Session Descriptions

On the internet, content is king. Whether you are writing content for your business or a large corporation, you must know and respect your target audience. Targeted content is one of the best ways to grow your brand and the old tricks of the trade will no longer cut it. Content for the Modern World takes a deep dive into the new and emerging content marketing trends. Since content patterns are ever-changing, we’ll discover new ways to keep up-to-date with channels to follow and helpful and efficient tools. Have you been struggling to create viral and click-worthy blog titles and email subject lines? We’ll talk about what trends to look out for in 2018, how to create content that resonates and converts, and current SEO tips and tricks to be found on the web.

A Complete Beginners Guide to using WordPress! In this Bob of the online WordPress instructional site BobWP introduces attendees to the WordPress dashboard, explaining posts and pages, how to use the editor, media library and other basics to get you familiar with using WordPress.

You’ve built a WordPress site or two (or 10), your installed plugins and themes to MOSTLY get what you want. Now you’re ready to learn the inner workings of WordPress and take your development to the next level. Jump into WordPress development and PHP by building a Plugin and learn to speak WordPress’ language: PHP.

You’ve heard of CSS Grid but you aren’t quite sure what it is. Or maybe you have started looking at it, but don’t know where to get started. Join me to get hands-on experience in building modern layouts using CSS Grid (and Flexbox). Learn where we came from (hacks, floats, and more hacks) and where we are going. Discover solutions to “impossible layouts”, how to handle users in older browsers, and about the power of Firefox debugging tools for grid.

Themes control the look, feel and layout of your site. Picking a ready-made one can be a daunting task, so let’s take a look at themes and understand the decisions that need to be made. We’ll dive into:

• Why it’s critical to understand your brand, audience and content before you even begin looking
• What to expect a theme to do and what it won’t
• What to look for when picking a theme and good places to find them
• How to install and switch themes
• Understanding the theme file structure
• Understand how child themes work

Whether you’re writing a client proposal or documenting the success criteria of your web presence, explicitly accounting for accessibility provides benchmarks to measure the success of your project against and establishes important expectations. This talk will discuss when, where, and why to account for accessibility in projects or an organization.

Extending WordPress above and beyond the core functionality is part of what makes WordPress so powerful. However, the sheer number of plugins available can be overwhelming. A strategy for evaluating plugins makes both developing managing WordPress easier. In this presentation, attendees will learn:

• Strategies and tools for evaluating one plugin over another
  • Key factors to consider
  • Evaluation tools
• Paid plugins versus free: do you get what you paid for?
• Managing plugins and updates
• Evaluating plugin security:
  • How to research plugin security history
  • Identify functionality that may be risky

Attendees will also receive a plugin evaluation checklist they can take home to help choose plugins that fit their project’s objectives.

Whether it is for re-using the same code or deploying a bug fix or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system. This talk will briefly explore the need for Git, the history and use cases. Then we will jump into how to get started and the basic organizational concepts. We will also examine Github, the web-based Git hosting service. Bring your laptops to play along at home and get started before you leave the room.

In this talk, we’ll consider what makes WooCommerce a great platform for eCommerce sites of all kinds. We’ll compare it to other platforms and dig into why it is so flexible.

How to clean up the WordPress Database, David Greenwald

Is your website running slowly? If you’ve had a WordPress site for a few years, it could be the MySQL database—the silent killer of WordPress performance. For many of us, the database is the most intimidating optimization challenge, leaving it to make sites bloated, expensive, and ready to crash under high traffic. But it’s actually not that scary. Using WordPress plugins and phpMyAdmin, we’ll build the skills to diagnose database issues, go over some common problems and weird edge cases, and learn how to safely fix and maintain the database for top performance.

Holy Blockamole: Tips On Learning Block Development, Andrew Taylor

New development workflows can be scary. Want to create your first custom block but don’t know where to start? This talk will help you get started on your journey to modern JavaScript WordPress development by sharing resources, tips, and lessons learned from developing custom WordPress blocks.

Gutenberg and WordCamp.org’s Shortcodes, Corey McKrill

One of the exciting things about Gutenberg blocks is that they can serve a similar purpose to many shortcodes that generate a “block” of content, but with more flexibility and a much more user-friendly interface. Creating Gutenberg versions of your shortcodes is also a good step in future-proofing your plugins and sites. This talk shows how some of the custom shortcodes from WordCamp.org have been adapted into Gutenberg blocks.

5 Easy Coding Tricks You Can Do in WordPress (Especially for Non-Developers) – Rocky Kev

For every WordPress user, there’s always a button that’s a bit off to the side, or a logo that doesn’t display correctly. This session will help you DIY types, who want a little more control but don’t want to spend years being a programmer. We’ll will show you a few tricks to fix common web design issues with certain plugins, with a bit of coding. We’ll do a tiny bit of HTML, CSS, and PHP, but don’t let that scare you, I’ve taught this to 50+ year old WordPress users who picked it up immediately.

DIY Content Strategy, Larry Swanson

WordPress agencies and freelance designers and developers can improve their client’s website projects by incorporating content-strategy best practices into their workflows. Anyone who has built more than one website has developed a good array of content strategy skills. I’ll show how to plug those skills into a proven framework for crafting an actionable, state-of-the-art website content strategy. If you’ve ever used “lorem ipsum” copy as you struggled to extract content from your client the day before launch, this talk is for you.

