Sessions

Presented by Philip John in Banjo – Room 103.

WordPress isn’t always as lean as you might like. In this talk, we’ll go through some simple steps you can take, without any development know-how to make your sites leaner and more responsive.

Presented by Rian Rietveld in Banjo – Room 103.

If you are a theme, plugin or core developer/designer you need to test your work for accessibility errors, but how to do this and what guidelines to follow (like: what is WCAG 2 AA)?

In this talk I will give you an overview of useful test tools, how to use them and how to integrate testing your development workflow. Also, I will give you tips on additional testing that can’t be automated, like using your site with only keyboard.

Presented in Contributor Day – Grand Ballroom A.

Presented by Josepha Haden in Guitar – Room 104.

Open source projects are sustained by volunteer efforts. This talk will look at the basics of open source contribution and how to find your place as a WordPress contributor.

Presented by K Adam White in Guitar – Room 104.

Webpack is a powerful tool for bundling, transforming and optimizing your JavaScript, CSS and HTML for front-end web applications, but it can be hard to get started, and even harder to understand what’s happening inside that build. A simple boilerplate might take a minute to build, and create a many-megabyte JavaScript bundle, before you even add any code of your own—but it doesn’t have to be this way. In this talk we’ll discuss what Webpack is doing when it creates your bundle, and how to inspect the generated code to understand the origin of build performance issues. Armed with that information we will then learn some simple ways to create smaller bundles that rebuild faster, to speed up your own development and to improve the experience for the users of your application!

Presented by Weston Ruter in Fiddle – Room 101.

This year’s heavy focus in core has been on WordPress’s next generation Gutenberg editor. With the call to learn JavaScript deeply, it’s no surprise that Gutenberg is written in a JavaScript-first architecture. Once Gutenberg and its building blocks are in core, focus will broaden to then include Customizer. The Customizer was the first JavaScript single-page application in WordPress (added in 3.4). With the focus transition from Editor to Customizer, while keeping a JavaScript-first mindset, it is important for contributors and plugin authors that the Customizer’s JavaScript API be demystified to facilitate the integration of the new block editing interfaces. In my talk I’ll delve into the inner workings of the Customizer JS API, show how to use React to build custom controls in the Customizer, and demonstrate how to use the Customizer to preview changes to sites that use React-based themes—including previewing changes on headless REST API-driven sites.

Presented by Alain Schlesser in Banjo – Room 103.

Wheels… we reinvent them on a daily basis. This is true in a lot of fields and activities, but it seems exceptionally common in WordPress development.
Computer Science has been around for longer than most people assume, and the simple truth is that most problems you could possibly encounter have been solved already… decades ago!

This session tries to give a brief glimpse into the timeframes and the usefulness of Computer Science as a discipline and wants to make the point for looking at known solutions first before reinventing the next few wheels.

Presented by Tessa Kriesel in Guitar – Room 104.

You know that Continuous something-or-other exists. Maybe you have even heard the terms Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment, but not much more than that. I was in your shoes just a few short months ago. I came, I coded, I conquered. Now I am breaking it all down so you too can feel confident with the basics of continuous integration and deployment.

I will cover the basics of how to setup Github and Circle CI with WordPress and configure deployment to a staging environment. We will cover continuous-jargon and break down yml and script files to better understand how it works and how you can start to use it with your projects.

Attend. Absorb. And you too can conquer.

Presented by Felix Arntz in Guitar – Room 104.

While a contributor day in the core team gives you a basic idea on how the development environment is setup and the processes involved, it is often hard to follow up on that. Trying to find tickets to work on is tough when there are almost 5000 open tickets around, and when your ideas are rejected for seemingly no apparent reason, frustration quickly becomes a factor.

This talk addresses what comes next: How do you spend your contributing time efficiently? How do you find access to developer groups? How do you make your ideas heard? Following up on your first contribution efforts is not always as straightforward as one may expect, and the goal of this talk is to prepare you for a beneficial long-term relationship as a core contributor, by presenting advanced techniques and clarifying expectations.

Presented in Contributor Day – Grand Ballroom A.

Presented by Kathryn Presner in Banjo – Room 103.

Discover ten handy tips in as many minutes for customizing your WordPress site with CSS. From quick techniques to hide elements you’d rather not see – to sneaky ways to add in extra bits of text, this talk for CSS newcomers will show you just how useful CSS can be. It’ll whet your appetite for more and suggest where to continue your CSS journey after the ten minutes whiz by.

Presented by Dmitry Mayorov in Banjo – Room 103.

Even the very simple-looking menu may be tricky to build if it is poorly designed. In this short talk, we’ll cover the best practices for creating website navigation and what to keep in mind when creating a theme or building a website for a client. When to use multi-level vs. single-level menus or sticky vs. non-sticky vs. mixed type menus. What accessibility challenges you can face and how to tackle them. Hamburger pros and cons. What to include in the menu and what to keep away. Buckle up, we have only 10 minutes!

