Sessions

Presented by Ben Martin in Training Track (#820, upstairs).

As attacks on everyday WordPress sites continue to evolve website owners need to take steps to ensure the security of their data. I’ll explore common issues that I see and simple/effective solutions that site owners can employ to ensure that they are not low-hanging fruit for attackers and that their website’s reputation is protected.

Presented by Drew Jaynes in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

The WordPress contributor community is a massive ecosystem of volunteers spread across a multitude of teams and timezones. And for anybody who has ever contributed or is looking to contribute, figuring out who the movers and shakers are and how they tie the community together can be a daunting task.

This talk seeks to examine the makeup of the WordPress contributor community to better illustrate the organizational structure of the open source project we love. The idea is to pinpoint who is involved, what they work on, define cross-connections, and determine how they fit into the overall picture of WordPress. The end result is that everyone is closer to being on the same page. Win!

Presented by John P. Gamboa in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

Recent growth in places like China, Vietnam, India and Russia brought astounding economic and technological successes that also yielded some of the largest networks of censorship in history. The Great Firewall of China, DPI and SORM in Russia, and SmartFilter in Iran and Saudi Arabia are just a few of the tools used to block the free expression of millions of people.

For this talk, we’ll discuss how WordPress can empower users while still understanding the pitfalls and considerations required to reach those affected by censorship.

Other topics will cover how WordPress sites and plugins get blocked, issues designing and maintaining sites, and how the OpenNet Initiative affects WordPress. John will also give insight into his own experiences working with censorship and the Web from his time working in China.

• Slides

Presented by Rami Sayar in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

Wondering what the future has in store for JavaScript web developers? ECMAScript 6 (ES6) is the next major release of the ECMAScript language specification a.k.a. JavaScript. In this talk, Rami will be showcasing some of the features proposed in the current ES6 draft along with examples on how to use them, why these features are important and why you should care. Rami will also show you a survey of ES6 feature compatibility across all the major browsers and platforms. Features like block scoping, destructuring, modules & classes, proxies, collections, iterators & generators and arrow functions, etc… will be showcased. Rami will show you how you can use these features in your WordPress theme TODAY!

Presented by Kalen Johnson in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

As developers and users of WordPress, we may get very comfortable using the software, and we may find ourselves getting nothing but WordPress jobs or only working with WordPress. This is wonderful, we become experts in our respective fields, yet there is a danger to this as well.

I would like to remind everyone and explore some of the ideas that come from outside the WordPress bubble. All too often it’s easy to get entrenched in one way of thinking (the WordPress way), and while this is very necessary to understand how to work with WordPress efficiently and correctly, it often helps just as much to step outside of our comfort zone and explore how other people are handling the same problems we run into.

Presented by Richard Tape in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

A tenth of a second can make a huge difference with how many people stay on your site. What about a whole second? Or two? Or *five*?

Find out what HHVM is, how and why it’s being used by the biggest sites on the Internet and how you can use it right now to improve not only the speed of your site and how that can improve your conversions.

• Slides

Presented by Michael Schroder in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

Benchmarking is an important practice for high-traffic sites, or even low traffic sites that may have high-traffic spikes.

What will happen to your site if it hits the Reddit front page? Without benchmarking and stress testing, there’s no good way to know how your site will perform under true load.

In this session, you’ll learn some of the basics of benchmarking, some good tools to get started, and when stress tests are the right tool for your site’s performance concerns. Finally, you’ll learn some common performance problems found through stress tests, and their solutions.

Presented by Katya Boudjelloud in Training Track (#820, upstairs).

One of the most difficult task for beginners once dealing with WordPress is to pick the right theme.  There are so many Free and Premium themes available on the market place now that it can be overwhelming and time consuming.  In this talk I’d like to share a few tips and share my shortcut to make this step fun and interesting.  I tell the audience how to plan their site and where to look for themes.  I also explain the main differences between Free and Premium themes.

