During this workshop we will take a brief look at what Models, Views and Controllers are and build an application using the MVC design pattern which is widely used for application development in many languages.

To do this we will be working with the WordPress MVC plugin ProdPress.

Workshop Length: 1.5hrs

Recommended prerequisites

To benefit from this workshop you will ideally have:

• a knowledge of WordPress backend development and theming
• a laptop with a local installation of WordPress
• an IDE for editing code

Join millions worldwide who are exploring mindfulness as a tool for well-being.

This session will look at the practical benefits of mindfulness, including:

• enhanced focus, memory and creativity
• reduced stress, anxiety and depression
• healthier emotional regulation, communication and social connectedness

And we will have a go at some simple mindfulness exercises – exploring how in just a few minutes, we can re-connect with ourselves and find calm.

This workshop is about finding the words to press… and how to access the content from inside your client’s head.

Workshop Length: 2hrs

We will be covering

• Web content: The right questions to ask and the best ways to ask them to get the content you need from an unwilling client
• Blog posts: How to come up with ideas for blog posts to make sure your client’s website gets seen
• Tools: Free tools to use and how to use them effectively
• Reviewing web content: Tips for how to test, review and improve copy

Do you design and develop websites or apps? Are you really proud that you have mastered two distinct disciplines? Or do you feel a bit insecure that neither your design or development skills match those of a ‘specialist’?

If you’re anything like me, you sometimes feel a bit of both and wonder how to pitch yourself for potential work or where your skills fit as part of a wider team.

I’m going to argue that we should not undervalue our skills, I’ll share some ideas about ways of working and make a plea to the wider web world to take us more seriously.

Whether you’re a seasoned plugin/theme developer, a freelancer just starting out with building/customizing sites for clients or a technical support engineer that needs to replicate the setup of a client’s site, a local WordPress development environment is a critical part of your arsenal and there are a number of solid tools to pick from as the core of your setup.

I’ll introduce you to a nifty option that prioritises extreme speed and is light on resources. I’ll also take you through some interesting little tricks that make starting a new project as well as contributing to an existing one faster and way more fun.

Hold on to your hats and scarves and let’s jump right in.

Colour is an essential design element. When we design for the web, we’re sometimes conditioned in our colour choices by the colour palette of the brand we’re building the site for. However, usability and accessibility must be the first consideration in our choice of colours and their application. This talk gives practical guidance on how to approach and use colour in your web designs, with a few touch points on colour psychology and theory.

What comes to your mind when you think about technical requirements for successful SaaS company? Should it be lean and easy-to-build, but ready for continuous improvement? Should it have wide opportunities for customization but still be reliable and stay under the control? Should it be powerful and scalable, but still really easy to manage? We’ll see how to build such kind of Software-as-a-Service application using WordPress Multisite, from scratch.

This workshop explores the essential ingredients for any good talk content and how to conquer your fears of an empty stage. 

Workshop Length: 2.5hrs

Requirements

Please bring pen, paper, an open heart and a big idea!

By Tamsin Taylor

Explore what a “living” style guide is and how you can use one to drive the creation of your WordPress themes. Looking at where this helps with things like collaboration, testing, maintenance, and reuse. From the perspective of an implementer rather than a designer so will contain technical details (so how to implement, not so much how to design for, and not just why you should).

It is often noted that the last part of any digital project is usually the hardest and takes the longest as expressed famously by Tom Cargill, Bell Labs:

“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.”

Why is this? What makes the last part of any digital project this difficult?

Have we become the “Snapchat” generation that can’t focus long-term? What does it means for our projects? It is us, our clients or the projects themselves that fail at this stage?

This talk will aim to focus on common project failings that I have seen again and again in the final stages and provide actionable advice for all team members involved in creating websites to help deliver better projects.

Panellists

Mika Epstein

Alain Schlesser

David Lockie

Tammie Lister

So you’ve heard about Gutenberg and you know all your plugins are ready for it. But you aren’t a coder, you don’t jive with javascript, and you certainly don’t prance with PHP. What happens when you realize you need one of those fancy blocks and you are just not ready for the deep dive into development?

That’s the day you realize … WordPress has your back. You can build a block WITHOUT any code knowledge necessary. And no, that’s not an exaggeration.

Workshop Length: 1.5hrs

Share Neil’s journey from concept to product, via famous 5 minute install (in fact it was more like 5 seconds thanks to $ wp valet new –project=bedrock ).

Neil will talk about how this project was conceived, what it’s like to be the geek in a team of psychotherapists but a doofus in the dev team.

See the mock-ups that landed them a £660,000 project (and how he got bullied into accepting just a fraction of that *and* had to launch a year earlier than planned!)

Neil will share the lessons he’s learned about being a good ‘client’ to his developers (two of the nicest people he’s ever worked with), despite wanting to learn how they do what they do. Cringe as he shares some of the questions he’s asked them, the very patient replies he’s had, and the comical initial estimate of how much time he needed them for.

Find out how Neil support 800 users, the dilemma of supporting vs solving, and having collaborators rather than customers.

Next steps – where will this product be next year, 2 years from now?

Using WordPress as a headless CMS is a great solution for delivering fast, scalable websites. This talk will feature a website we developed for one of our clients, a global software company selling statistical and data analytical tools and solutions for the biotechnology sector.