Presented by Bob Visser in Banjo – Room 103.

Layout creation for the web in general has always felt, rigid, limited and artificial. Designing compelling responsive layouts for WordPress generated sites with long or unexpected content has been even more of a challenge…until CSS Grid and Flexbox was added to our design toolbox!

As Bob Visser will explain, CSS Grid is the final answer to all hacks and (most) inconveniences and can help to create more unique WordPress designs. Defined as a two-dimensional system for placing elements, it is the very first layout method that truly separates content from layout configuration. The built-in auto-placement, repeat and implicit grid generation features, together with explicit placement control, make CSS Grid very suitable for controlling layouts for dynamically generated content. On its turn, Flexbox is a great help for managing the layout for dynamically created page sections.

Bob will introduce you to the principles of this exciting new CSS Module, show demos of uniquely designed layouts and code examples of how they can be created for WordPress.

Presented by Michael Hill in Guitar – Room 104.

In 2002, the percentage of the population over the age of 50 was over twenty-seven percent. By 2020, it will be over thirty-five percent. The size of the 50 plus population will more than double in the next 35 years. Our nation faces a demographic revolution as 78 million boomers enter their retirement years. A baby boomer turns 60 every 7.5 seconds. This demographic shift will result in tremendous changes in the workplace, civic organization and healthcare. This segment is adopting and using technology faster than any other segment. And, they are the group with the most disposable income. Ignoring them and their needs is not just a bad practice, it’s bad business. More importantly, the things that can be learned from working with this audience can inform efforts with other segments. We’ll look at some of the unique aspects of designing, developing, and testing with this audience.

Presented by Sonja Leix in Banjo – Room 103.

If there is passion for innovation, things get done. This is often true for the WordPress Open Source project and smaller projects within.

The WCEU design team set a tall goal this year, beyond the usual design work for the event. We decided it was time to make creating and customizing a WordCamp site easy and intuitive, so we released a new WordCamp default theme for all. I’d like to share our goals, design consideration, and how we released the CampSite 2017 theme beta just before the event.

Presented by Tracy Levesque in Fiddle – Room 101.

If you’ve been paying attention to demographics released by tech companies, you will know the lack of diversity situation is pretty dismal in the tech industry. How has this come to be, and how does homogeneity hurt companies’ productivity and end products? In this talk, I present the research done regarding this topic and give proactive steps we can all take to help fix this situation. I believe the WordPress community has a unique opportunity to be leaders in making the tech industry more diverse — let’s do it!

Presented by Katherine White in Banjo – Room 103.

Developers who love to write docs are pretty rare. But documentation is a critically necessary evil throughout a site’s life, from initial development through to ongoing support and enhancements. How much documentation is too much? Not enough? As developers, how can we produce meaningful documentation that supports our code and sets it up for success once it launches out into the world… without making ourselves completely crazy in the process?

We’ll explore a structure for documenting your codebase, the components of strong documentation, and how these project artifacts evolve over time.

Presented by Chris Teitzel in Guitar – Room 104.

Have you been tasked to build the most powerful weapon in the universe? No? How about a hyper performant and scalable system integrating multiple services and workflows all corners of the globe? Are you new to creating and maintaining a system for WordPress to thrive in, but don’t know how to keep it safe?

Whatever your task is, architecture is key. And while putting an exhaust port on the reactor core seems like a good idea, trust me when I say it’ll blow up in your face later. “Death Star” security happens whenever a system relies entirely on an outermost security layer — and fails catastrophically when breached. Defense in depth is especially critical as a site becomes more complex, utilizing systems which may not all be on the same server.

We’ll be exploring methods strong enough to cross the public Internet, flexible enough to allow your team to thrive, and robust enough to avoid single points of failure. Layering your security into a project from the beginning at every step and every layer will help prevent a young Jedi shooting a proton torpedo through a hole the size of a wamp rat and destroying your hard work.

A talk for projects and teams of all sizes, this will be an interactive time filled with lessons learned and examples from the real world. Just promise that afterwards you’ll use what you learn for the good of the galaxy and that you won’t go build a planet sized weapon of mass destruction.

Presented by Jason Bahl in Fiddle – Room 101.

WordPress has successfully transitioned from a Blog to a CMS and now is becoming a platform for which anything can be built. However, the evolution is still continuing, and GraphQL is part of the platform evolution.

GraphQL is a query language spec that allows data from any system, including WordPress, to be queried as if it were a Graph of data.

I will walk through what WordPress as an Application Data Graph looks like, and how GraphQL can make querying data from the WP Application Data Graph easy, declarative and highly performant.

We will look briefly at how GraphQL compares to REST, some similarities and differences.

We will look at some examples of WPGraphQL in production on large publishing sites, such as DenverPost.com and SiliconValley.com.

We will dive into how to use GraphQL to query data from WordPress using the WPGraphQL plugin (https://github.com/wp-graphql/wp-graphql).

In this portion of the talk, we will look at demos of querying and mutating (writing) data in WordPress using a GraphQL IDE tool called GraphiQL.

Then we will discuss what benefits GraphQL provides for decoupled applications, the tooling around GraphQL that makes it a pleasant experience to work with.

Some benefits I will highlight are: performance gains over REST, the ability to request multiple resources without round trips to a network, tooling around GraphQL (such as GraphiQL IDE and other IDE plugins).

Presented by Marc Benzakein in Banjo – Room 103.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve been inspired by many people within the Community who are doing things about their health, both mental and physical.

This year I turn 50. I have spent the last few months getting into the best shape I’ve been in, in almost twenty years. It’s been a journey that included depression, programs that didn’t work, burnout, and unhealthy behaviors that impacted not only myself, but my family and my work.

In this talk, I plan to get down to the nitty gritty of what I went through, how I overcame it, and what I’m doing to continue down the path of both physical and mental health. It will be very personal, raw, honest, possibly uncomfortable at times (for me), and hopefully inspirational, as I plan to share not only my own story, but the stories of some of the others within our Community who have been through their own journey (with their permission, of course).

Presented by Christie Chirinos in Fiddle – Room 101.

You’ve heard of financial forecasting, but you’re not really sure what it entails. However, you do know one thing: planning is good.

Planning allows you to grow strategically, be prepared for setbacks, and prioritize your time. Would you be surprised if I told you that that’s also the definition of financial forecasting?

Ever wanted to talk about what might be the key economic indicators of the WordPress industry? This talk is for you.

We’ll take some really complicated topics in the world of financial forecasting and break them down into ultra-simple ideas using contexts that we, as developers or marketers, actually understand. You will walk away being able to define qualitative vs. quantitative forecasting, the Delphi method, regression-based analysis, moving averages and exponential smoothing, but all in the context of WordPress business-specific applications.

This won’t be a math-heavy talk – the goal here is theoretical understanding. Understanding how the models work in theory will unlock a powerful, high-ROI thought process: to apply what you already know about the work you obsess over, and use that knowledge to think like a forecaster in your decision-making.

Presented by Josh Pollock in Banjo – Room 103.

This talk will be given in a room that is specifically designed – as mandated by law – to be accessible to those with disabilities. Like our physical spaces, the web has accessibility standards too, but we don’t always take those seriously, as we’re not always legally required to do so.

We’re not all accessibility experts, but our job is to put valid HTML on a page. If 18.7% of the population can’t use what you create, are you doing your job? In this talk, we will look at attitudes that hold us back from creating web experiences for everyone. The point isn’t to complain, but to move paste these assumptions towards better understanding and to start learning. This talk isn’t being given by an accessibility expert, and you don’t have to be one to attend it, either. We’re here because we want everyone to be able to consume the HTML we generate.

Presented by Yoav Farhi in Banjo – Room 103.

For years, the WordPress translators community has needed to resort to painful compromises for languages with grammatical gender, where women are often discriminated by default. In this talk, I’ll present an addition to WordPress core that can make a huge difference and solve a decade-long problem.

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Guitar – Room 104.

“What do I need to learn to become a WordPress developer?” This question pops up in forums, social media, and everywhere else on a daily basis. I think a better question is “How do I prepare for a future that looks nothing like the status quo?”

Tech is changing at incredible speed, and what we consider important skills today may be meaningless a year from now. This talk is a discussion of what technologies are on the horizon, how the web and the internet will change, and how we can all prepare for a future with or without WordPress.

Presented by Vivek Jain in Banjo – Room 103.

“Best Practices for Client and Project Management” is a subjective topic because everyone has a different opinion about how to develop the needed skills. Some place emphasis on professional training, while others find hands-on mentorship as a starting point.

I think that there is a much simpler way to get started.

After working for eight years with clients from small agencies to big corporations that use WordPress, and learning from all the mistakes, I found there are five basic questions that should be answered and introspected to make a client relation successful-

1. *Who* – exactly is your client? A techie, manager, marketeer, or a user.
2. *What* is expected from you? Go beyond gathering requirements and find out what your clients’ & their customers’ expectations are.
3. *When* do you plan to give ongoing demos, and delivery? Build predictability.
4. *Why* do clients send you those agitated mails? What is the real reason behind them?
5. Finally, I will speak about *How* can you make this happen: by following the **LED principal – Lead, Empathise, Document**

In my experience, answering these questions are building blocks for a successful client relationship- whether a small theme project or one with a huge scope.

Because at the end of the day, we are humans dealing with other humans.

Presented by Brooke Dukes in Banjo – Room 103.

I’ve been on all sides of support; first as a WordPress user, then a freelancer, theme shop employee, and currently as WordPress.com staff. In that time I’ve learned a lot of the dos-and-don’ts of asking for (and providing) support. In this lighting talk I’ll go over some of the most commonly missing information when reaching out to support.

Presented by Winstina Hughes in Banjo – Room 103.

As brick and mortar stores close because of tough e-commerce competition, local governments can take a page from the retail playbook. Innovate with the times, or risk being left behind. When local private investment dries up and empty stores predominate downtown, “Buying Local” is only one step in thinking critically about how to improve a local economy. Why not buy local…online? Here is how one local government almost made this a reality.

Presented by Shawn Hooper in Fiddle – Room 101.

Hello! Hola! Bonjour! Does your institution serve students that speak different languages? If so, maybe your website should too! In this session we’ll compare different solutions for publishing content in multiple languages using WordPress, and what impact having a multilingual site could have on your site’s content and design.

In this session, we’ll cover:

* Terminology used when working in multiple languages
* Popular plugins for supporting multilingual content
* Creating PO files to add your own language to your plugins and themes
* Contributing to WordPress’ Polyglot team

Presented by Sarah Benoit  in Fiddle – Room 101.

As web designers and developers one of the keys to our business success is retaining clients over time and generating client referrals. If we build strong supportive relationships with our existing customers we can guarantee future projects and work. Clients need more than just a great website, they need to be empowered to manage their WordPress site on their own. However, many business owners and marketing professionals are not knowledgeable about WordPress and feel confused and stressed about running the site once it is launched. Learning about WordPress online is also very confusing for people that are newer to or less experienced with the platform. So how can we empower our clients to manage their sites on their own and feel confident in their abilities? Many designers and developers offer a single training when the site goes live, but for clients that have never used WordPress or rarely use it this single training is not enough. Get tips and tricks about how to prepare your clients so they can take their WordPress tool and make the most out of it for their company or organization. Learn how to put together a launch plan that includes in person training, video tutorials, FAQs, and more. Discover why as designers and developers we are also educators. Give your customers the best chance they have to succeed and they will be more likely to return to you when the site needs to grow, as well as tell other professionals, businesses owners, and organizations they know about your service.

Presented by Aaron Douglas in Fiddle – Room 101.

Growing up I was that kid always taking appliances apart trying to figure out how they worked. I was also that kid that only tended to focus on things that were sciency and nerdy. I missed a lot of details growing up frequently feeling out of place when clearly other children knew what was going on and I again wasn’t listening.

Entering adulthood I discovered this uniqueness had its challenges but I learned to cope and was successful at school and work. I also started developing health problems that cropped up slowly over the years – mostly attributed to weight gain and being less active physically.

Four years ago I started working 100% remote. Within a couple months I realized my brain and my ways of dealing with the focus & attention issues weren’t compatible with remote work. I struggled a lot and finally talked to my doctor. Discovering I did in fact have ADHD helped me understand a lot. Working with a professional counselor I developed a set of tools to help with attention and focus issues working remote. A side effect of all of those efforts was a drastic improvement to my physical health.

You’ll find out what tools have been successful for me and more importantly how to implement the changes in a way to set yourself up to succeed.

Presented by Gary Pendergast in Guitar – Room 104.

I’ve been a PHP developer for most of my professional life, but earlier this year I switched to JavaScript full time. I’m here to tell you that it’s not a scary move, and can be a whole lot of fun!

From my first impressions of React, ES6, and large scale JavaScript projects, through to implementing large scale features, I’ll walk you through how I became a JavaScript developer in just a few months. I’ll show you how you can do it, too, and what this means for the future of WordPress development.

Presented by Meg Delagrange in Banjo – Room 103.

I used to be really embarrassed of my story. I worked really hard to learn what “normal” looked like so I could act that way. I lived from the webpages of Urban Dictionary, hours of MTV’s reality shows and TLC’s “What NOT to Wear”. I obsessed about what I said to people but I never really mastered the ability of stopping myself from blurting out strange things. I obsessed over whether I was invited to things. I was desperate to fit in.

This desperation to be “normal” and fit in is something that I kept trying to do in every area of my life.

When I began interning as a UX designer for an agency, I obsessed over whether my designs were cool or fit in with the right trends. When I got involved with marketing, I signed up for course after course to figure out how to market the right way. I spent my life copying other people’s methods.

Then I got to know people in the WordPress Community. I noticed how unique each person was and I noticed how these differences were celebrated. I felt at home, even though no one else acted like me. I started following a lady called “Bridget Willard”. She claimed anyone could be a guru. She fascinated me. She helped me learn to embrace my own story.

I quit caring about what was “normal” or what I was doing “right” and I started being myself. I stopped being ashamed that I was born Amish or that I’m a single mom. This didn’t mean I started sharing EVERYTHING from my life, but I did make it a point to do everything from my heart. I asked myself how I felt about things. I started trusting my own gut.

Today I’m building a brand with my cousin and friend, Urban Southern. We’re weaving our story into this brand. We were both born Amish and we have both struggled to embrace our heritage but now we do. We focus on sharing real life moments. We make our own videos for our ads with our iPhones. We post fun stories on Instagram every Friday to share about our process and favorite memories from our childhood. People are loving it! The results are pretty cool so far. Within four months of launching our revised brand, we were invited to New York Fashion Week in the Spring of 2017. We are currently collaborating with Vintage Vogue in Paris.

Before my cousin and I started working together, she was presenting the brand as a very generic leather goods brand. We went from selling a total of 45 leather items in a year and a half, to now selling more than 45 leather bags in our slowest month since we’ve begun to work together and getting personal with our brand.

I’m personally much happier and I’ve had cool opportunities for my art career as well. I painted live for an event with the City of Denver this Spring and shared my story publicly. Now I’m headed to Uganda this month to paint murals in a school.

It doesn’t matter who you are, you have a unique story to tell or a unique way of solving problems. What you already have inside of you and in your life experience is exactly what you need to do what you want to do in the world. Use it.

Presented by Sandy Edwards in Guitar – Room 104.

This session is all about kids and code. We will discuss why you should teach your kids to code. We will cover how to teach your kids to code. We will even talk about how to keep your young bloggers safe online.

We will cover resources and what you as a parent, or teacher need to know to make sure your child is ready for the future in code.

Presented by Mika Epstein in Fiddle – Room 101.

Using WordPress to queery (not a typo) data and generate statistics based on the entire history of television and understand the impact of fictional death in the media on real life people. As seen on https://lezwatchtv.com

Overview

This presentation will discuss the complications of using WordPress to manage a site filled with cross-related data, in order to understand the social and psychological impact of the Bury Your Gays trope on TV. By using WordPress, we were able to easily output the data, but building out a site without planning what data will be captured leads to headaches. There were difficulties in the growth of data, including handling multiple actors and shows, with separate roles, characters who changed names and genders, and the death and revival of another character (does she count as dead)? Through it all, we prioritized open data and open discovery of the data to allow people to take the content and use it for their own purposes.

Aspects

• The dead lesbian / bury your queers trope (see also: The Lexa Effect of 2016)
• Rest API for data promulgation and distribution
• Confirming theories with data
• How WordPress makes it ‘easier’ for people to find themselves reflected in media

Presented by Andrew Roberts in Fiddle – Room 101.

TinyMCE is the world’s most popular open source library for online WYSIWYG editing of HTML. It is used by millions of applications, including WordPress.

Although first established in 2004, it was not until 2015 that the team behind TinyMCE began trying to commercialize it and build a business behind the open source project. What is the best way to make money from open source? Support, commercial licenses premium add-ons or hosting? And how do you avoid alienating the open source community? In this talk, learn what has worked and what hasn’t in the past two years.

Presented by Jeremy Felt in Banjo – Room 103.

Universities publish a lot of content on the web! It is not uncommon to have thousands of domains and millions of pages. On top of that, public universities must follow WCAG 2.0 AA guidelines for web accessibility.

When working with thousands of domains and millions of pages, how do you know where to start?

Just over a year ago, Washington State University received a complaint through the Office of Civil Rights that some of our web pages were not accessible. This talk will cover the steps we took to address the complaint, how we started to grasp where 5 million URLs were published, and what processes and open source tools we have in place to ensure that web accessibility is our top priority.

Presented by Joe McGill in Banjo – Room 103.

The logic responsible for handling media uploads in WordPress is a complex web of procedural functionality built up over many years. However, the modern web demands that we provide rich media experiences far beyond what much of this logic was originally designed to handle.

In this session, we’ll untangle the process that media files go through from initial upload on their way to becoming full-fledged attachments in WordPress. You’ll not only leave with a better understanding of the exact order in which functions are called, but will see some of the constraints that make media handling challenging.

The session will explore possibilities for how WordPress can modernize its media handling capabilities to support the next generation of media experiences built on top of WordPress.

Presented by Tammie Lister, Mike Schroder in Banjo – Room 103.

Images and video are among the largest use-cases for WordPress content, but the way in which users interact with media in WordPress hasn’t improved significantly since the introduction of the Media Library in WordPress 3.5 in 2012 and Media Grid in WordPress 4.0, released in 2014.
Meanwhile, user expectations for handling of photos or videos have since changed, with users expecting rich editing experiences with solid mobile flows, causing WordPress to fall behind.

We’ll chat through the history of media in WordPress, some of the challenges involved, and a possible future, building a case for working together to improve the media experience for user.

Presented in Contributor Day – Grand Ballroom A.

Presented by Bianca Welds in Fiddle – Room 101.

The Deaf community is marginalized in most countries around the world. Using WordPress, one couple is trying to increase understanding of and participation in the Deaf community in Jamaica. This presentation will share how a partnership with a WordPress developer has changed how they spread their message and improve the way of life for the Deaf in this island nation.

Presented by Patrick Garman in Banjo – Room 103.

Success in emergency situations does not happen by accident, we’ve failed many times before we succeeded and still fail sometimes even with preparation.

This talk will cover how to handle yourself, the site, and the overall situation of when your site is experiencing high traffic and is failing. As well as how to prepare in advance for these situations, and the importance of de-compressing afterwards. Based on experiences in real world scenarios when thousands of dollars and customers are on the line.

Presented by Jonathan Brinley in Guitar – Room 104.

If I had a dollar for every time I wished for a clone to help me get all my work finished… well, let’s just say it costs a lot more than that to raise a couple of kids.

As a parent, an educator, and a professional WordPress developer, I’ve given coding a central place in my children’s curriculum. Through games, Minecraft mods, and (of course) WordPress, they’re learning the basics of programming, site administration, and even entrepreneurialism. They’re not ready to take over my job (yet), but they have a great head start toward a future where programming skills pervade nearly every career.

Let’s take a look at some of the approaches, tools, and communities available to us as parents and educators. Our children will grow up to face a new kind of digital economy. We can help them learn the skills they need to thriv

Presented by Zandy Ring, Elizabeth Urello in Banjo – Room 103.

Those of us who collaborate on websites work with coworkers, employees, and freelancers who often aren’t in our office, our city, or even in our country. When work is remote, new challenges arise: people can find it harder to stay motivated, to communicate goals and accomplishments, and to check in effectively. This talk is about how to lead others from a distance toward a common goal. How do you build and maintain working relationships and get things done correctly and on time when you aren’t in the same physical location as your colleagues? Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, is fully distributed, which means all of our communication is entirely online. If we can do it, so can you!

Presented by David Laietta in Fiddle – Room 101.

There are a lot of things that go into running a service business beyond finding clients and building things for them. You’ve got to manage contracts, invoices, estimates, proposals, and more. You need to keep clients informed on progress, collect payments, and follow up on those payments invariably missed. On top of all of that, you need to have some sort of repeatable process to make projects run smoothly and keep getting in new work.

We’re going to look at a few ways that you can use WordPress to manage your WordPress business. This includes managing all of that paperwork from the backend of your site, allowing clients to make payments, and setting up a progress and ticketing system. We’ll also take a look at some ways to use your site to gain and manage leads.

From there you’ll be able to manage your business with ease and focus on the most important part: keeping your clients happy and successful!

Presented by Nathaniel Schweinberg in Fiddle – Room 101.

WordPress at its heart is a blogging platform, designed to serve a site that’s largely read-only. Logging in isn’t necessary unless you’re an admin looking to write a blog post or adjust settings. This is a good thing! Scaling a site that’s predominantly read-only is very easy because you can place a CDN like CloudFront or a page cache like Varnish in front of a single server and serve many, many requests from hardware as cheap as $5 per month.

But what happens when you have a site that isn’t read-only? What happens when you have, for example, a WooCommerce site with a couple hundred transactions a day? Or perhaps you run a news site with millions of pageviews a month? All of a sudden, that poor $5 server is catching on fire and asking what it did to deserve this!

Running a single server like this is called a “Single Point of Failure” and that is a very big no-no to run in a production environment. Cloud servers are ephemeral in nature and aren’t guaranteed to stay up 100% of the time. Any number of things can go wrong, which is why designing your infrastructure to respond to bursts of traffic as well as be able to continue serving requests when servers go down is paramount to a reliable production environment.

This talk will give an overview of what is involved from moving from a single-server setup to a scalable, highly-available infrastructure on AWS.

Presented by Ryan Markel in Fiddle – Room 101.

Every WordPress user is a VIP, and part of that VIP experience is knowing their installation, data, and user accounts are secure. WordPress.com VIP hosts and secures sites for some of the pre-eminent publishers and companies in the world. Ryan will share with you best practices from WordPress.com, WordPress.com VIP, and personal experience, to help you secure your sites, whether you are an individual blogger, a consultant helping people get started with WordPress, or an agency with multiple clients and customers.

Presented by Francesca Marano in Guitar – Room 104.

The Italian WordPress community was dormant for years, until a bunch of people got together at WCEU Contributor Day in Seville, in 2015, and decided it was time to revive it.

After months of online chats in our Slack team, we organised an event that kick-started an avalanche of Meetups and WordCamps in Italy: a stand-alone Contributor Day.

Two years later, Italy has more than 20 active Meetups, 4 cities with WordCamps in planning, and a great numbers of Contributors across the project.

In this talk, I’ll go through the steps we took to organise it, and I will also talk about Contributor Nights, special Meetup events where we concentrate on one of the Make teams and learn how to contribute from scratch.

Presented by Mel Choyce in Banjo – Room 103.

Let’s face it: most of us spend the vast majority of our days staring at some sort of illuminated screen. Work day? Eyes glued to laptop. Walking to lunch? Miraculously avoiding careening into oncoming traffic as I stare at my phone.

During my abundance of screen time, most of the content I consume is text-based. Some of it looks great! But some of it gives me a headache by the end of the day. Nobody likes headaches. In this talk, I’ll go over ten easy tips to make your typography headache-free.

Presented by Brian DeConinck in Banjo – Room 103.

WordPress dominates NC State University’s web landscape largely because of its ease of use. Whether it’s a faculty member’s research group, a student’s class project, or an admin assistant updating the departmental website, web content is being published by anyone and everyone on campus—and everyone is able to learn how to use it, with minimal strain on our IT training capacity.

But with so many content creators who have so little training in web best practices, we quickly encounter accessibility challenges. How do you teach an entire university campus when to use headings, how to measure color contrast, or what alt text is? How do you make sure the decentralized campus web landscape is an inclusive one?

In this lightning session, we showcase the “NC State Accessibility Helper,” a homegrown plugin that uses the tools WordPress gives us to put accessibility testing and learning resources in front of content creators before they hit the “Publish” button. We will demonstrate the user experience and briefly walk through how this simple plugin works under the hood.

Presented by RC Lations in Guitar – Room 104.

As members of the WordPress community, we have a unique opportunity to contribute to making the news better. WordPress powers news sites of all shapes and sizes – from small investigative teams, to large national publications. What they share in common is a reliance on open source tools developed in the WordPress community. However you want to improve the news – whether that’s making it more trustworthy, more accessible, more engaging, or something else entirely – the journalism community would love your help!

We’ll take a look at plugins and themes used in journalism and the impact each has on readers. We’ll identify areas for improvement, and simple ways that everyone can get involved – from documentation, to translation, and (of course) development. Everyone has the ability to help build the future of WordPress, and I hope you’ll leave feeling inspired to get involved!

Presented by Monique Dubbelman in Guitar – Room 104.

The most important factor for people in web design is, that it makes it easy for them to find what they want. Yet, so many websites are so poorly structured, that it’s impossible to do so. If you want to learn what content should be on your site or how your menu should be structured: this talk is for you.

Information architecture is something serious, however, the majority of businesses have structured their sites in an bad way, using the ITTIR-method – “I think this is right”. While common sense is a useful tool and a lot of sites are very simple (e.g. 5 pages total), there’s a better way to go about it. If you already have tens of pages on your site, you should do proper information architecture analysis. Guiding people through the vast amount of information on offer is something that requires thought and research. Intuitive navigation doesn’t happen by chance. So don’t jump the visual part of of your webdesign too quick, but take plenty of time to think about the architecture of the information you offer on your site.

This helps you answer user’s four most important questions when they arrive at a website:

Am I in the right place?
Do they have what I am looking for?
Do they have anything better (if this isn’t what I want)?
What do I do now?
After this talk you’ve learned what content should be on your website and how you should structure it.

Presented by Chris Taylor in Guitar – Room 104.

My talk will focus on how we as a community can work together to drive the next phase of growth for WordPress that goes beyond just relying heavily on the product itself and the breadth of the community. With other, proprietary, platforms gaining ground in the marketplace and spending large amounts to build their brands, it is increasingly important that we are able to compete in more conventional ways. I’ll cover the opportunities for WordPress growth, the potential role and efforts to-date of the Growth Council, and the efforts Automattic is making to grow our brands and WordPress as a whole.

Specifically, I’ll share:
– Data on the growth and marketing efforts of the competitive platforms.
– Opportunities and challenges presented by those platforms.
– Marketing and brand positioning of Automattic products.
– Ways we, as a community, can work together to ensure strong growth in the future.

Presented by Brianna Privett in Fiddle – Room 101.

The Personal Web of the 1990s/early 2000s was the first wave of online diarists and bloggers who use the web as a platform to chronicle and share their our daily lives. WordPress came out of this movement, and is now in its second decade.

