Online courses are hot in business, right now, and the best classes are much more than a series of videos. With WordPress, you can create a perfect platform for learning along with solid courses to serve your audience. We’ll explore what makes a great platform and a solid course plus WordPress configuration options to create this. From bbPress and Learning Management Systems to BuddyPress, we’ll look at what’s possible along with difficulty levels of the various implementations.

A downloadable guide and private area demonstrating one of the implementations will be available to attendees.

When your website is accessible, all users can access your content no matter their abilities. Visually-impaired users can visit your website using a screen reader. Those who can’t use the mouse can navigate your site using a keyboard or other input device. Some accessibility features might also improve your SEO. When your site is inaccessible, research shows you could be excluding up to 20 percent of your users. This talk for all skill levels will review tools and techniques you can use to test and improve your site’s accessibility.

Dissection of website development from the ground up for a millennial news website project for Ovation TV. Session will show off wireframes, UI mockups, Custom Post Types, plugins and dare I say it? Code.

Learn the correct way to enqueue scripts, how to load scripts only when they’re needed instead of all the time, and how to write your JavaScript in a way that minimizes the potential for conflicts with other plugins or with themes.

Whether you are a seasoned WordPress professional or are new to the software, the first day of any project is loaded with excitement and anticipation. Unfortunately, it is also the day on which we have the least information necessary to support a solid project plan. So, how do bring clarity and flexibility to the unknowns we face as development teams? Adapting basic Agile practices into your workflow can make this process more manageable and help your team to quickly scale your working knowledge of WordPress.

In this talk, I will review basic Agile philosophies and present three strategies that you and your team can adapt to your next WordPress project. Using examples and audience engagement, we will focus specifically on developing a workflow infrastructure that maximizes efficiency, ROI, and growth using this platform.

This session is aimed at project managers and developers interested in incorporating Agile practices into their workflow and business managers interested in how Agile can postively influence client relationships.

Scaling Your WordPress Support for Growth

Supporting your products well is one of the best ways to ensure solid growth of your company. But growth also puts additional strain on your support team. This presentation will give you tools to understand how to scale your support before your team gets overwhelmed.

There are several important factors that go into scaling a support team. The primary ones revolve around the following:
Understanding Support is Generated from Sales
Knowing How Much Support You Can Sustain
Knowing How Much Time you Need to Train New Staff
This presentation will cover those items in detail with tools, resources, and live data based on our experiences at WordImpress

Coming soon

We’ll discuss tools that can help you create a sustainable business. I’ll touch on various tools and specifically detail how you can use automation to get over the hump by saving your time, nurture leads, and get more revenue.

• Slides

One of the most important things a project manager does is say no to people, whether it’s the client or a member of the team. The problem is that “no” is one of those words that ends the conversation, cutting off growth that can benefit the project (and your bottom line). No matter how outlandish the demand, I will show you how the principles of improv comedy will let you use the word “yes” to ensure both you and your client get what you want.

Come take a behind-the-scenes look at how enterprise service providers manage their client accounts, with specific tips on how you can implement those practices on even your smallest projects.

Have you had a specific client management problem that you weren’t sure how to resolve? Have you noticed a trend among a few of your last challenging projects that seems to be hindering your “project profitability”? Then this session is for you. This session will focus on techniques large-scale agencies use to give a white-glove client experience while controlling scope creep.

The Unit Testing workshop will enable you to write unit tests for Object Oriented Programming projects, it will cover Writing testable code, Basic Unit tests, Writing SetUp and tearDown Functions for reusable code in tests, Running tests, Mocking Objects, Advanced Unit Tests for more complex code and a discussion about testing paradigms for teams and adding testing into your workflow.  This is a two hour workshop that will include 45 minutes of demonstration and discussion and 75 minutes of hands on coding.

An intro workshop to using the basic REST API included in WP core & how to setup your own custom API endpoints. The API can help you build advanced features on your site or make it easy for other sites to get data from yours.

An intro workshop to setting up a proper file structure for building plugins to avoid issues with core or others.

Even if you’re not trying to compete with Amazon, it’s good to know your customers and competition. While building your WooCommerce store you’ll want to know some items to consider that will help you to build a meaningful brand that your customers will be loyal to.

In this session we’ll touch on tactical items you can include on your site/store to increase customer loyalty.

Best practices for estimating WordPress-based projects to be delivered to customers. Understanding and controlling scope; Methods for estimating and tracking time; Managing customer expectations; Retrospectives/continuous improvement

Published still photography ends up getting exponentially more views than videography, and all Campers benefit from it being done well — yet any successful image is the result of teamwork. What does a successful image capture in the WordPress space? I’ll be sharing best practices for speakers when there’s a photographer in the room, for the camera-shy when engaging with a photographer at a Camp, for doing photography at WordCamps, for contributing photography to Camp sites and hubs like those I’ve created in working with the WP Photo Project, and for publishing your own.

You’ve heard of the good ol’ school PHP loops. You have your “for” loops, your “foreach” loops, your “while” loops, your “fruit” loops… Well maybe not that last one!

