Intended Audience: Users who want to experiment with WordPress on their computer instead of a live site.  (more…)

My presentation will focus on sharing practical tips and advice based on my experiences in becoming a core contributor. While there will be some technical aspects of how to contribute, my intention is to share what I have learned along the road to getting my first props and to provide practical, real-world advice on how to get into core contribution. My audience would be developers of any level who want to start contributing to core. (more…)

Our annual after-party will be taking place in downtown Toronto at the Duke of Devon pub. A short walk from Union Station, this’ll also be at the heart of our city’s annual Scotiabank Nuit Blanche festivities.

Address:
Duke of Devon Pub
66 Wellington St W
Toronto, ON
M5K 1H1

Join WordCamp organizers Brent Kobayashi, Tom Auger, Andy McIlwain, and guests for Agency Chat, a new livestreamed Hangout for agencies and web professionals.

Anyone who manage a WordPress site and with basic HTML knowledge should be able to create simple HTML and CSS sites using the WordPress API REST JSON to retrieve content; a simple approach to build brochure sites and landing pages. (more…)

“We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do. (more…)

Tips on how to improve the security of your WordPress site and develop better security posture. I’ll explore the motivations behind why WordPress sites get attacked and how to protect, detect and respond to these threats. (more…)

To start a company is a noble thing! To start an online company, nobler still. A distributed workforce (or even a workforce working in an online “space”) has special requirements. There are nearly endless possibilities where expansion and direction are concerned, but finding and maintaining a workforce in those environments is a task that can be made simpler through a few key components. (more…)

An excellent topic for developers using WordPress for the first time. Also suitable for people building a website for the first time. This is a case study of a first-time WordPress development project for the website defeatharper.ca. My talk will outline how the ideas behind the site evolved as the requirements changed and the environment it was designed to play in kept shifting. How did we manage the change? How do you keep forward progress in development? (more…)

Want a better-looking site, stronger writing skills and better visibility? You have a powerful resource at your fingertips: the WordPress community. Whether you’re a novice or seasoned professional, learn ways to tap into the community to make your site stand out. (more…)

“Content is EVERYBODY’s problem: it’s a problem for the content creator, and a problem for the developer. Without content, there is no website. Without the website there is no client. Yet.. how is it content always gets left for last? In this talk I will teach you the core practices of the field known as Content Strategy. (more…)

It’s time to give back. There are hundreds if not thousands of tickets on Trac, the official WordPress bug tracking tool, that are awaiting attention and patches. Let’s put the great talent that will be gathered at WordPress Toronto to knock this number down. (more…)

Keep contributing! keep giving back! keep coding, supporting, helping, documenting.

See the full write-up here.

In WordPress 4.1 the “Theme Customizer” was changed to the “Customizer” with the intent that it could be used as the interface for any settings for customizing WordPress themes or plugins. Very few developers are taking advantage of this built-in options panel. Through some examples, we will see how easy it is to use the Customizer API. (more…)

What makes websites, mobile apps, and other digital media products go from ‘good’ to ‘great’? Or ‘very great’? How about ‘really, really, really great’? In this session, we will be looking at the Kano Model to unlock the secrets of companies who have turned their products from a new market offering to something that captures their users in total delight. (more…)

Benjamin Moody: “As a developer of free plugins there is great excitement and pride when something you have put so much time in gains traction and starts to be used by 1000’s of fellow WP users. Along with this thrill is the sudden realisation that 1000’s of fellow WP users now rely on your plugin! (more…)

CSS preprocessors make developing clean and semantic stylesheets effortless. My talk will take someone through a basic structure for organizing Sass within a WordPress theme, using the Bones theme framework as an example. (more…)

Most small organizations have a challenge with how to leverage their basic WordPress site into a full marketing platform. My presentation takes the audience from a discussion about the marketing problems they face, to a digital marketing platform design pattern that they can use, and then ultimately through a discussion about which WordPress plugins they can use for the different components. (more…)

“In my years of developing and managing WordPress sites I’ve discovered that many end users don’t keep their sites as updated as they should. This usually stems from not being sure how things work and/or the fear of breaking things. (more…)

Presentation will cover: Why content is important; website content and how to start developing it; how blogs enhance a website and why not to be afraid of blogging; delve into blogging strategies, tips and topics; take a vertical dive into writing – basic concepts on grammar, sentence structure, voice, etc. to make content better; content driving SEO, with specific focus on the Yoast SEO plugin and how to use it. (more…)

An introduction to using Ecommerce with WordPress. Session attendees will have a working knowledge of how to set up a basic ecommerce store in WordPress.

