Why Didn’t You Tell Me That?
After running a WordPress based business for nearly 5 years, there are some things I’ve learned that would have been helpful to know going in. In my talk I’ll give you a handful of helpful hints that I wish somebody would have told me before we started.
Panel: Commercial WordPress Products
We’ll be kicking off our Sunday Business track with our only panel of the entire weekend. We are bringing together some of the great business minds from the WordPress community to share their perspectives on selling WordPress products.
- The panel will include:
- Reid Peifer – Modern Tribe
- Marc Benzakein – ServerPress
- Tony Perez – Sucuri
- Carl Hancock – Rocket Genius/Gravity Forms
- Ben Fox – Sidekick/WP University
- Panel Moderator: Kiko Doran
Designing for Interaction
Touch, gestures and voice control are quickly becoming more important for designers (and developers) to think about and design-for. Interaction can enrich a user’s experience of a product or service, and express character and feeling within those interactions. During this talk I will assist in equipping you with the process you need to design for interactive experiences on WordPress and on the web. How can we achieve clean, easy and scalable interactions that are optimized for every device? This talk will focus on current solutions from various experts in the field, as well as our best practices, and optional tools to use.
Slides: http://werkpress.com/sharing-wordcamp-mpls-knowledge/
Client First Development
Being a WordPress developer is about a lot more than just making a ‘functional site.’ In this talk we will examine what ‘client-first development’ means, looking at the role of Theme Options, the appropriate use of Custom Post Types and Custom Meta Boxes (including meta box descriptions). The end goal of this talk is to provide you with the tools to create custom themes (or plugins) that ease the management of content rather than hinder it.
Don’t Let Your Site Jump The Shark
Sometimes a good site goes bad. You start out with the best of intentions, then one thing leads to another and BOOM, Geocities.
Clients can make some dangerous requests, like adding 12 slideshows to the homepage, or loading 50 high rez images into a carousel. People can grow attached to a favorite animated GIF.
In this presentation we’ll be talking about using animation to add a little pop to a website, without blowing it up!
WP-to-JS and back again
WordPress is an amazing tool. JavaScript makes it even better. Learn how to push data from WP-to-JS and back again in this primer on AJAX. Key takeaways will be several methods making WP and JS work together as well as some tips and tricks for better performance.
Slides: http://werkpress.com/sharing-wordcamp-mpls-knowledge/
1 Million Downloads – Lessons Learned Growing a Plugin
Since adopting the predecessor to Breadcrumb NavXT in 2007, I have grown immensely as a plugin developer and maintainer. Along the way, I have faced obstacles, made mistakes, and had fun. This session will cover what I have found that works, and the mistakes I made as I’ve grown Breadcrumb NavXT into a plugin that has been downloaded over 1 million times. Topics covered include: support and release strategies, workflow and tools, and WordPress plugin coding tips.
Slides: http://slides.mtekk.us/
Making Your Website Business Friendly
Beautiful websites are great but if you’re in business, there are essential components your website must have to ensure success in business.
Does your website have what it takes to grow your business?
Slides: http://diywebsitecoach.com/business-strategy/ready-for-business/
Creating Color Palette Options within a Theme using Sass
I’ve found in my theme development the need to have different color palettes available as options to choose from within my themes. Over time, I’ve developed a process for doing this using Sass and the theme customizer.
We’ll go over this process to create color palette options within a theme’s customizer using a combination of Sass lists, Sass’ @each loop, a custom Control class and a filter hook.
Back To Square One: Building A WordPress Starter Development Kit
The back-end and front-end teams at Modern Tribe set out to create a WordPress starter development kit in order to speed up development and help keep uniformity among projects. So, how did we build it? Why didn’t we use “________” framework instead? What does the code look like? Is our universe real? What is true happiness? This session will attempt to answer at least 60% of these questions.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/windfarm/building-a-wordpress-starter-development-kit
So Long Fixed Templates and Thanks for all the Fish: Modular Content
We’re at an interesting point in the evolution of WordPress. Huge advances have been made in the way that we build themes and plugins. Leaps and bounds have been made in performance, security, and the marketplace as a whole.
But up until recently, the way that we actually create, organize, and present content has been pretty stagnant. Wysiwygs and Meta Boxes for creating content. Taxonomies, P2P, and hardcoded templates for organizing and displaying content.
There’s a ton that you can do with that toolset. But we want to do more.
We want front end editing, page builders, and modular content. We want rich landing pages, and interesting layouts. We want flexibility. We want to empower authors and editors.
We want to lower the bar to awesome.
It’s a design challenge. It’s a theme challenge. It’s a dev challenge.
We’ll look at what’s out there today and what’s coming down the pipe. Hopefully this is interesting for people who create content, build themes, and work with clients.
Structuring Content in WordPress
Gone are the days where we simply throw all our content into the WYSIWYG and send it off into the world – in today’s age of unlimited devices, structuring your content is more important than ever. Fortunately, WordPress has many tools for you to break your content into manageable blocks that can be served up together on one page or divided and sent out to mobile, API, or anywhere else.
In this session I will talk about the planning process involved in discovering how your website’s content should be structured – be it a small site of 10 pages or a large site of 10,000 pages – and then look at the WordPress content types available to build our model into a functional, scalable, and author-friendly system. There will be no coding in this session, and it is appropriate to both beginners looking to understand content types, and seasoned developers looking to plan a thorough build process.
Where’s my Maserati?
There are a lot of steps between starting a business and buying a maserati. In our discussion, we’ll cover a few critical areas to consider as a new small business owner begins to hone their process. Walking through some of the common business mistakes and misconceptions can help get attendees on the road to growing their business and being more profitable.
We’ll cover:
- Estimating
- Time Tracking
- Analyzing Time Data
- Evaluating Profitability
Slides: http://werkpress.com/sharing-wordcamp-mpls-knowledge/
Pressgram: Daily Digital Publishing
Introduce yourself to Pressgram, the iOS application enabling bloggers, businesses, and others, to reclaim ownership of their online presence via high-quality image editing/filtering and an ease of story-sharing directly to WordPress blogs and social sites. Hear how you might best integrate this tool with a WordPress site and how you and/or your clients might benefit from its use.
You Don’t Need jQuery
As developers, one of the first things we do when starting a new project is enqueue jQuery and start writing code. That’s the way it’s always been, and works for you. But as devices get smaller, processors get slower, and web apps get more complicated, jQuery can cause some fairly serious performance issues. So let’s take a step back from jQuery and talk about ways VanillaJS is faster and simpler.
Picture this: WordPress images for responsive and high-density designs
Today’s designers and developers must format and code images so that they look great across a multitude of screen sizes and resolutions. This presentation will focus on how to ensure your next WordPress project has razor-sharp, responsive, imagery. Topics will include:
- How images are handled on high-density / Retina displays
- Which image formats to use, and when (jpg, gif, png, svg)
- Working with vector (svg) graphics in Photoshop / Illustrator and in the browser (XML/CSS)
- How to enable / work with SVG images in WordPress
Slides: http://alecrippberger.com/retina-images-presentation.pdf
WordPress Security – It’s all About the Basics
The key to website security is awareness, that’s what I hope to achieve at this talk. Getting down to the basics and sharing insight that very few can share through the experiences we have ascertained at Sucuri. Would like to share the latest threats, trends, and ofcourse some good hardening takeaways and recommendations.
Remote Project Management
There are lots of benefits and challenges associated with managing projects when your clients and your developers are separated from you by several time zones. I’ll go through what I’ve learned in the past year as a project manager working with people all over the world. Topics will include how take advantage of unique experiences and opportunities that arise from working outside of your geographical area, how to overcome language and cultural barriers, and tools you can use to keep your project on track and successful.
Slides: http://werkpress.com/sharing-wordcamp-mpls-knowledge/
Stop Giving S** Away for Free and Start Feeding Your Family!
I’ll share how I took my WordPress business from free side jobs to a development firm that supports my family of four. Ask me almost anything. If I can help people overcome their fears or speed up their learning curve, I’m game!
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/heatheracton/stop-giving-s-star-star-t-away-and-start-feeding-your-family
We Can’t Read Your Mind: How to find help for your WordPress problems
Having problems with WordPress? Are you having trouble finding answers? Do you need to reach out and ask for help?
