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.

Lucas is a full-time high school student, a job which is sometimes more demanding than the freelance gig he pulls during evenings and weekends. He believes that humans are people, too, and that we move so quickly we forget that nowadays. Public speaking is one of his favourite activities. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

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Presentation: Designing Creativity

Design doesn’t have to be something that requires special talent, nor is it something limited to so-called “creative” people. Design is a skill, to be learnt and practiced like any other.

We’ll learn how to apply the principles of problem solving to a real design project to remove the necessity of a “creative” mind, and gain some tips for good design thinking along the way.

“I’m a Senior Web Engineer at 10up, the lead developer of the Pods Framework, a father/husband, a musicophile, and enjoy playing my Ukulele. I’m a developer who loves to make awesome things for people to do awesome things.”

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Presentation: The new Metadata Registration API

We will be going over the new Metadata UI / API project (http://github.com/wordpress-metadata/metadata-ui-api) and the far reaching impacts it will have once it reaches adoption into WP core in 4.2+.

“I work with small and medium-sized businesses to create amazing web experiences, usually with WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for as long as I can remember and I absolutely love traveling to WordCamps around the US and Canada to share what I’ve learned!”

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Presentation: WordPress Project Management 101

“I’ll be focusing on how you can manage a WordPress development project from start to finish: writing great proposals, working with project management software, learning to communicate with clients, and more.”