Category Archives: Sessions

Session Spotlight: Duty Now for the Future with Jason Cosper

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See Jason Cosper in the Salt Creek Trail room at 4:30 PM on Saturday, June 6 for his talk Duty Now for the Future.

WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for almost 12 years now. As game -hanging server technologies like Facebook’s HHVM start to creep into the WordPress hosting space — WP Engine, Pagely & Kinsta all offer HHVM-ready plans — those workflows need to be expanded.

I’ll be introducing you to a new Vagrant-based WordPress development environment (HGV) that includes debugging and profiling tools and allows you to test your code in both PHP & HHVM environments.

If you’re interested in attending this talk, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn’t a hard requirement.

Session Spotlight: Should it Go Into a Theme or Plugin with Russell Aaron

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Join Russell Aaron in the Trabuco Trail track at 3:40 PM on Saturday, June 6 to discuss whether certain features should go into a theme or plugin.

In this presentation, scenarios will be discussed along with whether the feature in question should go into the theme or into a plugin. Many times, many developers might say most features should go into a plugin – but most would be surprised why a plugin can be a bad idea.

Session Spotlight: Selling a Million Dollars in Design with Jennifer Bourn

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Join Jennifer Bourn in the Salt Creek Trail track at 3:40 PM on Saturday, June 6 for her presentation Selling a Million Dollars in Design.

Development is clear cut. It works or it doesn’t. The code is well-written or it’s a mess. Design on the other hand, is subjective, with the success of a project often based on the client’s ideas, perceptions, opinions, and personal experiences of what good design is.

As a freelancer, Jennifer has sold well over a million dollars in design services alone, and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, ugly as she learned along the way.

In this session, Jennifer will share with you the mistakes made, lessons learned, and contract changes implemented. You’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of the role design plays in business, how to sell design, and how to navigate the sales process with clients.

If you’re a designer who rocks at design but feels a little less confident selling your services, you’re a business or agency owner who now find themselves selling design, or you’re a developer who wants to better understand pitching design to clients, this talk is for you.

Session Spotlight: A Tale of Two Test Suites with Eric Mann

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Join Eric Mann at 10 AM on Sunday, June 7 in the Salt Creek Trail room for his talk A Tale of Two Test Suites.

WordPress powers over 20% of the Internet and comes with a fully-fleshed out unit testing framework covering the core library. For testing plugins and themes (extensions to WordPress), Josh developed WP_Mock, a comprehensive mocking framework for WordPress. WP_Mock allows developers to test their code in complete isolation from WordPress itself.

He’ll walk attendees through both test frameworks, covering the pros/cons of each and examples of their use. Attendees will gain a further understanding of PHPUnit, unit testing in general, process isolation, and code modularization.

Session Spotlight: The Value of Logos with Andrew Bergeron

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Come to the Trabuco Trail track on Saturday, June 6 at 2:50 PM for Andrew Bergeron’s presentation on the value of logos.

A logo should not cost the same as a cup of coffee (read: fiverr.com) – as WordPress designer/developer “unicorn” we often get stuck with a client who wants “just a simple logo.” The problem is that logos are not simple, and they’re very important – not to mention, they’re on every page of your website. This talk will offer guidelines on how to tell a good logo from a bad logo, and offer some inspiration/steps for others to follow to create their own brilliant logos.

Session Spotlight: Customer Care with Levan Apriashvili

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Join Levan Apriashvili in the Salt Creek Trail on Saturday, June 6 at 2:50 PM to discuss what superior customer care is and what it can do for your business.

Ours is an age where power has shifted from corporations and companies to the common user. With the rise of the Internet and social media, consumers have a voice that echoes over marketing. Poor customer care comes with an incredibly high cost: 89% of consumers have stopped doing business with a company after experiencing poor customer service. A customer is 4 times more likely to buy from a competitor if the problem is service related vs. price or product related.

Focus on customer care has an incredibly high value: 81% of companies who deliver superior customer care outperform the competition in market share; 60% of customers will pay more for better customer care and customer retention is 5x more profitable. In this talk, Levan will guide us through the process of recruiting, training and motivating a high-performance customer care team, as well as demonstrate the value in investing in centralized in house systems, automation and tools that help your customer care team deliver an outstanding quality of service to positively impact your bottom line.