Sessions

Blocks as a concept existed before Gutenberg, but have become a lot more important to the future of WordPress and the web.

In this talk, I take you through how blocks have changed our approach to UX Design as a digital agency, how clients are benefiting from this, how it’s made us quicker at delivering our designs and how all of this results in a better experience for site managers and end-users.

You’ll walk away with practical tips about selling and presenting blocks as an idea to clients, workflow ideas to make things easier for developers and a smile on your face. 🙂

In this talk, I will be looking at various ways to shortcut your workflow. Saving time typing with handy shortcuts for the command line, such as scripts and aliases, emails, and every day tasks. Leaving more time for problem solving and coffee drinking.

This talk will cover workflow and shortcuts on my Mac, introducing terminal, Alfred, Brew, ZSH/Oh My ZSH and shell scripting. While it focuses on Mac, most of the talk is applicable for anyone using or connecting to a Unix/Linux system as well.

By the end of this talk, you will be rushing to shortcut your life.

WordPress has always been so intuitive for me to use when creating client sites. So much so that I’ve always wondered if I could provide the steps for my clients to do it themselves and what would that look like at scale? Could I help 10 people at once or 50 even?

I decided on helping 100 small business-owning users build a new WordPress website over a three week period in June 2019.

In this presentation I share the results of my beta test, covering the common problems users still face when going at it alone and how we can better appeal to small businesses with our WordPress services in the future.

Gutenberg is the biggest update that has come to WordPress in many years. This is how a small WordPress studio reacted to this massive core change and why we decided to rebuild our internal processes.

Often WordPress themes are not easy to change, maintain or fun to work on. This can rule WordPress out as a viable option for bespoke, non-trivial websites.

In this talk we’ll dive into how this happens and look at how we can benefit from software engineering techniques to help make your code easier to change. I’ll also show how using Lumberjack, a powerful MVC framework built on Timber, can be used to power-up your themes.

If you are a software engineer that also works in WordPress, or primarily using WordPress and looking to level up then this talk is for you.

Most freelancers and agencies who work in web knows that accessibility matters, but during the daily working life it is sometimes hard to include accessibility into the projects.

Eight years ago I was a one-gal band running my WordPress business on lots of coffee and late nights and systems held together by a wing and a prayer and a bit of Sellotape.

This had to stop. Bootstrapping, I hired my first offshore team member. Since then I’ve scaled my business with people, policies, and systems, so I work with more clients in a less stressful way, and enjoy life an awful lot more!

In my session I will focus on:

Is going offshore for you? Have you developed the structure and policies to support offshore teams? Making your first hires – what are your options?

I’ll share my experiences, good and bad! Day-to-day management – developing robust communication and planning systems for your offshore team to enable a great work environment for everyone!

Creating your own team manual – sounds dull but is the lifeblood of your business. I will show you how to create a living document that grows with you.

Learn from my mistakes while I share my own shortcuts to hiring offshore teams and loving your WordPress business more.

Simple tricks (I always use) to improve the performance of your site – Mauricio Gelves

Do you want to be on the first page of Google Results? Besides working on your SEO you’ll have to set your website to a rigorous speed diet. Our god Google only seems to have eyes for fast websites and for that, I have a list of simple but very effective tricks.

Getting the best from code review – Sarah Pantry

When done right, code review is a great tool for levelling up developers and sharing knowledge, but when done wrong it can have a hugely negative effect, causing stress, demoralisation and burn out.

In this talk, we’re going to take a look at some simple ways to ensure you get more from code review and how it can become a tool for good.

SVG Super Safe, Totally Secure? – Tom J Nowell

You might have heard SVGs are safe, even allow users to upload them, are you sure about that?

Tom will run through a few examples and demonstrate the horrors of SVGs, and how to make them cast iron secure.

Imagine this. You’re in a new country, knowing only one person in a 500 miles radius. The little savings you had are quickly running out to the point you can hardly afford a bus ticket to the city center, not to mention next month’s rent, no job and you’re not sure what you’re doing tomorrow morning.

How would you rebuild your life and business to support your dreams and goals?

An inspiring story of how I found myself in a new country, busking for money on the street and how I optimised my way from the average £40 per day up to hundreds per day using growth hacking strategies. And how YOU can do the same for your business and life.

The talk will walk you through the concept of Growth Hacking along with some processes and ideas on how you can implement the same principles yourself.

The same strategies later helped me grow my WordPress business to 6 figures in revenue by the end of year 1 and to a team of 12 by year 3, as well as making history in the WordPress community by launching the first plugin by a new company to reach 6 figures in the first month.

What we cover:
• High-level goal setting
• Building your growth machine
• Productivity optimisation
• A/B testing for the win

So you’ve been to the security talk, that other security talk, and that really scary one. You followed the advice, and you are feeling confident. Perhaps you have never been to a security talk let alone the scary one but feel its time to at least find out how you stand.

In this talk, Tim is going to go through how to run a basic penetration test of a WordPress website. From start to finish, looking at scope, research, execution, and remediation. He will be demonstrating tools to use and processes to follow, so you can see how secure your site is or isn’t.

WordCamps have been a part of the WordPress community since 2006 and have taken place in dozens of countries around the world. They are a hugely popular way for all members of the community to meet, network, and learn from each other in a welcoming, friendly environment.

But how much work does it take to put on a successful WordCamp? And what are the potential pitfalls?

Three previous lead organisers will talk us through their experiences creating a WordCamp, what it meant to them, and what they learned along the way.

A look at a selection of some useful free tools that help ensure accessibility of websites. The tools are browser extensions and WordPress plugins. Many are designed for testing for certain aspects of accessibility, but some can actually help improve the accessibility of WordPress websites.

The session will contain many live demos to illustrate how the tools can be used.

