Luca Sartoni is a media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background. Thanks to his extensive experience in different business environments, from SMEs to large corporate projects, Luca helps companies scale up their business adopting data driven strategies. He does not believe in Santa Claus, magical spells and everything that is not backed up by facts. Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic.

In addition to his consulting background, Luca is a well renowned blogger and a speaker in the online communications industry.

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Presentation: Powering Business Sites with WordPress

“I’ll be addressing all the code poets, the WordPress consultants and business owners who powers their business sites with WordPress. I’ll be showing them how to define their business goals and structure a methodology based on WordPress to implement all the tools to meet those goals. I’ll be covering case scenarios: restaurants, gyms, local businesses, consultants, pro-bloggers, etc.”

Dawn Comber: “I am copywriter, providing web content and content strategy to small businesses, non-profits and individuals. I also teach monthly LearnWP WordPress workshops in Toronto with Ruth Maude (we’re doing a joint session).”

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Ruth Maude: “Hi I’m Ruth of Dandelion Web Design. I’ve been designing and developing web sites since the late 1990′s. I also co-teach LearnWP WordPress Workshops in Toronto with Dawn Comber.”

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Session: Website Assessment Clinic

Let two seasoned experts review your website and provide on-the-spot advice and insights into ways it can be improved!

This two hour session will give you feedback on your existing website with practical recommendations to improve it. Website assessments will include reviewing usability, messaging, SEO (search engine optimization) and design. We’ll address the principles of each as we review the websites of participants in the room.

James is an accomplished, forward-thinking marketing professional with 25+ years of multi-disciplinary experience in marketing and marketing communications companies serving high-profile, global brands and B2C clients in consumer packaged goods, durables, transportation, telecommunications and financial services. He has been involved in digital for more than ten years, first as President of a direct marketing agency in San Francisco, where he led the evolution of the agency from traditional direct marketing to digital.

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Presentation: WordPress for Designers

WordPress for Designers provides an overview of what sits under a WordPress site, so that designs won’t be in conflict with WordPress’ inherent capabilities, and can efficiently design effective WordPress themes that are equally efficient to build. The presentation is broken into four sections: how web sites are built, how WordPress functions, implications for designers, and tips, tricks and pitfalls.

“I’m a software developer at Alley Interactive with a background in digital media and journalism. I’ve built sites with WordPress since 2009, and prior to Alley, I was a web developer for Religion News Service, a nonprofit news organization.”

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Presentation: Writing Cleaner, Sturdier Code With Unit Testing

This session will gently introduce unit testing and the tools involved in it. We’ll set up your development environment and scaffold unit tests for your code with WP-CLI, write your first tests with PHPUnit, and learn more about unit testing with the core test suite.

“I spend my weekdays designing and developing with the great team at Modern Tribe. At work, I’m at my best with a coffee in my hand and death metal in my ears.”

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Presentation: 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.

“I run a small web consultancy in Syracuse, NY, USA, with core areas of expertise including WordPress, Ruby on Rails development, and web design, marketing, and project management.”

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Presentation: Sass and WordPress

“I’ve used Sass, the CSS preprocessor, more and more lately in my work, particularly after authoring an online course on the topic. My presentation would highlight the benefits of using Sass, particularly with WordPress: code organization and reuse, leveraging the power of outside libraries, more-efficient update and redesigns in the future, and more.”

Paul is a Senior WordPress Full Stack Developer from Toronto he works on variety of WordPress for simple plug-in and themes to large scale WordPress VIP projects.

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Presentation: Setting up Vagrant for Unit Testing

Learn how create and run unit tests using a Vagrant development server. We will cover creating units test in core, Plug-in and Themes. We will cover the basic phpUnit commands.

Alan Lok is the principal owner of WirelessLinx Inc., providing consultant services to business small and large including Trader Corporation, University of Toronto, Toronto Region and Conservation Authority, Grassriots and many others. Previously he was the YellowAPI Developer Advocate at Yellow Pages Group, and have worked almost every job in a software development shop.

In his spare time he cycles, dabbles in DevOps work and teaches piano. Alan is obsessed with gadgets and always try to find the latest tech ‘toy.’

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Presentation: Pick the right CMS for your job

Ask yourself these questions and know when is the right time to pitch WordPress in your RFQ and defend your choice in front of your client. In the presentation, Alan will be sharing insights on where WordPress make things easy, highlight areas that other CMS packages may shine, and help clients dispel the myth that WordPress is for small sites only.

I’m a professional writer with a focus on technology and digital life. I am also the editor of LabTO, a site that covers Toronto’s tech culture. My work has appeared in publications such as The WHIR, TechVibes, Betakit, Biometric Update, and The National Post. I’ve also done commercial copywriting for HP and Intel, as well as local brands including Kobayashi Online.

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Presentation: A Quick Guide to Long-form Content on WordPress

Many of the most popular websites include long, in-depth content, and communities like Medium and Narratively are built around the idea that people crave long content – as long as it’s worth their time.

This presentation will go over some of the fundamentals of long-form content, what stories are best suited to long-form, and what tools and techniques can be used in WordPress to create compelling long-form pieces.