Author: Flynn O'Connor

WordCamp Vancouver 2015 was another wonderful event thanks to the efforts of many people.

We’d like to start by thanking our generous sponsors whose financial support made this event possible.

Outstanding Sponsors: Bluehost, PlanetHoster, WiredTree, Jetpack.
Superb Sponsors: GoDaddy.
Splendid Sponsors: Dreamhost, WPML.
Venue Sponsor: BCIT.
Pacific Ocean Sponsors: Microsoft, Washington State University, Green Geeks, Odin Hosting.
Georgia Straight Sponsors: Sucuri.
Burrard Inlet Sponsors:  Modern Tribe.
False Creek Sponsors: Ivy Cat, Camp Tech, Sparkjoy Studios, Creative Mornings, Prospress, WP Engine, KIMBO Design, Jukebox Print, Sticker Giant.

We would also like to thank all the marvelous volunteers who gave their time to ensure the day of the event went smoothly.

The speakers this year were all amazing. We want to thank them all for their top notch presentations.

Since WordCamp Vancouver is run as a non-profit event under the WordPress foundation’s umbrella, we’d like to share our final budget numbers with the community. This is just another step by which the WordPress community demonstrates its openness and transparency:

If you missed a talk you really wanted to see, or just wanted to take another look at a code example or another detail, we’re pleased to let you know that all of the talks in the two main tracks were recorded and will be published on WordPress.tv within the next few weeks. We’ll send everyone an email once those videos are available.

If you are looking for the slides from your favourite presentation, we collected most of the slides below:

Understanding & Combating Global Censorship with WordPress
John P. Gamboa

Reimagining Content Creation
Reid Peifer

Designers & Developers: Cats & Dogs Living in Harmony
Kirsten Starcher

Stepping outside the bubble
Kalen Johnson

Content-First Content Management
Mandi Wise

Google Analytics for Objective SEO and Diagnostics
Alycia Mitchell

Who Works on What in WordPress
Drew Jaynes

Behind the curtain of WordPress multisite
Jeremy Felt

Slow sites suck. Make your site hum with HHVM.
Richard Tape

Debugging CSS
Stephanie Hobson

Robot OOP
Andrew Woods

Building theme components with the WP REST API and Angular.js
Nathan Shubert-Harbison

The Future of JavaScript
Rami Sayar

Siege and Beyond: An Intro To Benchmarking and Stress Tests
Michael Schroder

From WordPress.com to Self-hosted
Luiza Libardi

Help Me Help You: The Art and Science of Getting Good WordPress Support
Kathryn Presner

Shortcut to choosing your WordPress Theme
Katya Boudjelloud

Why Security Matters
Ben Martin

A big thank you goes to BCIT, for again providing a great WordCamp venue with helpful and dedicated staff!

Thank you to our generous WordPress community sponsors! These are sponsors who pledge to support the WordPress community in a certain region (or, in some cases, the whole world). Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

Outstanding community sponsors:

Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over one million WordPress sites. Their goal is to provide outstanding hosting services and customer support for the best possible price. Bluehost is also constantly innovating and upgrading their services and infrastructure at no additional cost to their customers. Join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how they can help you with your site.

WiredTree provides Managed VPS and Managed Dedicated Servers to WordPress users worldwide from our Chicago-based data center and offices. Every WT server is backed by 24×7 telephone support, ticket support with 15 minute average response times, and is fully managed and monitored by WiredTree to maximize uptime and minimize frustration. All servers come ready-to-run with cPanel/WHM and are optimized and security hardened with firewall and anti-spam out of the box. With experience in SSD technology, MariaDB, Memcached, WordPress plugins, server optimization, and LiteSpeed Web server, WiredTree can take your site’s performance to the next level.

PlanetHoster offers premium hosting solutions to WordPress users worldwide. Whether it’s shared hosting, managed VPS, dedicated servers and much more, PlanetHoster’s customers report that these affordable, feature-packed hosting solutions exceed their expectations. Their certified engineers are very experienced with WordPress. They work hard to assure that your WordPress site will run very fast and will be hosted in a secure, 24/7 monitored environment. If you want to offer the best latency to your visitors by being hosted whether in Europe or in North America, PlanetHoster might be right for you.

