Presented by Eric Mann in Salt Creek Trail.

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), I developed WP_Mock, a comprehensive mocking framework for WordPress. WP_Mock allows developers to test their code in complete isolation from WordPress itself.

I’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.

Presented by Greg Douglas in Salt Creek Trail.

If you are thinking about being a freelance consultant or already working as a consultant designing websites using WordPress, now is the time to specialize. The jig is up… the bubble has popped. We have exceeded full market saturation for consultants building websites with WP for small businesses. If you don’t plan to specialize and you are not a natural developer you are going to have a hard time. For this reason, I believe it is important for people identifying themselves more as a designer to specialize in our field as a designer. With examples, this talk represents my take on the why and the how of specializing as a designer, designing for WP websites/applications in today’s business landscape.

Presented by Jacob Arriola in Trabuco Trail.

This is an introductory presentation that will showcase tools that may help a Front End Developer or Designer streamline her development process and collaborate better within a team environment. Topics will include Gulp.js, Bower and Bourbon. This talk assumes the user is familiar with HTML, Sass, isn’t afraid of the command line and has a general understanding of the WordPress theme hierarchy.

Presented by Tabby Chapman in Trabuco Trail.

This is a session designed to help the intermediate developers switch from live-testing their code to implementing automated testing. The topic will cover a general overview of testing the WordPress way and include instructions on how to get started with testing in Windows and PC.

Presented by Adam Silver, Kathryn Presner, Gregg Franklin in Crystal Cove Trail (Workshops).

This session will help you understand the basics of WordPress.

SETUP We’ll cover everything from initial setup to publishing posts, adding categories, tagging content, and much more. We will go through the entire Dashboard, sharing all the useful tools and providing tips along the way.

THEMES You want the site to look good. Really good. You start researching themes – but there are so many variables. Frameworks, Child themes, responsive, retina! Everything will be broken down for you: what to look for in a WordPress theme, how to find a good one, best practices and more.

PLUGINS The range of over 35,000 community-contributed plugins is one of the most valuable features of WordPress.org. But how do you determine what’s a safe and effective plugin without being overwhelmed by choice? We’ll look at when to use a plugin and clarify the difference between widgets and plugins. We’ll discuss how to make an informed decision about which plugin to use – and explore how to troubleshoot any conflicts that may crop up.

Presented by Natalie MacLees in Trabuco Trail.

Responsive design is so much more than a flexible grid and a few media queries. A responsive web site project requires a whole new approach to the way we think about web sites – and involves a serious blurring of the boundaries between design and development. In this talk, I’ll cover some new workflows and how designers and developers can better collaborate in a responsive world.

Presented by AJ Zane in Trabuco Trail.

What if there was a way for us to develop in WordPress faster? What if this way actually made our code more precise and less error prone? What if we could stop using braces!? This talk will explore the concepts of using existing tools and preprocessors like sass, jade, coffeescript, etc to speed up your workflow and produce top notch themes and plugins. Before you know it, all your friends and family will be watching you code, yelling: “Run, Forest! Run!”

Presented by Justin Tucker in Trabuco Trail.

Get started with building your first theme. We will cover the necessary files to get started, key functions to know, as well as some other solutions to jump start your development.

Presented by Mendel Kurland, Chris Lema, Jeff Turner, Karim Marucchi, Cory Miller in Crystal Cove Trail (Workshops).

The WordCamp OC Business Track is going to be epic! We have gathered four of the best business masterminds in our industry and they will individually sit down for a conversation with Jeff Turner.

The speakers will be Mendel Kurland (GoDaddy), Cory Miller (iThemes), Dre Armeda and Karim Marucchi (Crowd Favorite). Jeff did an outstanding job interviewing the speakers at WordCamp LA 2014 and these sessions will be nothing short of amazing. Don’t miss it!

Presented by John Hawkins, Aaron Hockley, Mike Hansen in Crystal Cove Trail (Workshops).

Learn how to help improve WordPress, any which way you can at the Contributors Workshop. You will get an introduction to the various ways you can join the WordPress project and assist people on the forums, improve documentation, triage bugs, and add new features to core. Whatever your skill level, you can help!

Presented by Jarrett Gucci in Salt Creek Trail.

