SEO for WordPress
In this session we’ll look at
- ways to use keywords within your WordPress site structure
- SEO plugins
- On-page SEO principles
- how to present web content for search engines and a human audience
Get your feet wet with WordPress!
A fun, quick intro to the basics of WordPress. If you are a beginner, wanting to try out WordPress for the first time, this is the workshop for you. We’ll be working with the free, hosted accounts available through WordPress.com. Some of the things we’ll look at: changing your password, creating a static page, creating a blog post, adding photos to a post, simple changes to the look of your site, etc. You should leave this workshop with an idea of how WordPress works and info on how to get started. It’s a great first step before taking an intensive in-person or online course.
Participants are asked to fill in a quick sign-up form before attending so that we can ensure there are enough TA’s to help everyone. Everyone will also need to sign-up for a free wordpress.com account before the workshop and bring a laptop; free Wifi will be provided.
This workshop will run from 1 pm until 3 pm.
Led by Shannon Smith of Café Noir Design, Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services, and Jeremy Clarke of Simian Uprising, with assistance from Al Davis of Telus, and Christine Rondeau of Bluelime Media.
What we will cover:
- Changing your password
- Looking at options and preferences
- Using your own domain name with WordPress.com
- Create a static “About Me” page
- Add a photo to your “About Me” page
- Create a blog post
- Add a category to your post
- Add tags to your post
- Create a blog post that will appear in the future
- Create a sticky blog post
- Embed a YouTube video
- Dealing with comments on your blog
- Dealing with trackbacks on your blog
- Using the QuickPress bookmarklet
- Make a back-up of your site using the Export tool
- Create an “About Me” widget
- Modify the main menu
- Choose a new theme
- Changing the background and header image
- HTML and CSS basics (if time allows)
- Modifying a theme (if time allows)
- Where to get more help
Using WordPress to Build Interactive Games
We have all known WordPress as a blogging platform. We have seen it emerge into a Content Management System.
But building interactive games? Can it do that? Emphatically YES!
This session will dive into the concept of using WordPress as the data-handling backbone of an online interactive game scenario.
Especially with the emergence of Custom Content Types, WordPress has become more and more available and accessible as a general data-storage system and has all the raw materials that can go into building the foundation of an interactive game.
In this presentation, we will demonstrate how game logic can sit on top of the WordPress platform and send data to and from the WordPress system resulting in an interactive gaming experience.
We will be using a Javascript game engine, WordPress Custom Posts and WordPress User information within the game experience, and we will look to bring the game to ‘life’ with some basic Ajax.
Although we will be getting into some technical matter, this presentation will be enjoyed by anybody who loves to play.
Hands-On Multisite
Sunday’s workshop will be fully hands-on. We’ll walk through setting up multisite (either on a live domain or locally), then walk everyone through the various menus for the defaults, and show how to do some common tasks, possibly including domain mapping for when you want different domains for each site.
Bring a laptop to get the most benefit from this session. (Start with Alfred Ayache’s WP Sandbox: Running WordPress on Your Local Machine, and you’ll be able to install WordPress locally, to make it easier to learn how to use the software, and develop websites “offline”.)
WordPress Multisite
What can you do with multisite?
Ron & Andrea Rennick will highlight sites big and small using multisite in interesting ways.
Beyond the Guidelines: Theme Development Best Practices (Volume I)
As Theme developers become more accustomed to the Theme Review Guidelines, the overall quality of WordPress.org repository-hosted Themes has improved tremendously. However, ample opportunity for continual improvement remains. As the Theme Review Team continues to refine and improve the Guidelines with each new WordPress release, I believe that we can work together with the Theme developer community proactively to implement community-standard best practices. In this presentation, I will discuss areas for such best practices, including Theme inline documentation, proper copyright attribution and copyright declaration, Child-Theme readiness, proper enqueueing of scripts and stylesheets, and a few, other miscellaneous areas.
Managing your Editorial Workflow
A look into features, techniques, and plugins (like Edit Flow) that can help optimize your writing and editing workflow within WordPress. Whether you’re a individual blogger or a team or writers and editors, we’ll explore ways to maximize your WordPress efficiency in your journey to create great content.
PressWork – Designing in a Live Preview Environment
Using PressWork as a case study on how we have revolutionized theme frameworks with modern standards like HTML 5, and thinking outside the box with better UI/UX and live preview environment design for different types of users.
Mobile WordPress
All things mobile + WordPress. Dale Mugford will discuss the plugins and options available to present your WordPress website on mobile devices and tablets, as well as the mobile tools available to publish content on the go with WordPress.