We will cover the benefits of taking a headless approach, where WordPress is used solely as a CMS but its theme & templating features are replaced by a separate framework, GatsbyJS which is based on React.

We will also include some of the pitfalls and challenges we overcame along the way and the benefits to our client of this approach.

Requirements:

• A laptop
• An internet connection
• Development environment that supports Node (v6 onwards) and NPM (v3 onwards)
• Basic development experience

Nice to have:

• Experience with JS, React, GraphQL & Static Site Generators
• Familiarity with Terminal/CLI

Workshop Length: 2hrs

Voice search is rapidly evolving. Will it be the next big thing? Or is it already? And what should you be doing in order to stay on top of the game?

What about mobile indexing? Will this effect your rankings in the future?

In this talk I will be talking about some of the latest trends and important new insights in the world of SEO.

Working on the Third Sector, we have utilised WordPress as our platform to build the community. It is very important to keep a strong connection with our audience to establish a long-term relationship that can keep us growing and allow us to increase the support of our cause and activities. Because of that, I would love to share some of the tips and knowledge that I have gain during the journey, how to improve your blogging skills, how to make your platform more interactive and engaging and how to make your audience feel ownership of it.

At the same time, I believe this is really useful for many people who navigate the online world as a business but with the intention of have a better impact, create content that builds that ‘community feeling’ and also make a social difference. As Social Responsibility becomes more and more an essential element of many companies, we need to improve the use of our online platforms and experiment new ways of activism even when your first intention might be to just increase your audience. No matter what your sector is, building your online community has an incredible effect on your organisation, for us It has been a complete game-changer.

An introductory talk for people who are newer to WordPress and making websites in it. I think its a topic that isn’t covered enough at events these days and I’d like to encourage newer users to dive in to WordPress.

I will be going over how to use the dashboard to create a new website.

Topics covered will include how to create posts, pages, menus and how they correspond to the content displayed on your site. How to create galleries, and search for themes and plugins.

I will also talk about a couple of popular plugins, for example how to use Yoast and add contact forms to your site.

When I started my business, in 2011, I didn’t think I needed a business plan, I only needed clients, tons of clients. Even though my title was web designer, I took every job that was asked of me: web sites, of course, but also graphics, print, social media management, training, basically anything!

In less than eight months I had to go back to work as an employee because I managed to spend way more money than I earned.
I kept doing some freelancing on the side with no direction whatsoever and finally I realised that I needed a plan. After implementing a proper business plan, I was able to recognise and concentrate on a niche market, become much more successful, raise my prices, and greatly increase my income.

It doesn’t matter what your financial goal for the year is, or what your mission for your small business is, having measurable goals and a clear strategy will allow you to do what you love and make a living out of it.
Together we will go over the basic sections of a business plan and we’ll learn a creative way to make one that represents you and your business. There will be worksheets to help you draft your first business plan and crayons and markers to make it more fun!

Workshop Length: 3hrs

Let’s have an honest discussion about the challenges of running your WordPress business. Building your own business, no matter what size, can be one of the most rewarding, satisfying and freeing experiences you’ve ever encountered. It can also be one of the most terrifying, isolating and lonely roads to take.

Having successfully started, developed and sold businesses, Dan has first hand experience of both the positive and negative impacts on his mental health.

Dan will talk candidly about some of his experiences, giving you some insight into his decision to launch the charity: WP&UP.

WP&UP supports & promotes positive mental health within the WordPress community.

The WordPress REST API lets you move data in and out of WordPress – enabling integrations with any other client application or data consumer. We’ll guide you on how to design, create and execute custom endpoints in the REST API to enable complex integrations for multiple resources and clients.

In this workshop, we’ll create a fictitious project – we’ll be outsourcing the development of the app, whilst we focus on creating and providing the data from WordPress. We’ll start by designing the required data models and a communication protocol to transfer from server to client – then we’ll document our requirements to pass on to our outsourced app provider.

Once we receive the app back from our provider – ready to accept data – we’ll build the backend implementation to covers proper data models and custom REST API endpoints.

Attendees will learn how to design their WordPress backend to properly power a mobile app as well as how to putting together requirements that allow them to outsource non-WordPress development work for the custom client.

Workshop Length: 3hrs

Requirements
Attendees are assumed to have a working WordPress development environment where they can develop and test a custom plugin, and have a git client that they can use to clone a git repository and switch branches.

The practice of branding can be traced back to 50.000 years ago. The concept of marketing branding to 4000 BC. And with the (r)evolution brought forth by Internet and Social Media, today we are all brands and as such, we all need to be aware of how a brand is best managed. This talk is a primer on the origin and the evolution of the concept of branding, so to better understand and care for our brand(s), regardless of their being a company, a product or a personal one.

In his talk, Mitko will tell us about some of the ways WordPress websites can be AJAXed. The talk will start with explaining how the wp_ajax functionality works and show some tips and tricks, and then go into the WP API and some javascript frameworks that can help you AJAX your website.

We are working to ensure every project is tested internally and externally for accessibility issues, it’s not been an easy road and we would like to share our experiences with you. By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessible and help your agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.

How design trends shape the future of digital design and how to distinguish those that are simply a ‘flash in the pan’ and those that can serious benefit, mould and inspire future thinking.

Highs, lows and where to next for four Women in WordPress.

Panellists

Louise Towler
Vineeta Greenwood
Marieke van de Rakt
Meg Fenn

Moderator

Kelly Molson