3 Security Mistakes You Didn’t Realize You Made, Mikey Veenstra

We all take shortcuts sometimes. Whether you were swamped with client work and a corner had to be cut, or you’re stretched so thinly trying to wear every hat that something fell through the cracks, we’ve all encountered mistakes we made ourselves. While they’re mostly all forgivable, it becomes a bit of a different issue when a mistake leads to a security concern. In this talk we’ll look at three common security mistakes made by WordPress site owners every day, why they get made in the first place, and how to resolve them.

Clone yourself through Automation, Jocelyn Mozak

Ever catch yourself repeating the same task over and over again? If you can document the steps you can automate it! From high-level concepts like the development of systems and processes to detailed examples of how to harness the power of forms and Zapier to save hours of tedious work this talk will inspire you to look at every task in your business and ask … can this be automated?

Take a Chill Pill, Beth Ball

Humor is incredibly effective in marketing. With this presentation, a fast one at that, I’m going to give some wicked awesome stats on just HOW effective humor is and WHY it’s important, and WHY it will help convert website visitors to lifelong customers/buyers. LOL’ing not required. It’s OK if you’re a LOTI’er (laugh on the inside…er)

3 Design Trends Worth Ditching in the Name of SEO, Erika Saracco 

You’ve designed a beautiful website. Every detail is perfect; every angle considered. But does Google like it? If you can’t get the website to rank, your gorgeous design is never going to be seen or used. We’ll cover five of the most common design practices that could be tanking your SEO.

Using what we’ve learned today, Fellene will guide attendees through the process of building a working portfolio! We will cover a basic photo portfolio, and adding additional features to create an academic or professional portfolio as well. Access to the slides and additional artifacts from the session will be downloadable afterward.

You’ve no doubt heard a fast loading website is critical to success. With Google’s recent algorithm updates, this is more true now than ever. Many plugins and services claim to speed up WordPress, but which are most effective? Should you spend money on a service or find something free? How can site owners improve performance without writing code? This beginner-friendly talk covers the basics of site performance and recommends simple strategies and tools to boost performance. Sprinkled throughout will be pro tips for power users who want to take these concepts to the next level.

When we work with WordPress, we deal with data that we commonly know as posts, pages, media, comments, options etc. However, the REST API has required us to rethink what some of these data structures are and how they should work, particularly in regards to metadata and options, which have historically been an undefined dump of arbitrary data. This session provides an abstract overview of how data in WordPress is structured and gives insight on questions like: How are post types and taxonomies related? What makes metadata different from options? Where does my own data fit in? If you are developing for WordPress, it is crucial to know some of these concepts. In recent years, WordPress has started to make some structure out of its previous data mess, but is still only touching the surface. And we can all contribute to figuring it out together.

Sustainability is critical as WordPress matures. Efficient implementations will thrive for years to come, while older WordPress projects are already obsolete. The building design and construction industry now embraces sustainability as a vital aspect of any successful project. In Portland, seismic resiliency is an increasing priority given greater awareness of our local earthquake hazards. Drawing experience from the built environment informs an efficient, sustainable, and resilient approach to creating WordPress sites and products. Through stories of both digital and physical projects, I’ll present a framework for maximizing the longevity of your work in the ever-evolving digital space.

When the idea of an automated code quality tool was first conceived, it was to help facilitate internal candidate code reviews. However, after a few ideation sessions we quickly identified a number of other more appropriate use cases; including what ultimately became the basis for what Tide is today. Tide is an automated tool to provide insight into WordPress code and highlight areas to improve the quality of plugins and themes. We believe the web can be better. With Tide, the code which underpins every website can be more standardized, faster, and more secure. Tide is focused on WordPress, because no other platform has as large an impact on the state of the web. Tide raises the quality of code one plugin or theme at a time, by elevating the importance of code quality in the developer consciousness. During this talk I will discuss the reasons why we need Tide and how it can lift the WordPress ecosystem into a brighter future.

Creating and working with WordPress themes is a great way to learn more about WordPress as well as make your site look and function exactly how you want it. We’ll go over what goes into making a WordPress theme, as well as concepts like “the loop,” “actions and filters,” and the “template hierarchy.” By the end of the talk, you should have a good overview of WordPress themes, as well as places to go for further learning.

This introductory session will cover the ways that people can contribute to the WordPress global community team, no matter what their background or experience.

Let’s explore the benefits of thinking in re-usable blocks. Atomic design, Modular Development, and D.R.Y. methodology improves productivity, enhances UI and empowers authors. We will explore multiple methods to achieve modularity in our WP themes, leveraging the WordPress templating system and Advanced Custom Fields or using blocks in the form of Gutenberg. Regardless if you are ready to learn Javascript deeply and embrace Gutenberg, or set in your ways and sticking with the classic editor — you will leave this talk excited and ready to integrate this strategy into your workflow.

This the story of Rocket Lift, a Portland-based WordPress founded in 2011 and shut down in 2017: How and why it closed — what we did well, lessons learned along the way, and our process of deciding to shut down — shared so other WordPress businesses and freelancers can learn from our experience.