This is the next step in Content Architecture. What happens when you have huge amounts of information or posts that can be put into more than one category at the same time? This talk will describe how you guide users from multiple paths to the same content. The intended audience are for those people who have their sites up and running, but need to rethink their content organizational structure. (more…)

In this session, we will be going over how to design and secure your site, so that your users trust your site (and you), and then teach you some basics on how to make sure that you aren’t betraying that trust. (more…)

A new wave of website tools now allow us web designers to collect an abundance of data on our users behavior and actually associate it with an individual. While we’ve been using general tools like Google Analytics to refine our user interfaces and page designs for a decade, we’re now able to actually understand how each individual interacts with our website. (more…)

A designer, a developer and a client walk into a bar… or more accurately, a meeting room. Hear from designer Avery Swartz, developer Linn Øyen Farley, and client Mark Aikman as they describe the process of getting the new Buddies in Bad Times Theatre website off the ground. (more…)

The reason you run WordPress is to publish content that people will visit. How do visitors find you? What do they like best about your website? Google Analytics is the best free reporting software you can get. This talk will introduce you to setting it up in WordPress, applying essential filters, and creating the best reports to measure and improve your website traffic. (more…)

Writing blog posts without a clear direction is typically a waste of time for bloggers and businesses that are trying to grow their audience. If you aren’t sure how to reach your ideal audience and need actionable tips to gain traction, this is the session for you. (more…)

A great website design is nothing without a developer to bring it to life, and a developer can only do so much with a design that’s not prepared properly. This talk is about helping designers help their developers help them. (more…)

Have you ever cried yourself to sleep unable to find the cause of a horrendous bug in your WordPress site? Cry no more, your tears will be reshaped as blinding swords as we explore uncharted territories laced with mystical creatures. (more…)

Think only coders can make a living using WordPress? Think again! There are a surprising number of ways to make a career using WordPress without knowing a single line of code. This presentation will tackle some of the barriers that discourage beginners from using WordPress professionally, like a lack of technical skill and feeling like an impostor. (more…)

This is not a marketing presentation on how to get more conversions. In this presentation we’ll walk through best practices for integrating A/B testing tools and plugins like Visual Web Optimizer and Optimizely for WordPress. We will also look at how to properly setup template pages, embed tracking codes and how to manage your content and media for testing across multiple devices. (more…)

You’ve bought a fancy new WordPress theme, but now your site looks like everyone else’s. So how do you make that fancy new theme look a little bit more… you? You create a child theme. Child themes build on top of the original theme, letting you change as much… or as little… as you want, while keeping all of the snazzy theme options and functionality built in to the parent theme. (more…)

There are many plugins that can help your site to be optimized for the search engines. However, knowing the basics and some of the insider tricks can help to beyond what the normal plugins can do. (more…)

In my travels, I have discovered that there is not much documentation on using CSS3 specifically in WordPress. While not many of the new CSS3 modules have reached official recommendation by the W3C, support is very good across all of the latest browsers. (more…)

You may have missed it; the biggest update to the HTTP protocol in over 15 years was finalized this year. The long awaited HTTP/2 update is finally here and you can take advantage of it now, but what does this change mean for you, a builder of the web? (more…)

The rallying cry for WordPress has become an Apple take-off “there is a free plugin for that”. So the premium plugins have to offer substantial value to win over developers. Here are two image grid plugins, Justified Image Grid and Essential Grid, that offer just such value. (more…)

The introduction to using WP-Cli, including: How to get it setup. Some helpful basics about the shell/command line. Some of the very useful things you can do with WP-Cli. Audience is Power users or administrators.

“But this worked the other day!” We’ve all had those moments (maybe you even had one today). It’s so frustrating when things that used to work break. Sometimes, you feel a bit silly. Other times, you’re ready to flip a table. Well, put that table back down! (more…)

Understanding how HTTP works fundamentally is a huge help when dealing with REST APIs which is becoming a huge trend. Learning about HTTP in general and then how to use it with WordPress will allow users to communicate with services like Twitter and will allow them to better understand the WordPress API. (more…)

“Online storytelling continues to evolve, with more complex and engaging forms appearing every year. What began as long-form online news articles has branched off in diverse directions, ranging from websites that expand the universe of an upcoming Hollywood movie, to a loose fabric of apps and sites that together reinterpret a classic Victorian novel. (more…)

Managed WordPress is a vibrant category of web hosting that specializes in doing 1 thing only: ensuring your WordPress websites are reliable, secure and well-maintained. (more…)

If we had a dollar for each time someone asked us which plugin to use for a multilingual WordPress site, beer would be on us for everyone attending our talk. At this time, there’s no be-all end-all answer to the multilingual question. (more…)