In this presentation, we will cover how to make good support requests, what things to avoid when reaching out for help, and the resources the WordPress community has for everyone’s use that may answer your question for you.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/csonnek/we-cant-read-your-mind-how-to-get-help-for-your-wordpress-problems
All the Software that isn’t WordPress
A discussion of the software needed to run your freelance/agency business. IDEs to CRMs and everything in between. If you’re not sure you have all the pieces, or want to find out what options are out there, this session is for you.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/JulieKuehl/all-the-software-that-isnt-wordpress
How (and why) to Create a Child Theme
In this session, we will discuss what child themes are used for and outline the benefits of using child themes. We will walk through the steps to creating a child theme, and give a demonstration of using ftp (file transfer protocol) to add the child theme to a WordPress install.
Site Analytics in WordPress: Building for Success
Presentation Description: It’s ridiculously easy to slap some Google Analytics code on a WordPress site, and step away. But there is a lot more that developers and site managers/owners SHOULD do with analytics to show more obvious development ROI, make getting data easier and allow for ongoing growth without loss of data.
In this session, we’ll help developers and site managers integrate data collection with WordPress’ features to create powerful insights, including:
- Analytics checklists for new projects (including site migrations)
- Development best practices for data collection
- Google Analytics dashboard creation to cut through clutter and create actionable insight at a glance
- Considerations for use of Google Analytics Classic vs. Universal in WordPress, including key compatibility issues with collection JavaScript
- Additional options for data measurement beyond Google Analytics
Ideas presented will apply to both commercial and custom themes throughout the WordPress site lifecycle.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/JulieKosbab/implementing-google-analytics-in-wordpress
WPRBACOMGBBQ
WordPress’s Role Based Access Control? OMG BBQ!
In this session I’ll talk all about how WordPress user roles work, how you can completely break your site with them, and how you can extend them to do really cool things with plugins (using bbPress as an example.)
Plugin Monetization Options
So you’ve released a free plugin, or want to release a paid plugin/add-on — what are your monetization options, and what are the pros/cons of each?
I’ll cover my own experiences with sponsored plugins, building premium plugins (while running a consultancy), working for a premium plugin shop, and other lessons gleaned from the WordPress community.
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/nciske1/plugin-monetization-options-wordcamp-minneapolis-2014
Avoid Breaking All the Things: How to Develop Safely
Presentation Description: Have you ever activated a plugin just to see the White Screen of Death? Have you ever uploaded a file to a client’s site and realized you overwrote an important fix? Have you ever started a WordPress update and then had your site stuck in maintenance mode?
Most WordPress developers have done all of these things, probably more than once. In this talk, you’ll learn how to be prepared for situations like these, or even prevent them completely.
This talk is aimed at developers of any skill level, though more advanced developers might already be familiar with some of these best practices.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/aliso/avoid-breaking-all-the-things-how-to-develop-safely
Crypto 101: Demystifying the Cryptography Behind WordPress
Cryptography is one of the most important building blocks of the web — without it, secure communications would be impossible. Perhaps because of it’s importance, it’s also the most feared subject by the vast majority of developers.
In this presentation, I’ll tackle those fears, demystifying cryptography for developers of all ages and skill levels.
Starting at the beginning, we’ll build our way up to the high-level cryptography functions used in WordPress core. We’ll examine the components used in password hashing, SSL, and nonce generation and understand how, and why, we use different algorithms in different places. Instead of just discussing cryptography in theory, we’ll examine real life attacks and easy to understand code snippets.
At the end of the talk, any developer will have a basic understanding of how common systems work and a greater ability to understand when and why things go wrong.
Slides: https://getclef.com/crypto101 and https://getclef.com/crypto101-with-math
Presenting Accessible Video in WordPress
WordPress incorporates the powerful and flexible MediaElementJS library to handle audio and video files. It also includes oEmbed for many online video sources. On top of that, there are tons of plug-ins available for handling audio and video files. I’ll go through the ins and outs of making your multimedia documents accessible, what the issues are with the native WordPress methods and popular plug-ins, and show you how to make sure that you’re making your media available to as much of your potential audience as you can.
Although the presentation will cover a lot of technical issues and code, users of all levels will be able to walk away with vastly better information on making video accessible.
Let’s Get Sassy!
