Schedule

Session Descriptions are below schedule.

9:00AM-10:00AM Registration in Lobby
Lecture Hall Conference Room Room A Room B Room C
10:00AM – 10:30AM Welcome In Lecture Hall
10:30AM – 11:15AM Before You Build: UX, Design and Content Strategy Building Communities on BuddyPress Google Chrome as a Web Dev & Design Learning Tool Action, Filters, and basic Ajax Accessibility Roundtable
11:30AM – 12:15PM WordPress for Business: Measuring the Success of Your Website WordPress as a (Non-Sucky) Web Portal / Intranet Getting your development off of MAMP Building WordPress sites with AngularJS and the RESTful plugin JSON API More Than A Webhost: Leveraging the Azure Cloud for Your WordPress Site
12:15PM -1:30PM Lunch
1:30PM – 2:15PM Security – Things you should do Plus Ithemes Security plugin steps Foundation + WordPress: A Framework for Success Get Structured, Get Sexy… Get Schema! Typography & Web Fonts
2:30PM – 3:15PM Diving Into Google Analytics: What Matters? Modern Front-end Workflow for Theme Development Creating your first plugin using an external API Congratulations! You’re having a WordPress site!
3:30PM – 4:15PM Using a Frameworks and Child Themes Advanced Sites Deserve Advanced Custom Fields 7 Awesome Plugins Everyone Should Be Using Dealing with a lockout Short for Shortcode – or something clever
4:15PM-5:00PM Wrap Up In Lecture Hall
(Please stay to help pack up and then we’ll head to the After Party together!)
6:30 PM After Party at Millers Ale House

 

Building Communities on BuddyPress

Presented by Michael Eisenwasser.

WordPress is traditionally looked at as a one-way channel from authors to readers. These days it is possible to turn WordPress into a large-scale social network, where your visitors are actual members producing content and interacting with each other, by using BuddyPress and some creativity. This session will focus on how to turn your blog into a thriving online community with thousands of members.

Lightning Showcase

WordPress for Business: Measuring the Success of Your Website

Presented by Mike Whaling.

Whether you run a small consulting firm or an online store, WordPress is a great platform for your business web site. But just like any other business investment, you need to make sure you’re getting as much as possible out of your site. This session will cover ways to measure the success of your web site, including: How to set up your WordPress site to give yourself the best chance to reach your target customer, WordPress plugins to promote your site, capture leads and convert more sales, tips and tricks for Google Analytics to measure the performance of your site and your other marketing efforts and other useful tools to help you understand how to improve your site and your business.

Foundation + WordPress: A Framework for Success

Presented by Mike Whaling.

In this session, attendees will learn about the Zurb Foundation front-end framework, why it is a great solution for websites of all kinds, and how it was applied to WordPress to create the award-winning redesign for the Columbus Chamber of Commerce. As part of this case study, we will also discuss other elements of this redesign project, including transferring content from three disparate content management systems and responsive design considerations.

Security – Things You Should Do

Presented by Doug Triplett.

This session will look at the basics of setting up security for a new WordPress install. There are things you should delete and get rid of to start. Plus we will go through the iThemes Security plugin and what it does for you. You’ll learn how to change the defaults that hackers know about to make your site safer. You’ll see a live install of the plugin and the steps to complete it.

WordPress as a (Non-Sucky) Web Portal / Intranet

Presented by Phil Trimble.

