Sessions

Content security policies (CSPs) are a relatively new security element on the web horizon. CSPs use browsers to detect and mitigate certain types of attacks like cross-site scripting (XSS), clickjacking and other code injection attacks resulting from execution of malicious content in the trusted web page context. CSPs can be used for simple purposes like enforcing https on SSL-enabled sites, to more sophisticated uses like authorizing only truly trusted sources and blocking others.

Most sites do not have CSPs installed, but it’s important to be aware of them and how they can be used to add an additional layer of security to your website.

Let’s take a peek at what front-end development has become these days. Starting from what the role is, where we sit, and the expectations of us. Then we’ll get into the problems we face, how to approach them, and the tools we have at our disposal. We’ll look at how Gutenberg might fit into our lives as front-end developers.

WordPress has been around for 15 years. Over 30% of sites use it, and that figure continues to climb. We’re here for the long term, so we need to plan for the long term: Gutenberg has been built as the base for the next 15 years of WordPress.

What you see in the block editor is the first practical application of what’s going on underneath: a modern design process, an extensible technical architecture, and a forward-thinking foundation to build our future upon.

Let’s take a look at all of the projects going on around Gutenberg, we’ll see where they’re at, how they fit together, and how you’ll be able to use them to build your next-level WordPress experiences in the coming years.

As we inch closer to a mobile-only world, enterprises are struggling to deliver mobile experiences that meet or exceed expectations. Finding a CMS that can integrate with existing technologies while meeting the increasing demands of the mobile web is not an easy task. Technology such as Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) have emerged to improve the performance of web content on mobile devices, but the gains from those advances are not apparent in every CMS. While some are better than others, WordPress has emerged as the leader for the mobile web, specifically as demonstrated through AMP and PWA. This session provides a unique opportunity to learn more about the effects of AMP and PWA, based on the way different CMSs are harnessing these technologies to power digital experiences across the mobile web.

In 2008, Joanna led colleagues at McKinsey & Company to develop and teach a new form of leadership that enables everyone, not just leaders, to be at their best more of the time. Today, the program is based on 400+ interviews with remarkable women and men leaders around the world – along with quantitative research, academic learning from a range of related fields, and a decade of field-testing.

Called Centered Leadership, this approach helps you build personal mastery of your own thoughts, feelings, and actions to inspire and unleash positive change. And it starts with self, becoming the change you most want to see. Imagine building on strengths, pausing in the midst of upset, forming trust-based relationships, engaging hope and fear to act boldly, and practicing recovery consciously to sustain your energy. Imagine finding your center when you need it most to improve your experience at work and in life. In her interactive session, Joanna will guide you through tools and practices with an invitation to (re)discover one insight about yourself at work or in life that sparks curiosity to explore more.

New development workflows can be scary. Want to create your first custom block but don’t know where to start? This talk will help you get started on your journey to modern JavaScript WordPress development by sharing resources, tips and lessons learned from developing custom WordPress blocks.

Bisect is a tool built into Git which allows you to step back through the history of your code in order to identify a particular change that introduced a bug. It does so in an efficient manner, meaning you don’t need to check every change, and it can save you hours of debugging.

In this talk John will introduce you to Git Bisect and show you real-world use cases. He’ll cover using it to identify the cause of regressions, how it can save you time, and how to hook it up to automated testing.

This talk is suitable for anyone who is comfortable using Git for version control.

A mother with a wailing baby in her arms – maybe the baby has an ear infection. A trainer at the rec center who is overwhelmed with requests for team building exercises. A gifted data scientist who just. needs. to. focus. An executive with the future of a three billion dollar company on his shoulders.

These are all people who use the intranet web site my team builds. The code we write affects their daily lives, their work, their health, and the company we all work for.

The developer to end user relationship is very direct. We are in the perfect position to advocate for site users, and ensure that the site we build is compassionate in its design, because we write the code. We are the gatekeepers, and we have a both a responsibility and an opportunity to help, and not harm, the users of our site.

You’re not always sitting in front of your computer when inspiration strikes. Sometimes you need to write a post in a place that isn’t in front of your desk – like on a train, in your car, or just from your living room couch. We always have our mobile phones or tablets with us it seems – so why not use the WordPress mobile apps to run your site?

WordPress for Android and iOS provides a great experience for site admins for running your site. The editor is fully featured as well for short and long form posts! In this talk you’ll get a really good overview of the capabilities of the mobile apps so you can see just how easy it is to be mobile and still in control of your site.

Creating content to serve your target market takes up a significant amount of your or your team’s time. Content curation is a strategy that gives you lots of fresh ideas to share on your site without requiring a lot of writing. Curating thought leaders within your niche will both provide value to your community and initiate great industry relationships at the same time. It’s the most amazing win-win content activity that anyone can get started with in a few minutes time.

Whether you are working as a freelancer, or as part of a team, chances are that communicating with customers falls somewhere in your job description. As a website developer, you love the part of your job where you get to develop – but you also need to develop communication and project management skills to help you stay on top of projects, interact with your customers, and make sure that projects don’t spiral out of control or take more money or time than you budgeted.

In this talk, we will discuss the basics of project management. You’ll learn techniques for getting a project started on the right foot – things like making sure that your customer contracts are crystal clear, and setting up clear timelines and project milestones. You’ll also learn how to handle scope creep, and how to deal with projects that have fallen off course.

We will highlight a few (free!) project management tools that you can use to help keep things running smoothly. We’ll go through some developer/client relationship scenarios that come up frequently in our industry, and brainstorm ways to get through difficult experiences.

A website is a living and breathing piece of your overall business & marketing plan. You need to feed it! This presentation will cover why a website isn’t a “set it and forget it” entity.

Learn about content creation types, determine the need for enhanced features (eCommerce, membership, LMS), ways to encourage visitor engagement, website security and site backups and when it might be time to redesign the site itself.

The WordPress community builds amazingly powerful software to extend the platform with plugins. The developers who contribute plugins to the project should be proud of what they’ve created! The challenge is that often, they’re so close to the code that when they market their plugin, they position it as software for developers, rather than marketing it to the end user. In this session, I’ll give developers a framework for ensuring they market their plugin to their actual user, not to other developers.

WAI-ARIA means Accessible Rich Internet Applications. These are attributes you add to your HTML5 to (for example) inform blind visitors what is happening on your site.

How do you use ARIA and why? And why is the first rule of ARIA: “Don’t use ARIA”?

In this talk Rian will show you how to
– announce changes and error messages
– use the JavaScript function wp.a11y.speak()
– tell if a menu or accordion is closed or open
– give feedback on what’s happening on a one page website
– get the right documentation and examples

Discover that ARIA isn’t that complicated and is very useful for those visitors that use your site in another way than you do.

“You Don’t Have any Business Cards?” is a question that you hear a lot at formal networking events, but it happens even more frequently at WordCamps. Do you feel intimidated when it’s time to give your “30 second commercial”? Do you run out of things to talk about once you’ve exchanged names?

Effective networking is an important part of building your WordPress business. This presentation will help you get past the “grip and grin” stigma that people associate with networking and cover some ways that you can get the most out of mixing it up at networking groups, “business after hours” meetups, and of course the Hallway Track at conferences like WordCamp.

Learning how to network effectively can lead to your next client or your next trusted business partner. Whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you’re sure to pick up a thing or two in this presentation.

Over the past 10 years, CSS has transformed from a descriptive language for presentation into a Turing-complete, domain-specific, declarative programming language for layout on the web.

Okay…but how does one go from describing presentation to programming in CSS? And what on earth is a “CSS Algorithm”?

This entertaining and personable talk will answer these questions and more, before delving into practical steps for creating CSS algorithms of your own to bridge the gap between design and development.

As developers we have an opportunity to start working with the new Gutenberg editor and bring it into projects where it can positively impact the editorial workflow. In this talk I’ll be sharing our team’s experience in extending Gutenberg core blocks with our work on the AMP for WordPress plugin.

In working with Gutenberg, often block functionality needs to be customized. We’ve found that it makes more sense to reuse and extend existing editor blocks as opposed to creating new ones. From a user experience perspective it’s important to avoid confusing users by just duplicating blocks and cluttering up the block inserter.

Through real examples I will showcase our experience extending core blocks as we added custom features to the AMP plugin. I’ll also address some issues and pain-points we ran into during the process and share the workarounds used.

Since Gutenberg is still a work in progress, this presentation is not intended as the absolute truth for extending core blocks, however it is a practical example of how we were able to add AMP features to a plugin by extending the core editor blocks. If you’re interested in developing for Gutenberg you’ll be able to learn from our experience and pick up practical tips for moving forward.

Stories are powerful and a part of our genetic DNA. Stories in products can be used as fuel to power creation. The experience itself is a story and it’s important to craft the narrative. By understanding the stories of those interacting with the product, you can guide, support and even change their narrative from a tragedy to a happily ever after. In this talk I will show how to use stories in your day to day work. Start seeing the stories, learn ways to tell the stories to others. By putting stories at the heart of everything you do, you experience will improve and everyone will have a better time.

GDPR, CCPA, Data Breach requirements, DPIA’s… Yeah, it’s a LOT! Worse, there’s a lot of confusing and conflicting information out there regarding what’s changing in the world of privacy laws and requirements. We’re here to clear that up.

A strong privacy framework can strengthen your client relationships while reducing legal liability, arming you to ship better websites and products with ethics and privacy in mind, from day one. When making decisions, it’s important to understand their impacts: The right decisions (with user privacy in mind) to not only reduce your exposure, but also make your website better. It’s not the responsibility of “someone else” to get privacy right, it’s the responsibility of the whole team who builds and maintains your website.

Starting with an overview of laws that are relevant to you and your U.S. business, (what you NEED to know), best practices (what you need to DO), as well as resources for maintaining compliance (where you can turn when you need answers) you’ll see how privacy impacts business and technical requirements of every WordPress site on the internet.

What if we saw WordPress as a force of change on the web and in society? We talk about our aspiration to reach 50%, but we rarely talk about how we could and should use the power that comes with that market share. Starting from the WordPress philosophy of “democratizing publishing through free open source software,” this talk explores how — through code, community, and political engagement — WordPress can be used to move the web, the internet, and our society forward.

User Experience (UX) and Customer Experience (CX) design are in high demand these days and for good reason. Giant corporations are losing big money, big lawsuits, big customers, market share… or even *worse*. One key factor separating the successful businesses from those not, can be chalked up to an intentionally **diverse** and **inclusive** focus on UX/CX both online and off. Successful design is multifaceted, but a huge factor to UX/CX and Accessibility improvements in digital and public spaces are *directly* linked to an increase of diversity with those who create these spaces. If you think you have nothing to offer when it comes to improving the usability and accessibility of the products and sites you create and/or use, you’re absolutely wrong. In my over 20 years of experience designing solutions for users and customers, I have seen first-hand how important it is that I *unapologetically* bring my own individual diversity to the table. We have come a long way with design, yet still have a long journey ahead. But if we band together with our diverse rainbow of humans (pun intended), we will keep pushing technology forward, and everyone wins.

When we think about ethics and AI, our first thoughts often go to the question of what happens if a self-driving car kills a pedestrian. The life and death questions of autonomous systems are important to address—and so are other enormous questions like unfair bias, privacy, safety, and accountability. These aren’t just technical or policy questions: they’re design questions. Designers frame problems, shape the features and behavior of AI-enabled systems, and provide the levers that AI is allowed to pull. Designers are in a unique position to help with these problems about AI, design, and ethics, and in this talk, we’ll look at how.

For an open source community to thrive, it’s important that valid business models surround it. In this talk Marieke and I will discuss why a business model around open source projects is so important. The money that funds further development, but also funds conferences, marketing and education, has to be made somehow. We will cover the several large open source communities that exist today and discuss how successful the business models around them are.

But it’s not all about making money: it’s about giving back too. If every company in an open source community gives back, that community becomes unstoppable. The idea of five for the future is built on that. Other communities have similar ideas, and reward them in other ways, which we’ll discuss. We’ll also show why at Yoast, we think 5% is not enough.

When it comes to plugins and themes in WordPress, we’ve heard some mantras over and over: “Your custom user interfaces should feel like a native part of WordPress! Follow the admin UI! Back-compat 4 life!” So what happens when a project like Gutenberg comes along and threatens everything you thought you knew about creating and editing content in WordPress?

One of the things about extending software is that you tend to stick to familiar paradigms and patterns, often at the cost of innovation and creating the best possible experience for a given task. One of the major tensions we’ve seen in the push forward on Gutenberg is between the tradition of backwards compatibility and the forward-looking concept of a block-based editor. The hesitation is natural and understandable, but it’s important to take a step back and ask “are metaboxes really the best UI for what my user needs to do?”

In this talk, we will take a look at some creative solutions from the past that have broken outside of the bounds of metaboxes and other form-centric interfaces while still maintaining that WordPress feel, along with practical examples of where rethinking the editing experience can and has led to significantly better outcomes for both implementers and users alike.

The idea of marketing is shrouded in mystery. While there are endless agencies and consultants that bill themselves as the best at understanding particular demographics and tools, I believe anyone can be a great marketer if they apply four core principles. We’ll talk about product, place, promotion, and price – the keys to a strong marketing plan. We’ll dive into understand the art and science behind great campaigns and 10 key concepts I have observed.

With each passing year, the bar gets higher for software developers. Customers seem to expect more and more from us with no tolerance for delays or price increases. What causes this vicious cycle? More importantly, what can we do to continue to provide tools which satisfy new users and meet their ever changing expectations regarding usability?

Sometimes the best way to know what you’re doing right, and what you can do better, is to look at things from a fresh perspective. Being a Drupal developer for almost 9 years, and a recent convert to WordPress 2 years ago, I’ve seen the best and worst of both systems. Rather than pitting the two against each other, it’s best to look at the strengths, and yes the weaknesses of both. By doing so we can learn from each unique community and together make the projects stronger.

This talk will center around my experiences of building a plugin coming from Drupal, what I found in the WordPress community that I’m trying to take to the Drupal community, and visa-versa what I learned in Drupal that I hope to share with WordPress. This will be a fun look at the two communities and from it we’ll come away with a greater sense of how we can better ourselves, our sites, and the open source community as a whole.

Know a young child interested in learning computer science and coding, but the child’s reading level makes it difficult to know where to start? You’ve come to the right place! In this session we will go hands on with free online games that teach computer science and coding techniques to children as young as 4! These programs start with pre-reader courses and grow with your child so they can use the same program for years to come.

Visiting a foreign open source community is kind of like traveling to a foreign country! It may be difficult if you don’t speak the language or share the same culture, but you’re guaranteed to return home with a new perspective and interesting experiences.

It’s easy to get comfortable and stay in your own community bubble. Breaking outside of that allows you to see how others solve problems and tackle new opportunities. And, it turns out that other open source communities are generally welcoming and interested in your perspective as well!

We’ll share high-level overviews of popular open source projects to help you plan your itinerary. Attendees will leave with knowledge about what’s out there, recommendations on how to prepare, and confidence to your own start journey.

At this point, most product teams are making a good faith effort to be customer-centered and doing at least some research. Why does it seem like so many decisions are still based on speculation or personal opinion? Why is it still so hard to make a case for qualitative research?

All will be revealed. You’ll walk away better equipped to get the evidence you really need to create products and services people love.

Agile methodology and frameworks like Scrum were created for iterative processes like software development, and in recent years have been getting adopted more and more by digital agencies of all shapes and sizes.

And yet, this methodology created for development, and therefore _for developers_, meets with a lot of resistance. Why?

Whatever the applied method, project management is often viewed as an imposition, a constraint – a heavy process that slows you down, interminable meetings that interrupt your day. Does this ring true?

Scrum is in fact an empowering tool for developers and development teams. In this presentation, I will walk you through the basics of Agile and Scrum, debunk some common myths, and share some of my experiences with the practical application of Scrum, including working with remote teams.

• Project And Sales Pipeline Strategy
• Uncovering Client Business Goals
• KPIs vs KPIs
• Managing Scope

We built a custom intranet for our museum using WordPress tied to online forms, notifications, and Slack / Asana connections. It empowers our staff to create and share documents, submit work requests, and track project. In this brief lightning session, hear about the planning, tools, and implementation to bring everything together to create an interactive productivity hub that you can use for your organization.

A code review process has lots of benefits. In addition to the many technical and organizational benefits, there are also invaluable opportunities to set team members up to grow and succeed when an effective code review culture is adopted by everyone.

While working at Boston University’s Interactive Design department, Jonathan helped create a code review process that not only met the organization’s technical needs, but also established a culture that encouraged collaboration between designers, developers, and other departments throughout the University through code reviews.

This talk is a guided tour through that new process. We’ll discuss the technical aspects (such as the tools and integrations used), the organizational and workflow aspects, as well as the human factors, which are often ignored but are the most important to establishing a sustainable code review culture that will help your organization flourish.

The experience of creating and sharing information has changed dramatically over the last decade and will only continue to evolve. How do we understand the present moment and anticipate the future of publishing in order to keep pace with both user needs and emerging technologies?

This talk will provide a structured framework to help us understand how publishing has evolved (how we got to now) and what it might become in the near future. I will examine how the act of authoring has become more expansive, encompassing new kinds of users and different contexts for publishing, as well as how user expectations around content creation have changed. Which trends should we expect to see continue and where might we see radical changes in the publishing landscape? How might growing concerns around privacy affect how we create and publish online? In addition, we will explore emerging technologies like voice interfaces and machine learning, and examine what impact they might have on the future of publishing. Finally, we will look at the ways in which WordPress is uniquely suited to take advantage of the current moment, and what new opportunities could be in store for the future.