Sessions

WordPress I: Introduction to WordPress

Presented by Sé Reed • Orange Track

A basic introduction to WordPress, covering what it is (i.e. it’s not just blog software!), what it can do, who is using it, and how it works, including an overview of the main content components (posts, pages, categories) and the main style and functionality components (themes and plugins).

Getting an eCommerce Website Up and Running in 30 Minutes

Presented by Todd Miner • Orange Track

A presentation showing users how to take a vanilla WordPress install and build a new eCommerce site in just 30 minutes.

Website plan
Plugins to be used
Site structure
Configuring the site via WordPress
Mild CSS & HTML customization
Managing your orders

Enterprise Class WordPress

Presented by Jake Goldman • Blue Track

Sure, we all get that WordPress is great blogging software, and makes a great website for Joe’s Corner Coffee Shop or Mike’s Hometown Consulting Services. And maybe you feel solid about your ability to build a WordPress site on a shared host or VPS. But what about the big guns? Is WordPress a $200,000 enterprise CMS for large businesses? Is it a million dollar CMS for a movie production? And if so, what does this mean for building, hosting, and managing such implementations? How do we even sell WordPress as such?

This debut talk is an honest exploration and dialog about what it means to sell, implement, and manage enterprise-class WordPress implementations. We’ll explore solutions, like WordPress.com VIP hosting, EditFlow workflow tools, and development techniques where reliability and scale is a must. We’ll also examine the places where WordPress struggles to compete with or falls short of its enterprise competition, and explore how we can solve some of these problems as a community.

REST/JSON API

Presented by Mike Adams • Blue Track

We’ll talk about how to get data in and out of your site using WordPress’s current APIs. Once we learn why none of the current methods is very nice, we’ll get to know a new API available now on WordPress.com. As a special treat, we’ll also learn when that API will be available for self-hosted sites…

Building a CRM on WordPress

Presented by Bill Erickson • Orange Track

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system allows you to organize customer information from initial contact through project completion, and make important business decisions based on data. I’ll walk you through the why and how to build your own CRM on WordPress.

The Pursuit of Actionable Data – Getting the Most out of your Google Analytics

Presented by Kelley Koehler • Blue Track

Ever get lost in your site analytics, under a mountain of data you have no idea what to do with? Do you faithfully monitor page views and bounce rates without ever really understanding how people use your site or how you can improve it? Let’s discuss how to get the most out of your analytics using the standard metrics and features of Google Analytics. Figure out what matters, what doesn’t, and how to get at the real actionable data so that you can improve your site’s performance.

WordPress Emergencies

Presented by Tabby Chapman • Blue Track

Howdy, cowboy coder! This session is for you. Your WordPress site just went down. What do you do now? First, freak out. Then, listen to Tabby. Tabby Chapman is Zeek Interactive’s guru at handling WordPress emergencies. She will teach you how to quickly determine what is causing an emergency and what to do when regular maintenance becomes irregular. She will give tips and tools to handle WordPress outages efficiently and techniques on how to recover gracefully, both technically & personally.

Optimizing WordPress for Speed and Scale

Presented by Ben Metcalfe • Orange Track

This talk will encompass ways to optimize your website to make it fast, and then how to make that speed scalable. It starts at the beginner level with basic ways to get the most from WordPress, and will go all the way to the uber-technical level and include specific example of tweaking servers and caching to scale millions of visitors to a site and not suffer slow loading times. Compiled from the experience of Ben Metcalfe, WordPress innovator, the talk will give perspective of WordPress since its inception.

Getting Started with WordPress Multisite

Presented by Justin Seeley • Orange Track

This presentation will walk users through the ins-and-outs of WordPress Multisitie including use cases, local and remote setup, and Multisite administration. This presentation will be an introductory course for beginners.

Tips on how to use BuddyPress

Presented by Wes Chyrchel • Blue Track

With BuddyPress 1.5.4 and the coming 1.6, BuddyPress is stronger, leaner and meaner than its ever been. Many people still think of BuddyPress as a “Social Network In A Box” plugin, but BuddyPress is extremely powerful and has many great tools ready to go. With it’s incredible flexibility and as websites grow and get more interactive, BuddyPress is starting to make a lot of sense for many websites. This session will teach you how to implement BuddyPress in your next project by using some or all of the many features BuddyPress has to offer.

Let’s Build a Custom Theme

Presented by Andy Stratton • Orange Track

Let’s start with a folder of HTML and CSS for a basic business website design and move through custom WordPress theme development. We’ll even include:

Standard WP Hook integration
Custom bread crumb navigation
Home Page Slider management
Primary navigation using menus
Blog implementation (as news) with comments
Press releases with downloadable PDF
Selectable sidebar(s) with/without automated subnavigation

After the presentation, attendees can download slides in PDF format with the accompanying HTML/CSS/Javascript and final theme. QA as time allows.

How to use WP-Cron

Presented by Ben Lobaugh • Blue Track

Cron is a very powerful, system level, task scheduler, but how do you setup scheduled tasks if you do not have access to cron? Enter WP-Cron. WP-Cron is WordPress’ little known built-in task scheduler. In this session you will learn the anatomy of the WP-Cron system and how to create you own custom tasks. You will also learn the pros and cons of using WP-Cron vs cron, and how to hook WP-Cron into cron for a powerhouse combination.

Fun With Gravity Forms

Presented by Lucy Beer • Orange Track

Want to look like a genius without touching any code? This presentation is for ordinary folks (ie not developers) who want to do extraordinary things with WordPress. Gravity Forms is one of the most powerful and versatile WordPress plugins there is. I will demonstrate some of the very cool and awesome things you can do with it, without having to so much as look at a line of code. The types of things we’ll look at will include:

How to boost your mailing list sign up by providing an opt-in checkbox on your regular contact forms.
How to set up an e-commerce order form integrated with PayPal, featuring conditional logic to vary cost according to product, quantity, and chosen features of the product.
How to set up a powerful contact form for your business website that can do things like can route the submission to different departments
How to set up a post submission form for the front end of your site so that your readers can submit content

Getting Started with Contribution!

Presented by Mike Schroder • Blue Track

An introduction into getting involved with WordPress core contributions. A walkthrough of the basics of navigating WordPress release cycles, the core bug tracker, and getting your first patch committed.

End-User Awareness

Presented by Tony Perez • Orange Track

The purpose of this discussion is to discuss end-user security. Review the latest trends and challenges we see everyday at Sucuri. It’ll leverage existing presentations provided by Dre but hopefully add more substance that the end-user can take home. Would like to add some nice statistics on the latest malware trends and include some preventive techniques as well. The demographic will be geared towards end-users as they are predominantly the ones we see most severely affected. I don’t want to say Upgrade, I want to say upgrade and this is why (show them the vulnerabilities in older versions). If possible I would include a presentation that talks to the process and theory but then give an example as well. This is how you create an .htaccess file to block bots, this is how you use it block entry and insertion of php shells. This is how you scrub your server for things that you might find on our free scanner.. Theory is good, practical application is better. The intent of the presentation is to education and arm the attendees with the knowledge and tools they need to stay safe on the web.

Controlling User Access in WordPress

Presented by Alex Vasquez • Orange Track

As WordPress developers/designers, we are tasked with providing a solution that clients can easily use and update on their own.

There’s a fine line with regard to the access one gives their clients. A WordPress site is like a Toyota, or a Honda. Low maintenance and easy to run. If the keys are given to the client, a lot of damage can be done and countless hours troubleshooting, wasted money and more.

Clients don’t want to be treated like children, and as a developer we want our clients to be happy with the solution provided.

Sessions

Share this: