This year’s WordCamp focuses heavily on Gutenberg and the future of WordPress.<\/p>\n
Gutenberg<\/em> is the new visual editor<\/a> in WordPress 5.0<\/a>. It’s a dramatic change to the WordPress experience for both users and developers.<\/p>\n In light of the significance of this release, we’re working with each of our speakers to tie their sessions<\/a> back to the new editor.<\/p>\n ###<\/p>\n\n\t Presented by Andrea Zoellner<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t When we think about UX, we\u2019re often so focused on fonts, colors, and flow to think about those small bits of text that guide users through almost every part of a web interface\u2014the microcopy. Gutenberg makes it easier to craft engaging multimedia content and improve the user experience of your site. But what about the less sexy parts of a website like menu labels and buttons, error messages and interface instructions? These words may be tiny but they can make a significant difference in the usability of your design and affect crucial aspects of your site such as its conversion rates.<\/p>\n This presentation offers copywriting and communication tips that will immediately improve your user interface microcopy so your users experience is a more delightful and less frustrating one. The talk will focus on interface copy for end-users and note where elements can be edited with Gutenberg.<\/p>\n Copywriting tips, UX design basics, tips to improve website design<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Jesse Emmanuel (Jem) Rosario<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Gutenberg’s imminent arrival creates both excitement and uncertainty in WordPress users. On the one hand, its resemblance to <\/span>distraction-free<\/span><\/i> editors\u2014Medium, for example\u2014is a step forward. On the other hand, its impact on site building is massive. Aside from whether Gutenberg will be compatible across every single WordPress site, we also wonder if it spells the end of page builders or even WordPress consulting. This session is a forum for those questions.<\/span><\/p>\n We’ll assess Gutenberg’s opportunities and challenges and how we might prepare for it. We’ll especially look at Gutenberg’s content design opportunity and how it enables better content creation through <\/span>atomized<\/span><\/i> content. By modularizing content into <\/span>blocks<\/span><\/i>, we have the opportunity to approach content creation from the bottom-up\u2014something that’s more explicit in Gutenberg than in the current WordPress editor. Whatever your views regarding Gutenberg, come to this session for a nuanced look on what it has to offer and prepare for its imminent arrival.<\/span><\/p>\n Presented by Troy Fawkes<\/a> in Committee Room 1.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Can WordPress be the one stop shop for your marketing needs? Is it going to be there for you as you grow from a small business to a large one or will it let you down along the way? This session covers four critical digital marketing categories and how WordPress & Gutenberg support them through various stages of complexity.<\/p>\n Business owners, marketers, developers and designers will take away:<\/p>\n Presented by Thiago Loureiro<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t The goal of this session is to show how some of the most popular WordPress plugins are responding to, interacting with and supporting Gutenberg as well as what’s in their roadmaps. The plugins discussed include SEO (YOAST), page builders (Beaver Builder \/ Elementor \/ Divi), custom fields (Advanced Custom Fields), gallery sliders (NextGEN Gallery), forms (Ninja Forms) and others (TinyMCE Advanced, WooCommerce, etc.).<\/p>\n – Although it’s release is scheduled for 2018-11-19, the Gutenberg beta is supported by some major plugins – New features that Gutenberg enables in these plugins – Ideas on how Gutenberg can be used to enhance the editing experience<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Andrea Zoellner<\/a> in Committee Room 1.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t With the new Gutenberg editor, the possibilities for visually striking and engaging storytelling in WordPress have grown exponentially. For marketing content creators, journalists, and bloggers, harnessing the power of Gutenberg can improve the effectiveness of your messages, elevate your designs, and save you time.<\/p>\n In this talk, you’ll learn about current marketing trends in content design and how to put them into practice on your own site using Gutenberg. You\u2019ll learn blogging and page design tricks that make the most of the new editor and can help your content pop.<\/p>\n Presented by Rebeca Godin<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t How to use your WordPress site and Gutenberg with various digital marketing plugins to grow your business.<\/p>\n We will discuss how your WordPress site is more than a just website. It can be a great platform to turn your website into a digital marketing powerhouse. We will cover plugins for reputation management, email marketing, social media feeds and sharing, retargeting, SEO and analytics. You will learn how to use plugins we recommend to get the desired exposure to get business growth.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Ryan Moore<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Do you have a complex WordPress eLearning, eCommerce or membership site that uses lots of plugins? You’ve probably run into challenges getting them all working together. When a user makes a purchase, how do you give them access to 2 things? Or, when a user completes 3 actions, how can you automatically trigger a fourth? In this session, we’ll look at ways that tools can help you build and automate workflows like these to make your user experience as seamless as possible as well as keep your admin effort to a minimum. We’ll also look at the implications arising from the release of WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg.<\/p>\n Presented by Christie Witt<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t We migrated 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress. Learn how I assessed the business processes beforehand, conducted a company-wide process audit and implemented improvements involving the client services, business account managers, sales, finance, marketing and IT teams. I will also discuss how I built the CRM requirements and worked directly with the CRM developers to track and automate reporting of the various website statuses such as cancellations, suspensions, and brand new website build requests. Finally, learn how I would have evaluated the impact of Gutenberg on the migration had it been released prior to the project.<\/p>\n \u2022 How to assess the big picture around website processes \u2022 How to work with different teams within a large corporation to educate them on business process updates \u2022 How to work with the older generation on selecting website templates for migrations \u2022 How a multi-site instance was set up for the migration of 1,300 websites<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Mike Demo<\/a> in Committee Room 1.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Change is hard. For a developer, changing our workflow is especially difficult. In his book,\u00a0Who moved my cheese?<\/i>, Dr. Spencer Johnson uses an allegory to teach healthy coping mechanisms for change. When it comes to choosing a CMS, developers rely upon the tools with which we’re most familiar. Traditionally, WordPress doesn\u2019t make breaking changes. But with the upcoming release of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0, how can we realistically adjust both our attitudes and our workflows?<\/p>\n What if WordPress forks? What if it forks several times? How do page builders fit into a Gutenberg world? Will my favorite plugins adapt and how? Will my clients\u2019 sites break?<\/p>\n It\u2019s okay to ask questions. Learning to anticipate, monitor, and adapt to change leads us to a healthy place of positive acceptance.<\/p>\n In this talk, we will spend some time discussing the actual risk-benefit assessment of WordPress 5.0. You will leave with a better outlook \u2014 guaranteed.<\/p>\n Presented by Juan Pablo Gomez<\/a> in Committee Room 1.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Released last year,\u00a0CSS Grid<\/i>\u00a0changes everything for the web and the WordPress communityIt means that, for the first time, we can think of layout on posts and pages as two-dimensional and fully responsive.\u00a0CSS Grid<\/i>\u00a0is not another plugin hack or bootstrap patch. Quite simply, it’s the solution for which designers have been asking. It is here to stay and right now is the perfect time to learn it.<\/p>\n Why CSS Grid? How to use Grid? When to use Grid? Demos!<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Adrian Tobey<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Lead generation, page builders, email marketing, customer management and advertising are marketing tools that have exploded in number and popularity because of SaaS, the cloud, has made them inexpensive to build with low initial subscription costs. With a 100 different cloud based platforms offering 14 day free trials, rarely does someone looking for the latest and greatest in marketing tools think of WordPress.<\/span><\/p>\n That’s a problem because WordPress provides some of the best marketing tools and the lowest costs. With WordPress, you can build sophisticated eCommerce stores, send emails, and create automated follow-up. For example, there are literally hundreds of lead generation strategies and WordPress offers website builder the most effective SEO markup.<\/span><\/p>\n So why are people going to the cloud when they could be getting the same or better for less or free with WordPress? It’s because the cloud currently offers a better user experience.<\/span><\/p>\n With the advent of Gutenberg, a new era is beginning for WordPress, one that marks a new focus on providing a greatly improved user experience. With it, you can make your vision come a reality.<\/span><\/p>\n In this session, whether you’re a developer or not, I’m going to share with you tips and strategies that will help you create a better user experience for your plugin, your theme or your site so you can compete with the SaaS tools and make WordPress a better place for everyone.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Ryan Meghdies<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Most websites are only using SEO to target 30% of available traffic. This is a practical presentation that will help you identify how that missing 70%, the SEO techniques to integrate it into your web design, and, finally, how Gutenberg makes the development far more effective. You’ll also learn to identify easy SEO wins for your business and how web design and SEO are so closely related.<\/span><\/p>\n How do I prepare my website and marketing for <\/span><\/i>Voice Search<\/i><\/b> and Google’s <\/span><\/i>Knowledge Graph<\/i><\/b>?<\/span><\/i> In recent months, these have become very popular topics. Businesses want to stay ahead of the curve so their lead generation does not fall behind \u2013 online marketing is key to their success. As we look into the future of WordPress with Gutenberg and SEO, it will become clear what search engines are looking for from you and how it directly relates to the 70% we’ll be uncovering together.