Jonathan Wold will talk about the history of WordPress, its current state, and its future through the lens of serving as an Operating System for creating on the Open Web.
Category: 45 min. Regular Session
Unlocking six-figure eCommerce growth with automations
To automate or not to automate? Is automation impersonal, ineffective, or overdone? Or is it the key to unlocking retention and efficiency? This discussion digs into how automation applies to online stores, and how it can influence sales, processes, and customer relationships — especially when it comes to retention. We’ll also review how to identify areas for automation as a merchant or developer and where it’s most impactful.
Defining Fast: The Hardest Problem in Performance Engineering
We all want fast sites, but what is fast? What is performant? We may know it when we see; yet quantifying and communicating about web performance effectively is still a challenge. In this talk, we will discuss our ever-evolving set of standards for what comprises a fast site, how to measure it, and what to do once we have the resulting data.
Design Systems: Crafting For Crafters
Design systems are so hot right now. And for good reason! They improve collaboration and creation amongst your crafters (designers, developers, product, and marketing alike). Despite popular belief, it’s more than just colors, fonts, buttons, and components – much more. In this session, we’ll learn how to think about design systems to explore how you can empower your teams to do what they do, but better (and faster)!
WordPress Automated Updates: A Panel Discussion
Join an animated discussion on the hot topic of WordPress security and automated updates among longtime WordPress contributors. The panel will review recent conversations in WordPress Core on this issue, and discuss points for and against!
What many people agree on:
– Having the ability to opt-in to major auto-updates is a good idea
– Sites running old versions aren’t the most secure
– We need an aggressive awareness campaign for anyone on old versions
– If any site is currently opted out, that will be respected
– Backporting to more than 5 releases is no longer practical
What many people disagree on:
– Whether opting in to current minor auto-updates, and not opting out of major updates, qualifies as an opt-in to major auto-updates
– Whether keeping sites up to date is the project’s responsibility
– Whether our duty of care lies with individual freedoms or group safety
– How many sites would break, or are at risk of breaking
This session will include a Q&A section and will be moderated by Jenny Beaumont; don’t miss it!
Behavior-Driven Development in WordPress with Behat
Adding test coverage to your website and applications provides lots of benefits. For example, making sure requirements are met and preventing regressions from happening. One of the many approaches for testing is Behavior-Driven Development (BDD). This can be accomplished in WordPress using a series of tools: Behat, Mink, WordHat, and Selenium.
This session is for people who want to implement BDD in their WordPress projects. Through examples the role that each tool plays will be presented. The relationship among them and how they build on each other will also be exemplified.
By the end of it you will have an overview of how to use Behat, Mink, WordHat, and Selenium to write BDD tests for WordPress.
Learning objectives:
– How to set up Behat and WordHat to run tests for WordPress projects.
– How to write non-javascript enabled tests using driver Goutte driver.
– How to write javascript enabled tests using the Selenium driver.
Just Enough React for WordPress
We’re in the middle of the biggest change to the WordPress user experience in several years. It has modernized, streamlined, and simplified content creation. PHP theme and plugin developers are finding themselves needing to transition quickly. Come learn just enough React to take advantage of new features like colour palettes, meta boxes, and reusable blocks.
Take Back Your Web
We used to control our online identities, content, and experience. We now share Twitter names instead of domains; even web developers tweet and post on Medium instead of their own sites. We scroll social media and feel empty instead of reading news & blogs to feel informed and connected. Algorithmic feeds amplify rage & conspiracies, enabling tribal ad-targeting to polarise and spread misinformation, threatening democracy itself.
What happened? And what are we doing to fix it?
That’s a big question that will require all of us, our communities, our employers, to shift. I don’t want to wait, and you probably don’t either.
What can you do for yourself, today?
Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.
WebWeWant
If you build websites, you inevitably run into problems. Maybe there’s no way to achieve an aspect of your design using CSS. Or maybe there’s a device feature you really wish you could tap into using JavaScript. Or perhaps the in-browser DevTools don’t give you a key insight you need to do your job. We want to know your pain.
Submit your wants for the web and you could get to present it to an expert panel of judges and the WordCamp US audience live on stage. Best of all, the top problems will win awesome prizes!
Technical SEO Checklist: How to Optimize a WordPress Site for Search Engine Crawlers
Tending to the technical side of SEO is crucial to ensure that search engine robots can effectively crawl, index, and understand your site. In this session, attendees will learn how to optimize WordPress sites for important technical SEO best practices. All levels of technical optimizations will be covered from basic to intermediate to advanced, including both traditional optimizations that have been around for a long time, as well as newer modern SEO optimizations including AMP and Schema markup. We will walk through a checklist of important technical SEO best practices, and I will highlight our favorite SEO plugins, tools, and resources along the way.