PlanetHoster offre aux utilisateurs de WordPress partout dans le monde des solutions d’hébergement web premium. Que ce soit de l’Hébergement Mutualisé, des Serveurs Cloud, des Serveurs Dédiés et bien plus, l’Hébergement Web de PlanetHoster surpassera certainement vos attentes. Leurs techniciens certifiés sont très expérimentés avec WordPress. Vous pouvez être assuré que votre site web WordPress se chargera très rapidement et sera hébergé dans un environnement sécuritaire & surveillé 24/7. Offrez la meilleure latence à vos visiteurs en étant hébergé en Europe (France) ou en Amérique du Nord (Canada)!
PlanetHoster, Host Your World.

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me

Superb community sponsors:

GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

Splendid community sponsors:

OnTheGoSystems is the author of WPML and Toolset plugins. WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites. OnTheGoSystems is always looking for exceptional people to join the team. To learn more about our products and open positions, you can visit: http://www.onthegosystems.com/

DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. More information can be found at http://dreamhost.com.

Howdy all!

Every year we welcome members of the WordPress community who travel from out of town to attend our WordCamp. We try to make it easier for everyone to attend so here is our annual run down of advice and recommendation for accommodation and transportation within Vancouver.

Arriving in Vancouver

If you are arriving via air, it’s inexpensive and easy to get from the airport to any Downtown destination taking the Canada Line rapid transit rail link from the airport. In almost all cases the cost from the airport is about $9 and $3 on the way back. Ticketing machines accept bills, coins, debit and credit cards. It takes about 30 minutes to get from the Airport to Downtown. Cabs from the airport to Downtown usually cost about $40 and take about the same time, sometimes longer when there’s bad traffic. Public transit in Vancouver is offered by Translink. Google Maps offers reliable public transit directions.

If you are traveling via train or bus you will arrive at Pacific Central Station which is adjacent to the Main Street Skytrain station. There is construction on that station right now but you can still catch trains to get you downtown.

Hotel Recommendations

We’ve gathered a few hotel recommendations for you:

Sandman Hotel, rooms starting around $160 per night
St Regis Hotel, rooms starting around $179 per night
Rosedale on Robson, rooms starting around $170 per night
Holiday Inn Vancouver, rooms starting around $175 per night
Hotel Le Soleil, rooms starting around $186 per night
Opus Boutique Hotel, rooms starting around $270
Fairmont Vancouver, rooms starting around $360 per night

All of these hotels are within walking distance of the WordCamp venue.

There is also a number of great apartments/rooms for rent on AirBnb, raging from $45 to $250+ per night. While we cannot recommend specific rentals, we’ve heard great things about using AirBnb and do recommend the service as a whole.

Transportation information

As a reminder, the venue for WordCamp Vancouver 2014 is BCIT Downtown Campus located at 555 Seymour Street – Vancouver, V6B 3H6. The venue is in the heart of Downtown Vancouver and within walking distance of several hotels.

We recommend walking, biking or using public transit to get to BCIT Downtown Campus. If you use public transit, please get off at Granville station (using expo/millenium line) or Vancouver City Center (using Canada line).

If you are arriving by car,  please note that the BCIT parking lot will be closed that day. There are other public parking lots nearby, notably on Seymour St. Parking on the street may be difficult and/or costly.

Use these tools to help plan your trip to the BCIT Downtown Campus:

• BC Translink
• Google Maps

Map

We’ve prepared a helpful map of many key and recommended locations around Vancouver. Including the airport, venue, the after party location and all of the recommended hotels from above. We’ve also added a number of recommended activities, restaurants and attractions for out of own attendees. Please note that BCIT, the WordCamp venue is indicated by the blue WordPress logo whereas the after party location is indicated by the grey logo.

Hello everyone!

We are very excited to announce that our schedule of speakers is now up! We have many great speakers covering a wide range of topics.

https://2015.vancouver.wordcamp.org/schedule/

We have also extended the early bird ticket sales until Friday so you have a few more days to save on your ticket – but don’t wait too long!

https://2015.vancouver.wordcamp.org/tickets/