Ever thought about creating a Blogging Schedule to really take your blog to the next level? If you have you maybe asked yourself “How many post per week or month should I write?”. This is a tricky question and I want to help answer it with a method I developed called the 20/30 Rule. We will come back to that in a moment. First I would like you to imagine having an engaged audience that loves to read every new article you publish.

It has been proven that the best way to become an expert in your field is to write. So, what is holding you back? I bet the first thing is time and a close second for some is what to write about. For the purpose of this talk, you are going to be helped with the time portion of your blogging fear.

Presented by Cemal Tashan in Salt Creek Trail.

An American turns 50 every 7 seconds. The senior age group is now, for the first time, the largest in terms of size and percent of the population in the U.S. Those aged 50 and older represent 45% of the U.S. population. One-third of the internet users in the U.S., are adults aged 50+ representing the Web’s largest constituency.

WordPress sites must be designed with this in mind. You will learn how to meet seniors’ needs from one of their own.

Presented by Jason Cosper in Salt Creek Trail.

WordPress developers have been refining their development workflows and toolkits for almost 12 years now. As game changing 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.

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

Presented by Tony Mazzarella in Salt Creek Trail.

Growing a WordPress shop has many challenges—the most difficult and critical is managing growth and sustainability. In this session, Tony Mazzarella of Web Access Inc., a 100-person development shop, and one of the founders of UkuuPeople, will explore these challenges and provide a roadmap to sustainability. How do you align your business growth with market growth? How do you grow a team and effectively manage resources through traditional hiring, outsourcing, and a distributed workplace? Tony will also discuss the importance of client and project management processes in organizational growth to keep you on the right track.

Presented by Mike Hansen in Salt Creek Trail.

Having a website is a great but if you do not know what is working and what is not, are you getting the most out of your site? This presentation we will go over the analytics dashboard and describe some of the uses for specific areas. We will also go over a list of things to do right now to improve your data. This involves things like setting up site search, custom filters to remove common spam referrers, setup goals and automating your reports.

Presented by Mika Ariela Epstein in Trabuco Trail.

A tongue in cheek review of the things you can do to make your plugin submission make the review team cry, from pestering everyone and their mother about the speed of a review to simple mistakes that make the process take longer than it should.

I’ll leave time for a Q&A at the end.

Presented by Alex Vasquez in Trabuco Trail.

While everyone is talking about raising our rates; negotiating bigger gigs and releasing amazing products and “owning” their lives something gets overlooked. Our personal well-being, physically and emotionally. I want to speak on something that is overlooked and that’s how we deal with stress, feelings of inadequacy and more. I burned out last year and I’d say I’m still recovering a bit from it; it’s not easy doing the freelance thing, but I’m happy I do it and would like to talk about how one gets into the valley of doubt and depression to come out on the other side wiser, happier a better business person/freelancer overall.

Presented by Joe Chellman in Trabuco Trail.

If you’ve written a line of code in any language, you’ve gotten into a state where you don’t necessarily know what the frig is going on. That thing – it’s right there in the template! Or right in that functions.php file, but nothing happens! Or the wrong thing happens! AAAAAAAARGH!

Sure, you can try adding “echo”, “print_r”, “var_dumps” and the like all over the place, but it’s messy, and there is a better way. With a little bit of set up (but not much – seriously), you too can debug like a champ. If you’ve never seen a real debugger before, or if you’ve just dabbled with one, this talk could change your life substantially for the better.

Presented by Robert Donnell in Trabuco Trail.

Develop marketing automation solutions
A review of leading marketing automation solutions that integrate with WordPress
What is marketing automation
Why marketing automation is important
What is possible with MA
Setup – working with clients
Sample installations – a peek behind the curtain

Presented by Aaron Hockley in Salt Creek Trail.

We think of blogs as the written word, but photography and images can be a powerful and memorable element on your WordPress website or blog. In this session, we’ll explain and demonstrate powerful photography features of WordPress. Topics covered will include some built-in WP features as well as a few key plugins that can provide a better visual experience for your site’s audience. If a picture is worth 1,000 words, this presentation will save you several thousand keystrokes of work.

Presented by Dave Jesch in Salt Creek Trail.