If you are a theme developer, using Sass or Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets is a time saving way to write your code and it is easy to learn once you are familiar with CSS. In this session, you will learn how to harness the power of variables, nesting, and mixins and take advantage of everything that Sass has to offer to write awesome code. In order to get the most from this session, you must have a good understanding of HTML and CSS.
https://speakerdeck.com/suzettefranck/lets-get-sassy-minneapolis-wordcamp
Passwords: The Weakest Link in WordPress Security
“The weakest link in the security of anything you do online is your password. It’s the key to your site, your email, your social networking accounts or any other online service you use. If your password is easy to guess, your online identity is vulnerable.” – The WordPress Security team
When we talk about WordPress security, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical details that give us the craziest hacks that make the best stories. In reality, though, most WordPress sites are hacked because bad habits — and, more specifically, bad passwords.
It’s easy to recommend better passwords, but this talk will cover the technology that is changing how the password battle is being waged. Background on botnets, two-factor authentication, SSL, and password rot will accompany actionable advice any user can follow to secure their WordPress site.
Slides: https://getclef.com/wcmpls2014
Creating and Promoting Compelling Content Through Blogging
There are many ways to add content to your WordPress website. You can add webinars, ebooks, case studies and even white papers. However, these can sometimes be very time intensive to create. One of the easiest ways I’ve found to get additional content into your website that both your visitors and the search engines will like is through blogging. But there are a few things to keep in mind when starting this kind of content creation endeavor.
In this presentation I will discuss how to define your website marketing goals, understand your audience and how to get your executives and your team members involved in the content creation, publication and promotion process through blogging. I will touch on what makes content compelling, how to generate topic ideas and how to taking action by executing an editorial and engagement calendar.
Of course, creating content is only the first step. Your content might be groundbreaking, but the search engines & prospective buyers might need help finding it. To wrap up this presentation, I will share methods for distributing & promoting your compelling content. An outcome of this presentation is that you have an understanding of the steps required to produce and then get your valuable content noticed by search engines, key influencers and your ideal customers.
Slides: http://www.scottofford.com/2014/04/creating-compelling-content-wordcamp-minneapolis/
Design Is In The Details: How Decisions Shape Communication
Learn from examples that show how specific design decisions influence UX and effectiveness. This will be a talk that goes through specifically what works and what doesn’t.
This session is for all non-designers (new and advanced developers, business owners, site dabblers, etc) that want to learn more about design and UX decisions to apply to their own work, or have better conversations with their team members.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/marktimemedia/design-is-in-the-details
How to Build a Sustainable Business Using the Freemium Model
Freemium is an excellent business model to promote your product and your brand. We’ll look at some of the strategies that work well with Freemium and some strategies that don’t work that well.
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/bftrick/wordcamp-minneapolis-2014-freemium-business-model
WordPress Tips & Tricks for the Busy Business Owner
You are a busy person with very little free time who runs a business, raises kids, and…oh yeah…you also manage your website.
As you have probably discovered (or will soon), website have a tendency to break and demand more and more attention from you as the years go on. This is not good for business or your sanity.
In this session, Toby Cryns will share WordPress tips and tricks that will make managing your web presence less of a time suck and will help you to avoid expensive errors that waste focus and money.
So, you want to build a theme?
Maybe you are just getting into creating WordPress themes, or maybe you’ve been at it a while but still feel like you’re missing something. The good news is that WordPress themes can range from small to big and from simple to complicated — they are what you make them! This talk will cover the essentials: template hierarchy, The Loop, custom queries, and how to get more information or guidance from the Codex when you’re stuck. Soon you’ll be writing themes faster than you can think them up!
Slides: https://speakerdeck.com/johnheimkes/so-you-want-to-build-a-theme
Getting Started with WordPress Development
In this lightning talk, learn how to take your ideas from your mind to your website with an introduction on programming with WordPress. “Where should I start?” should be a question you should bring and, it will be answered in this talk. WordPress is a powerful platform and with the right resources and a good starting point, you can really take advantage of the whole platform.
IA Essentials: How to prioritize, design, and present your clients content
The lifeblood of any website is its content. This presentation will cover how to take new and existing projects, identify what content is the most important, then design and present that information so your client’s site guides visitors in a clean and predetermined path.