As somebody who has been both a developer and marketing team leader in my career, I’ve been able to see when projects go wrong between developers and external or internal marketing teams.

In this talk, I’ll share a few areas on where relationships break down, how to avoid problems before they arise, and also tips to get marketing teams on your side so you can both serve a happy client.

You’ve already heard that slow website keeps you from good conversation numbers and high Google ranking. But how do you know if your website is that slow?

By attending to this talk, you’ll learn:

• How to measure performance of your site properly
• Why fast DNS service is important
• What you should be aware of when choosing hosting provider
• What could be done on WordPress level to speed the things up

We will finish with a few tips on how to keep your site being blazing fast for a long time.

You will want to take notes!

Modern infrastructure technologies like serverless computing and real-time databases offer a huge potential for new and improved online user experiences.

In this session, we’ll go through a practical use case to find out how we can harness their power in the context of WordPress.

We’ll build a Gutenberg block that shows status updates, to be incorporated into a status page. We’ll use serverless computing to allow adding status updates via a Slack command, and we’ll use a real-time database so that all visitors receive these updates in real-time without any impact on our WordPress server.

The world of WordPress can be pretty turbulent at times. From major players leaving the community, to hefty mergers and acquisitions, and tech giants such as Google wanting a slice of the action; there’s plenty going on to get fired up about. But how do these big industry changes affect our local communities?

In this session, David will be discussing the possible implications of industry and technology pressures, including:

• How recent acquisitions will impact freelance developers
• What opportunities are available to the local community now the tech giants are interested in WordPress
• Will the advent of Gutenberg spell danger for other page builders
• And beyond the WordPress community: how will other political and environmental issues change our digital communities?

Within the next few years the way we work will have totally changed; this talk is for anyone in the WordPress community who’s excited or scared about it!

How can we ensure that we adapt the same standards of fairness, openness and inclusion at the heart of the WordPress community into our day-to-day web development projects?

How can we not only support but be champions of the open-source ethos of WordPress to clients and stakeholders?

Has the nature of building web applications evolved so much that we must now consider the possibility of an ethical and moral code by which we scope for and build web applications, particularly for WordPress sites?

I will attempt to (briefly) answer some of these questions, give my own thoughts on this and highlight some of the possible things that we need to consider beyond web performance, UX/UI, loading times and code quality.

No matter what the project is, we have certain moral and ethical issues around equality, fairness and inclusion that need to be considered more so now than ever before.

Welcome to the International WordPress Awards

Si Cooke

Have you heard rumours of the WordPress awards? They’ve been circulating for a while now, but the time has come to make them a reality. Welcome to the International WordPress Awards!

Our goal is to create a space where innovation flourishes, where WordPress professionals can share ideas that help shape the future of the industry. The IWP Awards will be a non-profit platform for the WordPress community, providing a way to recognise and celebrate the highest achievements in our industry, by enabling users to submit their work without cost, and the public to freely vote who goes through to the independent judging panel.

This talk is about the roadmap for developing the IWP awards, learn what the awards are all about and how you can get involved. Suitable for absolutely everyone!

I made a plugin! What I learnt and why I’m hooked

Ben Kinnaird

I’m not a programmer but I love programming. During the day I help people with marketing but after 4pm I just want to make stuff.

In this talk, I want to share how I built a plugin for WordPress and why I’m now hooked and want to make more.

I’ll talk about the steps that lead to the point where I felt confident enough to do it. From our lead (and only) WP developer leaving the agency, attending WordPress meet-ups and the right project coming at the right time.

This talk is for those who want to take the first step in making a plugin or even making small customisations to make your life easier.

How Blocks Have Changed UX Design

Melin Edomwonyi

Blocks as a concept existed before Gutenberg, but have become a lot more important to the future of WordPress and the web.

In this talk, I take you through how blocks have changed our approach to UX Design as a digital agency, how clients are benefiting from this, how it’s made us quicker at delivering our designs and how all of this results in a better experience for site managers and end-users.

You’ll walk away with practical tips about selling and presenting blocks as an idea to clients, workflow ideas to make things easier for developers and a smile on your face. 🙂

Decoupled/Headless WordPress sites allow WordPress to be at the hub of internet technology.

Rather than a ‘them and us’, WordPress can be the bridge for the non-technical client, allowing the decoupled site (which can be just HTML/CSS/JS) to integrate all the non-WordPress technologies.

The client can have the comfort and reassurance of WordPress CMS, the viewer can benefit from all the other non-WordPress technologies.

In a previous talk about time management it was all about methods like Eisenhower, Pareto, Chunking or ICE. I had to try various methods to find out what works for me and in this talk it’s about how I dealt with different things like:

• how does time management and being spontaneous go together?
• how do you deal with self sabotage?
• how to concentrate and how to stay concentrated?
• how do you measure productivity?
• what about multitasking?
• how do you find your priorities?
• how to beat procrastination?

I’d like to show you how I deal with all these stuff and would like to encourage you to listen to your intuition, your gut feeling and find your way to handle it.

An honest, open and forthright letter written by me, to me, with the hope it will help you.

Let’s talk about one of the most common road blocks for many in their personal and professional, growth and development… imposter syndrome.

Dan will talk from personal experience and share insight from his time within the WordPress community. You will hear about overcoming the challenges within both the business and personal life.

Web components have been around since the first spec was written in 2011, but they only started getting full support from the main browsers in 2018.

In this talk, I’ll discuss the four key specs that make the magic of web components happen and explain how they can help improve our workflow.

After showcasing the advantages of using web components, I will explain how to use web components in a WordPress application and highlight the tools and developer guides.

In conclusion, we will integrate web components with Gutenberg and learn how we can use the best of two worlds.

This talk is focused on front-end skills and requires a basic understanding of JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.