Presented by Andrew Woods in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

The way software books and websites teach Object-Oriented Programming(OOP) is typically quite dull. It doesn’t have to be that way. Learning should be fun! I’ll teach you the fundamentals of OOP using robots from popular culture — and how to apply them to your WordPress themes and plugins. Whether you’re a novice developer looking to level up, or an experienced dev that wants to have a laugh – you will enjoy this talk.

• Slides

Presented by Reid Peifer in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

While WordPress as a whole has evolved in amazing and powerful ways, the mechanics of content creation have stayed pretty static for years. Title field, TinyMCE Wysiwyg, metadata inputs, and a featured image. These elements have been our building blocks, all presented in a relatively unchanged WP admin experience. The future of WordPress is going to depend on how that experience evolves and grows to meet the needs of content creators.

We’re going to discuss the recent explosion of page builders, panels and modules, visual editors, customizers and front end editors. Lets take a look at the pros and cons. What does it mean for content creators, designers, and developers? Even better, lets talk about what the future holds. I’ll use specific examples of how we implemented modularized dynamic content and rich long form editorial creation on enterprise clients including Fortune 500 retailers and Ivy League institutions.

Presented by Kathryn Presner in Training Track (#820, upstairs).

Visual Editor stopped working? Plugin update gone awry? Getting useful help when you’re stuck on a WordPress problem is not always as straightforward as it seems. This session will be packed with tips on how to ask for assistance in the WordPress support forums and other arenas – in a way that will let others help you more easily and effectively. We’ll also cover some handy techniques for basic troubleshooting on your own – before contacting tech support.

• Slides

Presented by Alycia Mitchell in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic.

Presented by Luiza Libardi in Training Track (#820, upstairs).

If you have tried WordPress.com and are ready to move to a self-hosted website, this talk is for you. It will go over some common questions, the basics of installing WordPress, migrating content and customizing your site.

• Slides

Presented by Kirsten Starcher in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

Web designers and developers are each specialists with their own priorities, needs, and focus. Sometimes there can be a communication gap between the two, leading to misunderstandings and frustration. How can you learn to speak each other’s language and ensure your projects run smoothly and without hassles? We’ll look at specific ways for WordPress designers and developers to set clear expectations, express your needs clearly, and understand what you need to deliver in turn, whether you’re working together on a simple implementation of a pre-built theme or doing a full custom site from the ground up.

Presented by Stephanie Hobson in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

CSS is awesome. Except when it’s not. From diagnostic styles to dev tools, we’ll cover a variety of techniques to help you determine if that unexpected behaviour is the result of a misplaced semicolon or if it’s time to file a bug report.

Presented by Mandi Wise in Conference Room (#280, downstairs).

WordPress offers a lot of power as a CMS, but all too often we can lose sight of the most essential of those three letters—the Content. Whether you’re a web designer, web developer, or end user of WordPress, potential pitfalls abound when planning for the structure and delivery of content is left until the eleventh hour. Using examples from real projects, I will demonstrate how taking a content-first approach to our WordPress work allows us to better harness the awesome power underneath its hood, and save ourselves and our clients from massive (and expensive!) content headaches down the road.

Presented by Nathan Shubert-Harbison in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

I’ll give an introduction to the WordPress REST API and Angular.js in the form of a high level overview (why they exist, what problems they solve, the future of the REST API), and proceed to walk through building theme components with the REST API and Angular.js. I’ll discuss the concerns leading a theme author to chose to build asynchronous components, such as caching issues. Live examples of REST API/Angular.js components will be discussed, with examples of how I built them. Time permitting I’ll conclude by building a REST API/Angular.js theme component live, though will likely do it Emeril Lagasse style (here’s a directive I baked earlier!) due to time constraints.

Presented by Jeremy Felt in Atrium (#825, upstairs).

Multisite is often treated as one of the dark corners of WordPress and can be forgotten or managed poorly when developing public plugins or working on client projects.

Let’s pull back the curtain and shed some light.

We’ll cover the history of multisite from its early days as another b2 fork. We’ll walk through the structure and the load process to show how things really are straight forward. We’ll cover situations to be aware of and code to use when you are developing something for multisite.

And! We’ll cover the future of multisite and allow for some good Q&A, so bring your questions!