Prevention is the key to plugin vulnerabilities! Learn what to look for in your own code to help safeguard from potential issues. A step-by-step guide will be provided on how to avoid vulnerabilities and make your code more secure. With the generosity of popular plugin authors, we will review some recent vulnerabilities found, share how they fixed the problems and discuss the best methods for getting the word out about your plugin once it’s been securely updated. Yes, there will be code.

Presented by Chris Lema in Crystal Cove Trail (Workshops).

This is it. Our teams of plugin writers will come together to show off the fruits of their labors. Who has written the best plugin in their category. Whose code is the most original? Is it safe? Does it play well with others? Join our Super Special Host Chris Lema and our panel of judges in the First Annual Orange County Plugin-a-Palooza!!!

Presented by Jennifer Bourn in Salt Creek Trail.

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, I have sold well over a million dollars in design services alone, and the journey has been good, bad, and at times, down right ugly as I learned along the way.

In this session, we’ll skip the sugar coating and I’ll 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.

Presented by Scott Bolinger in Trabuco Trail.

I’ve been focused on selling WordPress products for almost 5 years now. I started out selling themes, last year my company AppPresser grew from 0 to $30k/mo. I recently released a SaaS product that has had a steep learning curve. Join me and learn about the ups and downs of selling WordPress products.

Presented by William Bay in Salt Creek Trail.

A lot of people know they need to focus on SEO. But how exactly do you do that without going to SEO Sorcerer School and learning the dark arts?

William Bay has trained many small business owners how to get their websites ranked by giving them a narrow group of tasks to focus on, vs learning a lot of jargon, server configurations, keyword densities and linking metrics.

What you’ll learn in this presentation is:

• How Google determines to display the pages it does.
• How best to set up your WordPress site to maximize the chances of getting ranked.
• Show you how to choose the right keyword, and introduce you to competitive analysis.
• Walk through using the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin on a Page and Post to set you up for rankings.
• And discuss links and why they’re important. Also why some links are very bad.

You’ll come out of this presentation with a clear understanding of what you need to do to get your pages ranking higher than they have in the past. And you’ll find that you didn’t need that magic wand after all.

Presented by Russell Aaron in Trabuco Trail.

In this presentation, we’ll be discussing scenarios and if they should go into the theme or into a plugin. Most people would say plugin. But most would be surprised why a plugin can be a bad idea.

Presented by Nathan Porter in Trabuco Trail.

Are you tired of building websites for peanuts? Want to know how to attract higher-paying clients? Then stop building websites, and start creating solutions. See how Nathan Porter, President of Arete Imagine Inc. and mastermind behind UkuuCRM for WordPress, changed the paradigm of his clients and helped them to view their web properties as a productivity and customer relations platform—not just an advertising expense. Hear how he raised the average project price of his agency to $50,000+ in just one year and why clients are still coming back for more.

Presented by Levan Apriashvili in Salt Creek Trail.

We live in an age when power has shifted from corporations and companies to the common user. With the rise of the Internet and social media consumers have a newfound voice that echoes over slogans and advertisements. 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 I will guide you 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.

Presented by Andrew Bergeron in Trabuco Trail.

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 logos are not simple, they are very important – and they are on every page of your website. This talk will offer guidelines on how to judge a good from a bad logo and offer some inspiration/steps for others to follow to build their own brilliant logos.

Presented by Ryan Kanner in Salt Creek Trail.

Creating a custom WordPress theme from scratch is time consuming, but why start with a blank canvas every time? In this talk we will go through the differences between starter themes, frameworks, and parent themes; and which one is right for your needs.

Presented by Suzette Franck in Trabuco Trail.

You love WordPress, and if you are not already making a nice living with it, why not? The WordPress economy is expanding and more people are becoming involved in all aspects around WordPress, whether it be freelancing and entrepreneurship, blogging and content creation, search engine optimization, social media and marketing, developing plugins and themes, designing sites, User Interface, Maintenance, User Experience, Executives, Project Managers, Teachers, Presenters, and on… all working with WordPress in some capacity. This light-hearted session will break down several different types of popular positions and some of the requirements to do that job, which traits work best with which titles, and how you can begin to find your dream WordPress job.

Presented by Chris Ford in Salt Creek Trail.

There are four ways to give back to the WordPress community that don’t involve writing code. Learn how writing, speaking and teaching can not only help you share your knowledge and grow the community, they can also help you gain a better understanding of your beliefs and values.