2017 marks 20 years that I’ve been using the web to create and archive memories, and 12 years that I’ve been doing it with WordPress. I’ve learned a few things about creating a real and permanent record of a lifetime on the ephemeral digital landscape, and together we’ll discuss how to use WordPress to create your own home on the web. We’ll cover topics such as how to maintain your (and your family’s) privacy, using WordPress to build a keepsake repository your friends and family can contribute to, and how to ensure that these digital spaces are available as a legacy for lifetimes to come.

Presented by Jennifer Dodd in Banjo – Room 103.

The WordPress support forums, which include international and
language-specific forums and power support and reviews for WordPress
core, themes, and plugins, had been running on bbPress 1.x since their
inception. Issues with both security and stability were a constant
threat and a move to bbPress 2 was well overdue, but no one was able
to tackle the upgrade. 11 million existing posts spread across more
than twenty sites, custom configurations and plugins written for the
bbPress 1 codebase, and above all, an active userbase and new posts
coming in constantly meant that the project was so unwieldy that it
was hard to know where to begin.

In the summer of 2016, I upgraded the WordPress.org support forums
from bbPress 1 to bbPress 2.x. This talk will be done as an interview
conducted by Mika Epstein.

It will cover the following topics:
– Getting the lay of the land; figure out storage, destination,
sandbox, meta environment.
– Formulating goals: Minimize downtime, clean import, remove spam/dead
topics when possible.
– MVP in terms of forum functionality.
– Native bbPress importer versus direct SQL script.
– Community support and notification.
– Staging and testing on live sites.
– 10x rule for new problems: memory leaks, multibyte language character count
truncation, different slug lengths between schemas, saturated postmeta queries.
– Planned downtime.
– WSOD disaster two days before the scheduled changeover at 95% data load.
– SUCCESS!!!

Presented by James Tryon in Guitar – Room 104.

Do you really know how your users are using your site? Do you know where they are coming from? Do you have any idea on what marketing paths are working best that you are currently using?

In this talk, we will go over real world examples and tools we use on a daily basis to improve our client’s user experiences by removing roadblocks and increasing conversions.

Buzzwords: Heat Maps, Screen Recording, Analytics, Link Tracking, and Effort

Presented by Susan Walker in Banjo – Room 103.

When we see a website for the first time and describe it as a _good_ site, what we mean is we find it an _attractive_ site. The design elements influence our judgment and distract us from the underlying issue of how well the content is serving the visitors.

When Rutgers-Camden began to identify goals it could accomplish with a redesign, it employed an exercise called 30 Questions. The exercise set out a series of tasks for participants to accomplish on the web site and recorded what they found along the way. It successfully separated the site’s content from its design and identified specific issues that could be addressed as part of a redesign.

This talk describes how the exercise worked, presents some of the more interesting findings and explains how the 30 Questions exercise can be adapted and applied to any type of website.

Presented by Nicole Kohler in Banjo – Room 103.

In my more than two years serving as the content creator for WooCommerce, I wrote 200 posts, responded to over 600 comments, and literally wore out an Macbook keyboard to the point of failure. (Eat your heart out, George R.R. Martin.)

I’ve learned three valuable lessons while writing for a business of Woo’s size that I’d like to share:

1. Never, ever fully commit to a publish date if you can help it — people get sick, writers don’t deliver, and unexpected things will happen.
2. Commenters are going to test your patience — always be kind, always think of their intent, and look for the gems (the funny ones/the helpers).
3. Writing content for a business is not easy, but it is rewarding. Lots of examples to share here: people recognizing/thanking me at WordCamps, getting comments weeks later saying “I did this and it worked!” and knowing you’re making it easier for someone to succeed.

Presented by Andrew Nacin in Fiddle – Room 101.

Building software means much more than writing code. In fact, you can make a bigger impact with people skills and thoughtful human-centered design than simply with code. After running WordPress releases and then spending two years working in government, WordPress lead developer Andrew Nacin wants to talk about how your interactions with others matter and how it’s important to think with people, not for them.

Presented by Andrea Zoellner in Banjo – Room 103.

There are subtle ways the tech industry leaves young women out. With programming, accessibility, codes of conduct or the lack thereof, tech conferences can be unpleasant for women rather than a great experience organizers try so hard to create. In this talk, I’ll lay out some obvious and not-so-obvious ways tech conferences could be better spaces for women interested in tech.

Presented by George Stephanis in Banjo – Room 103.

By this point, we’ve likely all heard of the “Internet of Things” — everything from thermostats to toasters can now be online for greater connectivity and access from our smartphones.

In this talk, we’ll look at how we can use the Arduino software to create our own wifi-connected devices (often for under $10!) that leverage the WordPress REST API to perform tasks from updating live weather readings on a WordPress site, to providing real-world displays of how many WooCommerce orders are waiting to be shipped out.