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.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to know they can add and adapt more types of content and styling into their templates and posts, and that they can do it easily.

When I first started branching into this area with my themes, it didn’t just give me control, it also opened up all these avenues where I could be more conscious and creative with my content presentation.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I’ve been in publishing (digital and print and even Apple Newsstand) for a long time, and I’ve always worked on methods or structures for delivering content, whatever the medium.

In publishing, you have a mission and you have content needs and a bunch of resources on one side, and you figure out how to put them all together to get the output with the most impact and the least effort. WordPress was the perfect combination of separation and integration and user-side ease for me, I loved it right away.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m a WordCamp Montréal regular, but this is my first WordCamp Toronto so I’m really excited to meet a whole new community.

Why did you decide to speak?

I get so much out of WordCamp presentations, so I’m happy to be on the giving side. And this topic is something I’m super into, and it isn’t covered very often at a relatively introductory level – most similar talks go straight to Custom Post Types and Custom Taxonomies instead, skipping the in-between stages that I think can sometimes be the missing link to leading someone to that next level.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Advanced Custom Fields, every day of the year.