Category Archives: Featured Speaker

Featured Speaker: Mark Kelnar

Mark came to WordPress as a developer and from a backend perspective around version 2.7. Initially to develop a few plugins for personal projects. After a few years of developing a sites for friends and diving in the WordPress community in Austin, WP Engine was born and he joined the project to take over platform and infrastructure development. This provided an opportunity to work with thousands of WordPress installations on a daily basis for a few years now.

Presentation: Adding Source Control To Your Code Life

Adding Source Control To Your Life is a discussion about using revision control in your plugin and theme development.

Editor’s Note: I think we typo’d Mark’s presentation title in the schedule… sorry Mark!

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Featured Speaker: Paul Bearne

Paul is a forward thinking developer, with over eight years experience in an international team.

He has in-depth knowledge of commercial & IT issues. Accustomed to delivering state of the art, Ajax based internet business applications for a diverse audience.

Delivering complete solutions, using WordPress as a CMS platform, that create an experience that delights and rewards the user whilst effectively meeting business needs.

Presentation: How to Set Up a Vagrant Development System

Vagrant is a tool to create and manage local virtual machines that provide local development web servers.

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Featured Speaker: Honrio Cham

Radii started out in web design and development over 14 years ago after the dot com boom, back when “old school” programming was the norm. When we got into WordPress seven years ago, it blew us away with everything we could do with it – it’s proved to be much more than just a blogging platform and small-scale CMS – and we’re still exploring how we can use it better. Along the way, we’ve deployed implementations for small to mid size companies all the way to nationwide projects using WordPress, including complex projects for which WordPress wasn’t the obvious solution–but it was the best solution.

Presentation: WordPress for Big Business

Every project has its own unique requirements–some of them more “unique” than others. And sometimes the solution sits right under our noses.

Such is the case with WordPress. Everyone knows it excels as a blogging platform. No one would think twice about implementing it as a CMS for a small business. But what about using it for nationwide projects with daily users are anticipated to grow to the thousands?

Can WordPress actually go beyond its reputation as a small-site CMS? Or are the myths more founded than fiction?

In this presentation, we explore the big business applications of WordPress, sharing how we’ve used it in the past and shining light on its potential. Designed to help web entrepreneurs think outside the obvious, we’ll discuss the opportunities WordPress presents for big business, tips for pitching WordPress, and the best practices we’ve discovered along the way.

After all, there is one limiting factor of WordPress: your imagination.

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Featured Speaker: Jared Novack

Jared is the founder of Upstatement, a web design firm located in Boston that specializes in responsive websites for media companies (like BostonGlobe.com which they designed in 2011). At Upstatement he directs projects and uses WordPress to build and prototype sites. Jared was formally the newsroom developer at the Houston Chronicle and Boston Globe and an adjunct professor at MassArt. He graduated from Syracuse University in 2006 with a BA in Computer Art.

Presentation: WordPress Templates are Broken! (but we can fix them)

In my talk I’ll be covering Twig, a popular open-source template language for PHP. By integrating it with WordPress (via the Timber plugin) developers can take advantage of a dramatically simpler theme development process that reduces errors, speeds-up coding and makes it easier to work with front-end designers.

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Featured Speaker: Denise Williams

Denise Williams has been living the logistics of tech-reliant content delivery for 15 years. She produced pioneering websites and internationally-distributed print magazines on girls skateboarding and self-righteous book reviews from the late 90s through the mid-2000s and has directed production for a wide range of print and digital publishers, from alt-weekly newspapers (like the Santa Barbara Independent) to luxury custom publications (like Mercedes-Benz) to iOS Newsstand magazines (like Reader’s Digest).

These days, she works as a digital project consultant and builds custom WordPress themes for business clients at her company Odeler Services in Montréal. Follow her at @lettergrade.

Presentation: Control your content presentation by breaking out of the_content field

I’ll be talking about the different techniques you can use to add more content areas to your posts and pages, using templates, custom fields, custom post types, et cetera.

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Featured Speaker: Terry Heenan

Terry created his first WP website in 2008 to promote a business and was immediately captivated by its ease of use. He attended his first WordCamp in 2010 and was motivated to take a 2 day WordPress training course.

He is deeply indebted to the “open source” movement and the contributions that make learning about WordPress available. Terry has been an active member of WordPress Meetups since January 2012.

Presentation: Use WordPress to become a Social Proprietor

I want to demonstrate the power of WordPress so that the audience will understand the various ways they can present their business story on the web. To go beyond the 5 minute install and choosing a theme, to understanding how to engage their audience and build an economical website.

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Featured Speaker: Jordan Quintal

Jordan Quintal is a 15 year web development veteran. He has been developing with WordPress for over 6 years now and will continue to advocate WordPress as a premium content management system solution.

In 2007, Jordan founded The Genius Web Media, which currently specializes in WordPress development and “”responsive”” technologies. The Genius Web Media has developed custom Themes and Plugins, and everything in between. Jordan has attended many WordCamps across North America and has presented at several across Ontario.

Presentation: WP-Admin for Beginners

My presentation will be a crash-course on the WordPress Administrative Area. To start, I will demonstrate how to access, and login to WP-Admin. From there, I will briefly summarize the Dashboard and what it can be used for. Then, I will quickly touch on the Media section, the Links section, the Comments section, the Tools section, and the Users section. Next, I will explain in detail and go through the Settings section and demonstrate how to update certain settings. Moving on, I will explain in detail and show a demonstration on how the Posts and Pages sections work. From there, I will explain and demonstrate how to operate the Appearance section and sub-sections. Lastly, I will explain and demonstrate how to manage the Plugins section.

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Featured Speaker: Richard Martin

Richard is an online entrepreneur focused on health services. Once he started to use WordPress, his online business took off and continues to grow at a robust clip.

He wants people to know that if they want to succeed online, then WordPress needs to be part of their online strategy. He is a WordPress evangelist.

Presentation: How Video Can Boost Your Traffic

I will be speaking about how video can drive quality traffic to your WordPress site/blog.

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Featured Speaker: Christopher Ross

Christopher loves WordPress, he loves that it lets him live a great life and he wants to teach others how to enjoy WordPress as much as he does.

Presentation: How WordPress let me quit the rat race.

We all dream of winning the lotto, but what if we don’t need to leave it to chance? Let’s talk about a frank truth. WordPress is awesome. Let’s talk about how I left corporate Canada behind, and how WordPress let me live the life I wanted.

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Featured Speaker: Brian Hoke

Brian has worked as a web developer at Bentley Hoke, a web development consultancy in Syracuse, New York, since 2000; he has worked extensively in WordPress for a number of years now. Brian finds that more and more of his work involves extending and customizing WordPress. He is particularly intrigued by the combination of client-side technologies like jQuery with server-side feeds in XML or JSON to enhance the user experience, both on the same WordPress installation and between foreign sites.

Presentation: Wordpress as API: how to distribute and share content for fun and profit

Twitter, Google, and other sites offer access to their content via an API, often via JSON. This presentation will explore how one might set up a similar API for a WordPress site: expose posts and other content with JSON, and offer client sites access via both embeddable code and through a more complex, authenticated API.

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