5 Steps to Personal and Website Security
Mindfulness – “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.”
Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (can’t) let that stop us from doing everything we can to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood.
In this session Adam addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what audience members can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites.
After attending this session, audience members will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.
WordPress Coding Best Practices
Yes, your code works, but is it the best it could be? This talk will guide you through tips and tricks to make your code efficient, safe, and easy to read. It’s a great primer for new developers, and a good reminder for those of us who have developed bad habits over time.
– Understand the WordPress Coding Standard
– Write Short, Reusable Functions
– Understand what Unit Testing & Browser Testing are
– Discuss benefits of code review
Building a Profitable WP Agency
Grow your business without going broke by building your team the right way !
Those of us who’ve grown know the dance all too well. We get too busy so we hire staff. We think .. yay! .. I’m touching XX% more money I must be making more .. until we look and the numbers and reality sets in … what the heck! … we are touching more and keeping less … where did we go wrong???
That is what this talk is about. The pitfalls and expenses of growing. From not knowing how long tasks really take because we never actually tracked our time to the overhead in management tools and lost billable hours. I share varies ways to grow your team from US based to oversees; contractor to employee to strategic partner. The possibilities are endless.
And the punchline … there is no “right way”. There is only the solution that works best for you!
Building a Simple WordPress Plugin
The idea of creating a plugin may seem daunting, but to build something basic is very simple. Anyone with some basic knowledge of PHP can improve their site building process today. Plugins can be used for many different tasks, but this will focus on a plugin which creates a simple short code that allows users to both use advanced logic beyond what can be done in the editor and reuse code so as not to constantly copy and paste huge snippets of code from one page to the next.
In praise of the side project: How to learn new skills, make money, and have a little fun
Many great projects, products, and companies have grown out of side projects or hobbies. Apple, Twitter, and even Gmail exist because someone dedicated their spare time to testing the waters. Most of your favorite WordPress themes, plugins, and websites were probably brought to life during someone’s day off.
But not all side projects need to be huge, life-altering excursions. Whether it’s building a WordPress plugin, learning a new software package, or building an entire website, they can be whatever you need them to be; from developing a new skill to bringing in extra income to simply having a little fun. Side projects can also be a great way to learn what you’re made of, try new avenues, and build relationships with other web professionals.
Join Rachel to discuss the pros (and cons) of side projects, learn about a few projects that turned into so much more, and hopefully leave with a few ideas of your own.
Javascript – Beyond jQuery
Most developers have some experience with jQuery, but few of them understand the principles of Javascript and how to write and debug Javascript code. This session will cover best practices for writing object oriented Javascript, benchmarking, and debugging.
Lunch / Birds of a Feather Discussions
Lunch:
Pick up your lunch in Stamm, then elect to either join a Birds of a Feather conversation (see location information below), or have a more free-form lunch wherever and with whomever you want.
Birds of a Feather:
The Birds of a Feather sessions are envisioned to augment the WordCamp 
experience and are by no means compulsory – if you are very interested in a topic, however, a Birds of a Feather session is a great way to dive deeper and meet others with aligned interests. Some of the gatherings have featured experts – people our organizing committee have identified as especially qualified to answer general questions and recommend general resources on a given topic. Other gatherings are more free-form discussion, featuring the questions and answers of fellow attendees. Please use this as a forum to engage in discussion, Q&A’s, trade resources, and network.
Birds of A Feather Topics:
Accessibility: Featured Expert: David Zulaica: Trail Room
Search Engine Optimization: Featured Expert: Fellene Gaylord Trail Room
Blogging Content Tips: Featured Expert: Eric Mann: Trail Room
Business Development: Featured Expert: Devra Polack: Thayer
Educational Technology: Featured Expert: Melissa Lim: Stamm West
The Future of WordPress – Diversity: General Discussion: Stamm West
Lightning Talks for any site: content, business, workflow
How to ease content updates & prevent design blunders – Steven Quinn
Make the back end of your WordPress websites as easy to use as the front end while making your site a data-driven experience. We’ll explore different ways of using of custom post types, custom fields, and settings pages to make content editing and management as easy as possible while enforcing front end styling.
Face your Fear of Niching – Ethan Clevenger
The idea of narrowing your business focus and positioning away from potential clients can be scary. It’s a fear that must be faced to maximize growth. While it’s natural to assume that becoming less of a generalist means doing less business, the opposite is usually true. By effectively positioning your business, you stand to grow exponentially.
This talk is great for owners of digital studios making WordPress sites but contains just as much value for other business owners trying to leverage their digital presence to grow their business.