<\/span><\/p>\n Key Takeaways:<\/span><\/p>\n Presented by Anthony Burchell<\/a> in Committee Room 1.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t In this talk, I will outline the story and what we learned from building the\u00a0Playlist<\/i>\u00a0block for the Gutenberg editor. We will explore both the epic wins and failures in the course of building our first block. If you are learning\u00a0Gutenberg<\/i>\u00a0or\u00a0React<\/i>\u00a0and have hit road blocks in understanding the flow, data or tools available, this talk will clear the air on many of those issues. We\u2019ll explore local development tools and design patterns used in block creation.<\/p>\n If there is one takeaway from this talk, it is that Gutenberg isn’t scary.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Thiago Loureiro<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t This technical session is for developers as well as users with at least a little coding experience. After a brief introduction to what Gutenberg is and what it can do, the presentation will show simple bits of code and demonstrate how these bits of code translate into a Gutenberg block.<\/p>\n Presented by Brian Rotsztein<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t The basics behind search engine optimization (SEO) and high rankings in Google haven\u2019t changed much in the last decade. While both on-site SEO and off-site SEO tactics remain important, newer areas of focus have come into play. Topics such as content quality, website speed, security, design, the <\/span>Knowledge Graph<\/span><\/i>, artificial intelligence, algorithm updates and Google mandated changes should be considered by anyone looking to stay up to date with SEO. This session will discuss some of the latest trends that site owners and managers should be aware of.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Presented by Doug Sheppard<\/a> in Committee Room 2.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t WordPress makes dozens (or hundreds) of SQL queries every time it serves a page. Every single one of them involves MySQL, and many of them hit the disk. Learn how Redis can turn those hundreds of queries into a handful, speeding up your site and reducing the load on your database.<\/p>\n Along the way, you’ll learn about WordPress transients (a way of storing data temporarily in the WordPress database), see the world’s most technically-compliant cache, and learn secondhand about server crashes (so you don’t have to learn firsthand).<\/p>\n In the session, you will receive the preliminary results of experiments to evaluate the impact of Gutenberg<\/span> on a site’s database load. For example, does the way Gutenberg blocks are stored or the standardization of blocks reduces the hits on the server?<\/p>\n In this talk, you’ll learn:<\/p>\n Presented by Robin Macrae<\/a>, Jacques Surveyer<\/a>, Thiago Loureiro<\/a>, Mike Demo<\/a>, Anthony Burchell<\/a>, Andrea Zoellner<\/a> in Council Chambers.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t Join us for an open-ended question and answer session with a panel of our speakers and WordCamp Toronto organizers, moderated by Robin Macrae<\/strong>. The one topic we will discuss is adoption strategies for individuals, business and enterprises and other practical issues in the changes brought by Gutenberg.<\/p>\n Come and tell us whether you\u2019re stressed, elated and\/or resigned and we\u2019ll do our best to put Gutenberg into perspective for you.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\tCopywriting for Better UX\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tGutenberg and the Content Design Opportunity\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tThe One Stop Marketing Shop: Gutenberg’s Marketing Toolbox\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tOur Beloved Plugins and Gutenberg\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tStorytelling with Gutenberg: How to use the new editor to boost your blog\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tWordPress as a Digital Marketing Hub: Gutenberg Edition\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tBuilding and Automating WordPress Workflows\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tMigrating 1,300 websites from HTML to WordPress, a business process case study\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tWho Moved My Editor? Addressing Gutenberg Facts and Fears\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tCSS Grid, Gutenberg and the future of Layouts\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tDemocratizing Digital Marketing. Why We Need To Create A Better User Experience.\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tGrowth and the Future of SEO using Gutenberg\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tBuilding Gutenberg Blocks, the Playlist Block Story\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tBuilding my first Gutenberg Block\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tCurrent Trends in SEO For Businesses and Bloggers\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tFast and furious: using Redis as a WordPress object cache\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
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\n\t\t\t\t\tGutenberg Strategy Panel\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\tMaking websites accessible and complying with the AODA\t\t\t\t<\/h2>\n\n\t\t\t\t