Migrations can be a scary thing with so many things to do and think about. I’m going to talk about the common tasks to have on your checklist before moving from one host to another. Also, I’m going to discuss how to migrate your site from a local install up to a publicly viewable server. (more…)

Many new users of WordPress are confused with and when pages are used and when posts are used. Are posts made to pages? Are posts pages in a site or blog? It’s such a mystery. In my session, we will solve the mystery of pages vs. posts with the help of Scooby Doo and the gang from Mysteries Inc. (more…)

For all of its simplicity, WordPress requires many pieces to come together to end up with a functioning, complete web site. This talk will take attendees through a visual roadmap that acts like the photo on a puzzle box to help you pull it all together. We will review a series of diagrams of the environment in which WP is installed as well as visual guides to find the right place inside WP to make the changes you need. (more…)

So many devices, so little time! Learn how to efficiently and effectively design your website so it will look amazing… from mobile to big screen (and everything in-between)! A combination of strategy, design and code tips for designing for all devices. a little something for everyone (and most technical levels).

WordPress has built-in support for storing location information on posts, but no real way to make use of it. The Geo Mashup plugin enables deep, powerful geolocation in WordPress, letting you easily add geolocations (coordinates) to almost any content type. (more…)

The talk continues with an interactive, hands-on workshop.

See the full write-up here.

In the field of Information Architecture (IA) and User Experience Design (UX), there is a practice known as Usage Modeling, which maps user scenarios and stories to business priorities. This technique has been traditionally employed in software development to help define the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for first candidate release. (more…)

Did you know the average user will wait only 2-3 seconds waiting for a webpage to load before abandoning it forever? Having a fast website is critical to its success. How do you ensure your site loads fast and reliably, to all kinds of users around the world? In this presentation we’ll discuss seven strategies for increasing your WordPress site’s speed. (more…)

Speeding up a WordPress site (or any content site) is economical, boost rankings, and most of all, improve the user experience. We will briefly discuss the LAMP stack and present some strategies to make your site more speedy or suck less if you are inheriting a mess. (more…)

We all have created the odd WordPress that has turned out to be fast but how do we do this each and every time? In this talk I am going to explore some of the techniques and choices that will make your site feel fast and also talk about how to automate / streamline your development process so that you can do this each and every time, no matter how rushed you are.
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• Slides

Unit testing is an important part of verifying that code works as expected. However, how many tests do you need to write before you can be confident that you’ve done a good job? Where should you be spending your time writing tests, and how do you know when you’re done? (more…)

Education, Media, and Public Service are having their business and service delivery models disrupted. Sometimes, they haven’t fully internalized customer, student, or patient-centric business drivers, and sometimes they can’t justify budget line items related to user-centered design in this fiscally constrained environment. (more…)

Good plugins provide actions and filters to allow others (like you!) to modify some of their functionality without having to either create a whole new plugin from scratch or hack away at the original plugin, losing your changes when that plugin gets updated down the road. Learn how to find these actions and filters in other plugins, and use them to bend the plugin to your will. (more…)

This session focuses on the do’s and don’ts of using the WordPress editor. Also, it will provide tips to improve a user’s content creation process, as well as how to fix problems that can occur.The intended audience is beginning users. (more…)

Web Accessibility is not just for developers, there are plenty of things people can do to get involved. This presentation will focus on the different ways you can contribute to Web  Accessibility and how you can help spread the word. We will cover some Web Accessibility fundamentals and why it’s important. (more…)

WordPress Admins and Super Users may get to the point where they’d like to move to the next level of understanding and exploiting their WordPress systems – but talk of hooks, loops, and APIs is still gibberish that causes their eyes to glaze over. (more…)

WordPress upgrades, they bring us new features, faster sites, and better security. But pushing that upgrade button can be a scary moment, unless you’ve ensured your site is ready and compatible. I’ll show you the best practices for ensuring your site is ready including a simple strategy that works whether you manage one site or hundreds. (more…)

Is your code vulnerable to SQL Injection Attacks, Cross-Site Request Forgery, or Cross-Site Scripting Attacks? Learn how to avoid letting hackers break your sites using these common techniques. Important for anyone developing writing their own themes and plugins in WordPress. (more…)

Communities—like the one we have in WordPress—don’t just happen overnight. For them to be successful, they take people to show up, contribute back, grow with it and most importantly to incorporate new people into the fold. It is ongoing, it requires attention and it needs people like you and me to speak up. (more…)

You have a plugin, theme, or site and suddenly your worst fear comes true; you get an E-Mail informing you of a security vulnerability. What should you do? How should you respond? What responsibilities do you have? What do you disclose and when? Find out how to handle these tense times and protect yourself and your users.
(more…)