Shared Hosting & WordPress
In this session, new users will learn the ins and outs of using WordPress with a shared hosting account including how to choose a service provider, registering a domain name, pointing or transferring an existing domain, how to set up WordPress, how to use FTP, and how to migrate a WordPress site from one provider to another.
How to Use a Child Theme to Protect Your Template
Sooner or later the theme you are using will need that little change to make just right for you. Learn how to create a child theme so that your personal changes won’t be overwitten by a theme update.
Building Mobile Apps with WordPress
We love WordPress because of the flexibility it offers and the ease with which it is possible to do very interesting things. This session will introduce the idea of building native-feeling mobile apps from within WordPress using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript. Distinct from just a mobile version of your site, a mobile app can actually be saved to the user’s device and be accessed offline. The possibilities are wide open for this new area of development. Besides offering lessons and insights for developing a mobile app from scratch, Trevor Mills from Top Quark will introduce a new plugin that can build an offline-capable, native-feeling app out of any WordPress custom post type.
PM101 – Project Management for Small Business
Project management for small business owners and freelancers who can’t afford project managers but end up doing it themselves. Reduce the amount of time spent on PM-type activities by learning some of the art and science of managing projects… setting expectations and clear communications, handling clients and resources, etc.
Creating Custom Backend/Dashboard Processes to Make Clients Happy
How to turn WordPress into a much more powerful CMS by implementing custom post types and custom taxonomies to better organize a website’s content, and make it more intuitive for clients to add and edit content. I’ll demonstrate how to create custom fields and theme option pages to allow clients to add and edit content in a much more controlled way.
Make a Living by Giving it Away for Free
A presentation about how developing a free charity plugin for WordPress changed my career from struggling to stable, and why it’s possible for anybody to make a living with WordPress. How developers can personally profit from supporting the platform and how their lifestyles (personal and professional) can be improved by supporting in small ways.
Don’t “Just paste this code in your functions.php”
Many snippets of code are available on the web to add functionality to your WordPress site. “Just paste this code in your functions.php”, used to be the refrain for adding those functions to your site. Now many themes are using the update system, which will overwrite the functions.php when updating and you will lose your changes!
A lot of functions that are key to your site operation, but not related to the theme, are also now being added to the functions.php. These functions should really be saved somewhere else, so your site won’t break when you change or update themes.
This talk will show anyone who uses WordPress how to easily create a very simple child theme, and a very simple personal plugin for saving theme changes and code snippets. It’s really very easy!
CUSTO(MY)IZE WordPress Themes with Photoshop
So many people use themes as-is when it’s easy to find image elements that can be changed or replaced with a little Photoshop work. Many people think they can’t easily customize their themes out of the box, but it’s just not true. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to customize out-of-the-box WordPress themes in Photoshop so you don’t have to use it as is.
How to Be a Weekly Blogger
How many of your prospective clients are primed and ready to hear from you right now? So what’s stopping you from posting to your blog every week and sending that content to your mailing list?
We will discuss:
• how one feature article can feed your blog and newsletter for an entire month
• how planning and batching can save you time
• how to provide more value in every single post
Building Better Plugins for WordPress
Learn how to build bigger, better, and cleaner plugins for WordPress in this interactive workshop. Participants will follow along with a tutorial plugin as they learn how to build their plugins with a class, use actions and filters, properly attach JavaScript and CSS, save options to the database and get their plugin ready for translation. (~ 1 hour)
Participants will also learn how to add their own tables to the WordPress database, how to build their own forms in the WordPress dashboard and how to use Ajax from both the viewer and administrator facing pages. (~ 2 hours)
Participants who attend this workshop are encouraged (but not required) to bring a laptop with a local web server that has WordPress installed so they can follow along. (See WP Sandbox.)
Beginner’s Guide to WordPress
This introductory session is geared toward bloggers, web designers and programmers who are new to WordPress. Even those who don’t know a Codex from a Cadillac will feel comfortable here. Delving into WordPress from a beginner’s point-of-view, we use unintimidating plain language to explain the fundamental concepts of WordPress, from themes, to widgets, to plug-ins. We go spelunking in the admin panel and show real-world examples of what WordPress can do.
Questions are welcome, and no query is too basic, so don’t be shy!
WP Sandbox: Running WordPress on Your Local Machine
WordPress is all about sharing your thoughts and disseminating your ideas. Sometimes, though, you just want to try something out, or test a plugin you’ve downloaded, and it’s not for public consumption. In this presentation, Alfred Ayache introduces you to XAMPP, your very own, very private web stack, which allows you to install WordPress on your computer. He’ll then show you how to setup multiple domain names (aka virtual hosts), and even carry around all this open source goodness on a jumpdrive.