Sessions

Presented by Scott Saunders in Room C300.

In this presentation, I’m going to cover how to build custom Gutenberg blocks with Advanced Custom Fields. I will also cover the differences between using ACF with and without Gutenberg, block organization, block migration for reuse, and potential problem areas for both developers and clients. I will also cover how to use ACF to incorporate page builder content into Gutenberg using Elementor to extend WordPress even further allowing users to easily create even more amazing things with WordPress.

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Room C300.

Can I gulp this webpack while the npm scripts grunt “rollup that parcel before I browserify you?” The WordPress toolchain has become extraordinarily complex, and it’s no longer enough to just copy some code from a tutorial or even the official documentation to get things to work. This talk gives you a no-nonsense straightforward easy-to-follow step-by-step walkthrough for extending the block editor with your own custom blocks. None of that “copy this code, and oh, I forgot, you also need to be a 10x engineer and know all this other stuff I forgot to mention in the documentation” nonsense. A full breakdown, from start to finish, that you can follow and build your own blocks. Also: You probably don’t need to build your own blocks, but you should still know how to do it.

Presented by Morten Rand-Hendriksen in Room C130, Room C180/C150, Room C300.

The future keeps arriving. Are you ready?

Presented by Anne Emberline in Room C300.

Are you keen on conditional logic but have no idea how to pair two typefaces? Do you know how to create elegantly structured HTML but can’t figure out why your colours look so damn bad? Has a client ever asked you to add more “pizazz” to their website, and you had no idea what the heck that meant? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then this session is for you. Anne will walk you through some specific suggestions designed to help web developers make better-looking websites using basic design principles.

Presented by Mari Kane in Room C130.

You know your site should be accessible to the blind, deaf, and physically challenged, and you know what specific changes you need to make. The question is, how to do it? And what tools will help you? In this session, Mari Kane will demonstrate the various web tools and plugins to not only test your site for accessibility but also to help your visitors see the pages in ways that suit their needs. By the end, you will never see websites the same way again.

Presented by David Ryan in Room C300.

Companies have used WordPress as a headless CMS for a few years now, but lately, it is easier than ever for developers to leverage technologies like the WordPress REST API and WP-GraphQL with React and Vue to build JavaScript frontends instead of traditional WordPress Themes. There are some great performance, security and developer experience upgrades gained from decoupling, but also some hazards I wish I knew before starting headless projects. We will explore a few of the best tools for going headless and how to solve some of the problems you will encounter along the way.

Presented by Christina Varro in Room C180/C150.

Freelancing is a great way to leave the 9-5 grind, but you need systems in order to really succeed and make it sustainable for the long term. Come and learn about productivity hacks for the modern freelancer. We will cover strategies and software to help you build sites faster, get approvals and feedback quickly, build re-occurring revenue and get paid on time.

Presented by Richard Gilbert in Room C130.

Back in the day, pixels were a front end developer’s best friend when it came to setting dimensions in CSS. Then came em (and rem) units. For the past few years, vw and vh (viewport width and height) units have become increasingly popular. In this session, I will take participants on a journey into the wonderful world of these wondrous scalable units, and how we can use them with Sass to yield displays that are more consistent and legible at any browser size. I will also highlight cases where the use of viewport units might yield undesired results, and I will demonstrate how we can use Sass logic and math to overcome these obstacles.

Presented by Ann Beaudet in Room C130.

Ann dreamed of being a writer and started a blog for fun called Annhoy.com. As a non-tech-savvy mom of three sons living in the burbs, she never expected anyone to read her blog, but it quickly got a million views.  Her first blog post took her a week to write. But with practice, it got easier, and she wrote 300 more. Writing the blog built both her confidence and her writing up, and she published a book on Amazon. This year, she wrote her debut novel, which will be published on Amazon soon. What started as a bit of fun, ended up being what would make her dream come true! Learn how it’s never too late for your blog to make your dream come true too!

Presented by Bruce Chamoff in Room C180/C150.

It is excellent that WordPress allows us to create websites and blogs easily, but most website owners want to make money with their websites by selling more products, getting more potential clients, and promoting their businesses more effectively. The problem is that most websites are not designed to engage their visitors or make money for their owners and miss great opportunities to convert visitors into customers or paid members. This session shows simple design changes to our WordPress themes and blogs to help convert visitors and engage them to become customers, subscribers, and repeat visitors. We also go deeper into the Google Analytics bounce rate to help increase sales.

Presented by Sara Mansouri in Room C130.

An introduction of Gamification (using game techniques in non-game system to make them more fun and engaging), and how it helped Google maps, Google translate, and some other real-word systems become so successful! We will also talk about how we can implement different gamification strategies in our WordPress websites using various plugins.

Presented by Nicolas Demers in Room C130.

This talk will introduce the audience to the WordPress command-line interface (WP-CLI). We will discuss advantages of the CLI vs the admin dashboard, then demonstrate various useful tasks, including: creating a site from scratch; backing up the site; managing users, themes and plugins. We will conclude by showing how to take WP-CLI to the next level, by creating custom commands.

Presented by Kelli Wise in Room C130.

You’ve made the investment to create an accessible website, but do you know what it takes to keep it accessible? Website accessibility is not a one-and-done activity. It requires discipline to make sure that new and edited content meets accessibility requirements. Your content creators are a key part of keeping your website accessible. In this session, we will cover the overview of website accessibility, writing copy that meets accessibility requirements, image management, graphics, testing tools. This session is designed for anyone who creates content or oversees content design and creation.

Presented by Dwayne McDaniel in Room C180/C150.

Whether it is for re-using the same code or deploying a bug fix or just for better document management, one of the most important leaps any site builder will ever take in their path towards becoming a developer is learning a version control system. Since Git is the standard for over 80% of developers, let’s roll up our sleeves and dive in. The benefits far outweigh the efforts needed to learn this tooling. Once you start, you will wonder why it took you so long to unleash the power of this awesome tech.

Presented by Jeremy Felt in Room C300.

Gutenberg, the new iteration of the WordPress editor, is powered by blocks. Most blocks are registered and controlled through JavaScript. However, in the course of your day to day development, you may find yourself needing (or wanting) to manage these blocks with PHP across one or many pieces of content. In the session, we’ll walk through a basic structure for managing blocks in PHP as well as some of the obvious (and less obvious) pitfalls that you may run into. You’ll walk away with concrete code examples and an overall confidence in your approach toward future blocks.

Presented by Josh Loewen in Room C180/C150.

The SEO WordPress plugin Yoast has 5 million active installations, but it is commonly misused. In this talk, Josh will outline the common mistakes WordPress owners make in attempts to grow traffic, and some awesome ideas on how to get more traffic with a WP-first approach. Are there other SEO tools and tactics we should be using? What are they? How do I know if my WordPress site is performing well? Questions like these will all be answered in ways WordPress owners and developers can walk away and start using them.

Presented by Rose Cass in Room C180/C150.

Following Chrome 74’s release in April, it became apparent that Dark Themes need to be taken into consideration by website designers as favicons began disappearing into the background. We will take you through a quick example of the Prefers-Color-Scheme media queries for Chrome, Firefox and Safari to tailor the content of a WordPress theme to match users OS preferences. Don’t underestimate the power of the Dark Side!

Presented by Alexanndre Levan in Room C180/C150.

This talk will cover simple and effective ways to optimize your WordPress in 2019 by offering basic and advanced tips on how to speed up your site to ensure it loads fast. This will be a practical talk with real-world examples and equip you with knowledge and tools you will be able to implement immediately without any coding knowledge. We will cover different topics such as caching solutions, image optimization, hosting selection, speed testing, and more.

Presented by Chris David Miles in Room C130.

Solving customer problems isn’t just a contest of technology or talent. It’s often about who is doing a better job of listening to the customer. Some call this “strategic empathy.” So if you want to build a successful new product or service, understanding your customer is paramount. In this talk, we will explore the process of creating data-informed, accurate customer profiles — and then how we can extend those profiles into empathy maps. We’ll see some real-world examples from companies like Ancestry.com, Bluehost, and others. And we’ll be sure to leave some time for a discussion on how this kind of thinking might help your business scale its ability to listen.

Presented by Ernest Smuga in Room C300.

There are lots of tutorials and code samples floating around to customize WordPress using WP PHP and JS hooks. Writing and learning code can differ greatly from using your knowledge in the real world. In this session, we will look at themes and plugins that use Hooks to explore than the wild world of custom WP Development, the complexities that arise, and solutions that are created to overcome them. We will learn how to use hooks and how to overcome small issues and complexities that may arise.

Presented by Jay Holtslander in Room C300.

Learn the basics of WordPress security and why it’s so important. This session is perfect for beginners and intermediates. We’ll cover what the reality is of the threats out there, why they’re trying to compromise your WordPress website, and what steps we can take to stop them. We’ll cover some popular free and paid security tools and look at what they do and how they’re configured. We’ll also explore some options that can stop malicious parties before they even reach your website.

Presented by Michaël Perrin in Room C180/C150.

This topic will introduce tools to automate the development and deployment workflow of a WordPress web application. I will show the main benefits of such a workflow and how it allows making the installation and update of the project fully automatic, predictable, versioned, and ready to be integrated into a continuous deployment system. Tools like Docker and WP-CLI, will be introduced to implement that process along with a simple tool that I have developed to automatically deploy the basic data that a project needs to be up and running. My mantra? No manual clicks whatsoever in the web interface!