As a WordPress developer, you use arrays and loops all the time. They’re an essential part of your developer toolbox. But do you know everything about them?

PHP has a wealth of array functions. They’re used by PHP experts to make their life easier. They let you reduce the amount of PHP code you need. This helps prevent bugs and makes your code more maintainable.

You’ll learn about functions like array_filter, array_map and array_reduce. All within the context of regular WordPress work. By the end of this talk, loops won’t look at you the same way ever again.

Flexbox is an exciting technology in CSS that gives developers and designers some new tools to help bring complex designs and components to life. The case for sunsetting traditional techniques such as margins, floats and positioning is now viable. With some new tools under our belts, we are able to deliver rich designs in the browsers that are well-supported.

Topics covered:

-Learning the different Flexbox tools
-Identifying good use cases for implementing Flexbox throughout our themes
-Death to margins, floats and positioning techinques
-The role of Flexbox in layout
-Implementing today’s designs with Flexbox

Whether you are a weekend warrior building sites for your never ending ideas or a freelancer that has an ongoing list of clients using WordPress, it is soooooo important that you provide support for these sites.

This talk will share tools and techniques for making sure you can support your WordPress development for as long as it is online. Knowing the tools is one thing but knowing how to use them effectively is key.

Live preview, via the customizer, is the best way to make site management easy for your clients and in your products. Anything can be live previewed out of the box, and with a little work, the live preview experience can become instant and compelling. WordPress core comes with several advanced Customizer controls that developers can use with only a few lines of code. There’s a color control, a media control with support for anything from images and audio to PDFs, and most importantly, the ability to create your own custom controls based off of these.

We’ll see how easy it is to leverage these specialized controls in themes and plugins, and show how you can extend them to build advanced custom controls without starting from scratch. I’ll also explain postMessage and Selective Refresh, and show you how to use them to make site management fun for your clients.

I will present on the utilities in WP-CLI, PHP Code Sniffer, PHP Mess Detector, and some shell utilities.

There’s an old saying that when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You can build almost anything with WordPress, but should you? If you build a single landing page or a 5-page brochure site in WordPress, you may be burdening your client with the cost and effort of constant maintenance of a site they might update once in a year. But if you don’t use a CMS when you need one, managing that site is going to be a nightmare for the client. Here’s how to explain to clients what a content management system is, how to tell whether they need one, where to go if they don’t, and why WordPress is worth the higher cost of hosting, the ongoing maintenance, and the time it takes to learn how to use it in the first place.

The transfer of information is paramount in design. Technology has made it possible to consume a mass of information in minimal time – is your design helping the flow of this information, or hindering it? While accessibility for those with challenges is one end of the spectrum, have you been designing for the other end? Have you been designing for telepathy or those with advanced capabilities? This talk will explore the spectrum of accessibility for both the challenged and the more advanced in today’s design.

Blog monetization is always a hot topic, but what does it REALLY take to go full-time?

Professional blogging is a business…potentially a very profitable one. With the right strategy, skills, and mindset, you can build a revenue stream from your WordPress blog that supports your lifestyle.

In this session, we’ll discuss why you need a business plan and how to write one, and how to develop a monetization strategy that makes sense for you. Plus, we’ll discuss exactly how you can use your WordPress blog to develop an income that supports your lifestyle, even if you don’t have hundreds of thousands of unique web visitors every month. We’ll probably also have a few laughs at the speaker’s expense. It will be a good time.

Membership Sites are quickly becoming a mainstream method to generate income, provide support, training and connect with niche communities. We will review and discuss 5 different Membership Site models that can transform any business into a dynamic, content-rich membership site.

Having trouble getting that first site up and running?

Wondering if your site is missing an important plugin that makes it more secure, hard to hack, and run as fast as possible?

Let a puppet show you the way that it’s done. I will be employing a puppet/dummy and a lot of audience participation to help me get a WordPress site up from scratch.

This presentation would be great for brand new or newish users who wants a brief over view of getting a secure and easy to administer site up with as little trouble as possible. Yes, a puppet. You didn’t misread. It’s a bit different, but great for asking/answering extremely simple questions a new user may be too embarrassed to ask.

Security, backup, cache, and page builder plugins are featured…as well as the puppet

This is aimed at the non-technical user who is getting a WordPress site up for their very first time or someone who has tried and never quite got what they wanted out of the experience.

“If you are not a designer or coder, it can be hard to know how to pick a WordPress theme for your website. Should you go with a free theme? a premium theme? or should you have a designer build you a custom theme.

In this session, Christina Hills is going to show you, in an easy-to-understand, non-techie way, the things you should look at when choosing a WordPress theme for your website. And how you can do it yourself without being a designer!

Attend this session and learn:

• The difference between free themes and premium (paid) themes
• What to look for when choosing a WordPress theme (make sure it’s mobile responsive too!)
• What is a ‘child theme’ and when/why you need it
• Plus answers to your theme questions

You want to build a WordPress site, and you want to have fun in the process, so don’t miss this session with Christina Hills!”