brain’s built-in cheat codes and just hack your way to success.

Along with learning, our brains are plagued by a raft of bugs and unwanted features that we have been unable to remove. Use these “features” to your advantage to teach, learn and persuade. Join us in a tour of some of the most amusing bugs and exploits that allow you to play with the interface between our brains and the world.

Throughout my years as a WordPress Developer, I’ve watched a Community grow and thrive by looking to lift others first before lifting themselves. In my talk, I’ll share the story of how I was able to leverage the knowledge I had, along with the relationships I’ve built throughout my time in the Community to help children who had no place to go when their families fell apart. My goal is to show you how you can take something that’s bigger than you (the Community) and use it to change lives for the better.

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You read through WordPress for Dummies and thought, “I ain’t no dummy! I can do this!” Only to find out – you really didn’t LIKE messing with PHP files and you broke more than you built. But you love #AllTheWordPressThings and really want to make a living leveraging your skills within this economy. Well, good news! There’s definitely more to building a career in WordPress than stylesheets, hooks, and loops. From part time bloggers to full time CEO’s, WordPress offers a diverse array of options for the budding or seasoned professional. In this session we will explore different professional skill sets that are utilized by freelancers, small agencies and large WordPress companies. With an emphasis on investing in the community at large, we will cover how to network your way to the top! (Or, at least …. how to grow your career in WordPress!) This will be an informative discussion and I will open the floor for questions/comments at the end.

Non-Profits serve an incredible role in our community, continually giving of themselves and their time to enhance the greater good. As a WordPress web designer, I feel it is my role to help non-profits understand the many ways they can use WordPress to streamline their tasks and allow them to focus on their causes.

In this presentation, I will walk you through why WordPress is the perfect solution for non-profits, and share stories about three non-profits I had the pleasure of working with to help transform the way their organizations function. In particular, I will discuss how I helped improve their online fundraising experience, implemented an automated membership system to connect Rotarians around the world, and created a video sharing community all through WordPress features and WordPress Plugins.

If more organizations are able to learn and understand how to harness the offerings of WordPress, there is no limit to what they can do.

Here is a quick video of the presentation.

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I’ve had the pleasure of designing and improving WordPress websites for companies researching and treating neurological diseases and cancer. Their work is profoundly important, but it can be obscured by poor web design and usability. They don’t understand the value of usability, the need to be mobile responsive, or the importance of upgrades and security.

Even seemingly minor improvements could make major differences when educating their prospective patients, or attracting doctors, scientists, and investors. And lives can truly be affected as a result of a better website. I’ll talk about my experiences improving these companies’ websites, some common usability mistakes, and best practices and techniques you can use for other websites, no matter what the industry.

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You can do GREAT things in this world, especially with the tools we have at our disposal these days!

WordPress gives us a platform to quickly and easily get your message out there. How do you take that a step further and get people to your WordPress site so you can have a greater impact?

We’ll explore how you can share your passion and your cause with others… and make sure they see it!

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It sounds cool when you hear a university is powered by WordPress, but what does that really mean? A website is a website, content is content, and WordPress is really just another way to manage it all.

Why WordPress? Sometimes because it’s the right answer. Sometimes because it’s free.

The true power is community. And if you can apply that community to how content is managed, you may find yourself with a solution that can carry change throughout an organization.

The goal is impact. The tool is WordPress. But the strategy is education. Because simply giving a customer a website doesn’t mean they won’t mess it up or limit their own potential impact because of silly mistakes. Hear the stories of mistakes and learning that allowed customers to have the true impact they wanted – from blogs to eCommerce sites.

The Customizer is WordPress’s framework for live previewing changes to a site. Live preview gives confidence to those who would otherwise lack it when making a change: it gives freedom to experiment and explore, without a negative “save and surprise” experience which discourages users from trying to make future changes. This talk will explore how the Customizer can improve the site management experience for users by looking at unique applications of the Customizer that are currently possible and also by looking at what is planned for the Customizer in the future of WordPress core.

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US Chess is a nonprofit that governs the rules of sanctioned chess tournament game play and fields the U.S. national team in tournaments like the World Cup of Chess and the Chess Olympics. The organization has over 80,000 active, dues-paying members, officially ranks all sanctioned tournament players, and maintains a historical database of every chess piece movement, in every game, in every rated tournament, for the past 4 decades.

Hear stories of mistakes, lessons learned, and successes from the relaunch of USChess.org this year. The project will illustrate 2015’s best practices for using WordPress to modernize a unique, mission critical website.

This will be a mostly non-technical talk surveying aspects of managing and executing on large projects, and adapting WordPress to meet complex, custom needs. It should appeal to novice and experienced developers, strategists, writers, marketers, and project managers.

This talk encompasses the idea that each of us can be empowered to use and improve WordPress through beta testing of upcoming releases. The 4.4 release is set to hit Beta 1 just three days before WCPDX, which makes this talk a unique opportunity to educate WordCampers on the value of beta testing, and even to interactively participate in testing the next version of WordPress during the talk. I’ll cover my personal journey and lessons learned in dogfooding WordPress for a living, as well as ways anyone (yes, anyone) can get started testing with little to no barrier to entry.

Accessibility is often thought of in terms of visual accessibility; however designing and developing for accessibility means considering auditory, cognitive, and motor abilities as well. As we age, our sight, hearing, motor, and cognitive abilities decline, meaning when an audience is comprised of a significant number of older individuals we must consider the full spectrum of accessibility when we design. Further, at this time, older individuals are much more likely to be less technically savvy, which introduces another set of usability and content needs. Erin will frame this topic within an experience of designing a website for a small non-profit club that contains a significant number of older and technically un-savvy individuals… as well as a significant number of younger technically savvy individuals.

Whether you’re a WordPress Web Designer or a steady blogger, building and customizing your own or a client’s website to fit their brand is important for more reasons than one. But when it comes to taking a site to the next level for your blog or business, personalizing the way a website interacts with a potential customer can change the success of a business — online and offline, big and small, for better or worse.

I’ll explore the motivations behind why WordPress sites get attacked and how to protect, detect and respond to these threats. I will also share tips on how to improve the security of your WordPress site and develop better security posture.
Learning Outcomes

• Understand the motivations of attackers and why they would want to hack your blog.
• Protect your website from the bad guys.
• Improve attitude and posture towards security.
• Effectively monitor your site environment for anything amiss.