The Benefits of Continuous Integration – Andrew Taylor
Modern development is complex, with lots of tools to turn the code we write into the code used by the user’s browser. This can be a simple and minifying assets or as sophisticated as downloading dependencies and turning source code into production code.
In this session we will look at the top 5 benefits gained from adopting a Continuous Integration workflow to automate the build process, testing and deployment. Whether you’re a developer wondering why you should try Continuous Integration in the first place or a business owner wondering why you should let your team spend time on adopting a new process when the current one “just works” we’ll have answers for you!
Lightning Talks for big sites: higher ed, passwords, accessibility
Using WordPress in the world of Higher Education – Rachel Cherry
Much like online businesses or blogging, higher ed is a world of its own with unique challenges, content, stakeholders, and target audiences. Higher education is WordPress at enterprise level but we don’t worry so much about which e-commerce plugin is best. Instead, we’re more concerned with how to manage a large-scale network of faculty blogs, abide with FERPA regulations, and implement Active Directory single sign-on.
This talk will showcase how WordPress is used in the world of higher ed and how we’re a great candidate for utilizing WordPress to its full potential, whether it’s using the powerful CMS to stretch limited resources or using its new API capabilities to share information and break down silos.
Going Password Free – Eric Mann
Should a password be long and complex? What about a string of easy-to-remember words instead? Are password managers the best way forward? What about multiple factors? Is there a better way?
These are all questions your users have: learn how to answer them and how to make security easy by moving beyond passwords for your web app entirely with magic link based authentication! Your users just click a link; they don’t have to remember anything.
Accessibility for All!!! – Mary Ann Aschenbrenner
Don’t Waste All That Good Content: How Repurposing Can Keep It Alive
You work hard to create your content. So how can you maximize its impact on your bottom line? Through repurposing. If you have a blog, you already have a good start. Your next step is to take all that awesome original content and repurpose the heck out of it. In this session, you’ll learn from a prolific content generator: how to create and push out and manage your content; how to keep your freshest content up front and alive, find unique ways to get the most out of your existing content and identify the right channels for repurposing it.
Too Meta
WordPress’ default dumping ground for all data related to posts (and custom post types) is in post meta. When there’s a lot of meta data, it starts to strain your server performance and resources in ways you may not have realized.
I’ll go through a real-world example of too much meta-data being stored with a post, some hacks to avoid problems, and some better solutions using the meta data API. I’ll explain how you can easily move data, even if your site has already been designed, developed, and deployed.
Use less memory, handle more concurrent visitors, and speed up page loads by only loading what you need, when you need it.
SEO in 15 easy steps you can take today
I’ve been blogging for 8 years and I have learned that when it comes to getting visits to my website, I had to do three things: (1) Narrow my niche, (2) Answer a question, and (3) gain a basic understanding of search engine optimization.
In this presentation, I would like to introduce the audience to 15 (or more) easy tips that they can apply immediately to improve the SEO of their WordPress blog. My tips will include:
Keyword research
Topics that answer questions
Best practices for headers
Guest posting and link backs
Digging deep into the analytics of a blog
Managing a WordPress Site Using Roots.io Projects
WordPress supports a lot of “aging” ways of developing for it. The Roots.io family of projects attempts to modernize WordPress development by embracing newer tools in infrastructure management and PHP standards adopted by the larger PHP community. If you’re new to using Git, SSH, Vagrant, Ansible, Composer and WPackagist to help manage your WordPress projects, then follow me as we take a look at how the Roots team makes use of these technologies. The results of using these projects are easy to reproduce sites, tracked in version control, and built for modern, high performance needs.
Starting up your Startup with WordPress: Best Practices for Starting Simple + Scaling as you Go
Think you need to hire a CTO and build custom tech to vet your next big idea? Think again!
Learn how startups can rapidly prototype and test their ideas before sinking thousands and millions into proprietary tech. We’ll look at a handful of active startups leveraging WordPress in a variety of industries, how they’re handling scaling, and starting to build their own infrastructure on top using APIs and React/Native.
Learn how you can launch and test your next big idea, applying the Lean Startup model, best practices and some cautionary tales.
How to Win Friends and Influence WordPress Core
It’s no secret that one of the WordPress core team’s greatest barriers to entry is contributors feeling like they don’t have anything of value to offer; nothing could be further from the truth.
Every potential contributor has something to offer whether they realize it or not, and this session will give them many of the tools and advice they’ll need to succeed in helping to influence the future of WordPress.
Topics covered: entry points for contributors of all levels, whether they’re developers, designers, copywriters, or everyday users. We’ll briefly cover the process of joining the “Making WordPress” community, methods to have your voice heard, submitting patches and keeping trac tickets moving, bringing core down to the local community level, and more.