This session will focus on using WordPress for an Intranet. Trimble has designed and implemented a web portal for the Member Agencies of the Greater Cleveland Food Bank using WordPress. The agencies use this web portal to submit paperwork (gravityforms, duh!), to stay up to date, to check the Food Bank’s inventory for ordering, to interact with one another and more. The end-user is typically not a ‘digital native,’ so steps were taken to keep things super clean and easy to use. We have more than 1,000 users in our portal, which is a multi-site environment with four sites. A number of Food Bank staff contribute to different sections, as well. It is running 37 plugins, among which you will find the likes of S2Member, WP Supercache, GravityForms, BBPress, LearnDash LMS, Tablepress and The Events Calendar (modern tribe). Trimble will talk about implementing a system like this and how they engaged a non-tech audience (e.g. We led them to water kicking and screaming and now they LOVE TO DRINK IT). He will also discuss multi-site, LearnDash LMS, and s2Member and touch upon the ever important “WordPress isn’t just blogging …” topic. We have received a ton of great feedback from our member agencies who use this on a daily basis and have also fielded inquiries and interest from other Food Banks around the country, including Columbus’ Mid-Ohio Food Bank. Since the site is predominantly locked down, you can create a username here, so poke around. Please use “WordCamp” as your agency name so I know you’re legit! http://portal.clevelandfoodbank.org/register/

Action, Filters, and Basic Ajax

Presented by Jake Snyder.

This session will be a quick overview of how hooks work in WordPress and how they can make working with WordPress a very powerful endeavor. Actions and filters allow fast and flexible development to create powerful applications inexpensively. The wrap-up will be to create a very basic ajax call using ‘admin-ajax.php’ and a simple action to make an update on the page without refresh.

Congratulations! You’re Having a WordPress Site!

Presented by Joe Rozsa.

I’ve found by talking to people that they get frustrated early on my WordPress because they don’t know the basic things about how to make a WP site go. Even clients that I train when I turn sites over to them get frustrated with what to do because they can’t remember what does what and which goes where. My session parallels many of the questions and concerns that new parents have about a new bundle of joy in their lives. It’s a little bit of poking fun at changing diapers and dressing your baby, feeding all that good stuff. Same things apply to a WP site. It needs to look good, get good content, changed periodically…

Getting Your Development Off of MAMP

Presented by Brian Retterer.

With new technology comes new ways of doing things.  This session will take you through this new technology and teach you how to begin developing in virtual environments instead of localhost.  We will touch on new tools that make it easier to get your WordPress environment up and running, as well as things like using Vagrant for your development.

Dealing with a Lockout

Presented by John Parkinson.

Parkinson recently had to deal with a lockout. He changed his habits and improved the security on all of his web sites. Learn what this is and how to deal with it.

Google Chrome as a Web Dev & Design Learning Tool

Presented by Samie Murch.

Want to learn how to change a WordPress theme? You will learn how to use Google Chrome’s tools and extensions to do basic web development and design.

Creating Your First Plugin Using an External API

Presented by Eric Katz.

This session will focus on the steps of creating a plugin that connects with a 3rd party API, such as Twitter, Instagram and Amazon. You’ll learn the major steps: Creating template doc blocks,  grabbing proper API credentials/library, creating an options page to store and save user inputs,  creating a widget to output content into sidebars and additional steps to improve code base. We’ll also cover best practices if there’s time.

Using a Frameworks and Child Themes

Presented by Phil Hoyt.

This session addresses how to build sites faster and more manageable using WordPress frameworks and child themes. You’ll learn what frameworks and child themes are, as well as learn some of the pitfalls of using other methods to build sites. And you’ll learn how to get started using frameworks.

Short for Shortcode

Presented by John Hartley.

This session will focus on the details of shortcodes. How to use them, how to create them and how to nest them with code droplets will all be covered. And live shortcode creation examples will be shown.

Advanced Sites Deserve Advanced Custom Fields

Presented by Steve Grunwell.

Advanced Custom Fields by developer Elliot Condon has changed the way we think about WordPress. No longer are we required to tediously program custom meta boxes or deliver a list of custom field values for customers to use on their new WordPress sites. With premium add-ons like Repeater and Options Page, creating carousels, global site settings and more is a snap. This session will cover the benefits of Advanced Custom Fields, as well as strategies for designing a client site around ACF. The wrapper functions from http://stevegrunwell.com/blog/using-advanced-custom-fields-for-wordpress/ will be covered (ensuring the site doesn’t break if ACF is ever deactivated) as will the exports tools from http://stevegrunwell.com/blog/exploring-the-wordpress-advanced-custom-fields-export-feature/. Perhaps most importantly, the talk will cover when it’s appropriate or not appropriate to use ACF and some of the inherent risks (e.g. overusing ACF to reinvent the way that WordPress handles content, thus making it extremely difficult to change themes later without heavy customization and/or re-entering content).

More Than A Webhost: Leveraging the Azure Cloud for Your WordPress Site

Presented by Mark Greenway.

WordPress on Microsoft Azure sounds crazy. But with the right techniques, it can be one of the best homes for a WordPress Site. We will start with the 1-minute demo of getting the site up and running. We will cover the different options for setup and the pros and cons of each.  We will work on configuring WordPress so it works fluidly on Azure. **We will continue on to making the site <<Insert Link Sharing Site of the day here>> proof, so you can stand up to the heaviest loads. Finally, we will work with tweaking and managing the costs of a consumption-based pricing model. By the end of the session, you will know how to run WordPress on Azure and whether you should.

Building WordPress sites with AngularJS and the RESTful plugin JSON API

Presented by Eric Greene.

Developers can build great single-page WordPress sites using AngularJS and the RESTful plugin JSON API. This session will demonstrate building a single-page web site with WordPress using AngularJS and the JSON API WordPress plugin. Some knowledge of AngularJS and REST services would be helpful to those who attend.

Diving Into Google Analytics: What Matters?

Presented by Nathan Driver.

There is a lot of information out there on Google Analytics. How do you decide which information is important … and which isn’t? This session will show users key information to look at from targeting your demographic to setting up goals and ways to improve your online marketing.

Modern Front-end Workflow for Theme Development

Presented by Paul Cook.

Do you develop custom themes for your WordPress-based projects? Maybe you make a living off of theme development. This session will demonstrate a modern take on front-end development for WordPress themes. What does that mean? Primarily, it means introducing tooling into your workflow. Grunt, Sass, CoffeeScript, Yeoman and all of the other wonderful tools available to make your job as a front-end designer or developer easier. You’ll see how Yeoman can be used to kickstart a new WordPress project in seconds with one command. Next, we’ll talk about how using a tool like Grunt can make your life easier in everything from pre-compiling SCSS and CoffeeScript to creating your build for distribution. Speaking of Sass, you are using something to give your CSS superpowers right? Finally this talk will show how all of this can be easily integrated into your WordPress theme development.

Before You Build: UX, Design and Content Strategy

Presented by Betsy Cohen.

We all know that WordPress is an amazing tool, but producing an amazing web site is never a given. A little planning goes a long way and in this session we’ll walk through a typical planning and design process that should be completed before you place the first pixel or spend hours searching through themes. In this session we’ll walk through the needs analysis and planning phases for a typical small business or personal brand WordPress site. We’ll cover: Defining project goals and audience,  content requirements and strategy, wireframes, rapid prototyping with WordPress, style board and design/choosing a theme.

Get Structured, Get Sexy…Get Schema!

Presented by Mitch Canter.

Let’s face it, content is king. But even the king doesn’t prance around haphazardly. He has a plan and his day is scheduled down to the minute. He has policies, procedures and ways to maximize how he gets things done. Shouldn’t your content have that kind of structure? We’ll discuss the idea of schema or structured data – first as an overview, then as a practicum. We’ll talk about why structuring your data is not just good practice, but is even rewarded. We’ll discuss some of the popular types of structured data. Finally, we’ll talk about quick ways you can implement schema into your site.

Plugins 101 – 7 Awesome Plugins Everyone Should Be Using

Presented by Angela Bergmann.

Learn what plugins are and how to pick the best ones. And the 7 plugins that every WordPress user should be running. Ask questions and pick my brain. Apple may say, “There’s an app for that,” but with WordPress, “There’s a plugin for that.”

Typography and Web Fonts

Presented by Maria Averion.

Have you struggled with fonts on your web site? Why do they even matter? In this session, you’ll learn the basics of fonts and when, why and how to use them. This session will be a mini bootcamp on typography and we’ll discuss useful plugins and how to use them.