WordCamp Sacramento 2015: Advanced/Developer Track Schedule

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WordCamp Sacramento Advanced Developer Track

Advanced? Developer? We’ve Got You Covered

Yesterday we published the Beginner/User Track Schedule for WordCamp Sacramento — and we’re pretty thrilled about it. The sessions and the speakers are awesome.

Today, we’re bringing you the Advanced/Developer Track Schedule, with a breakdown of what each session will cover — and like the Beginner Track, we’ve got a great variety of sessions we’re sure you’ll enjoy!

Advanced/Developer Track Schedule

8:30-8:50 am

Welcome & Kick Off

9:00-9:50 am | Jonathan Trujillo

Local Development with VVV

Learn how to set up and use Varying Vagrant Vagrants and Variable VVV to easily set up and develop multiple sites locally that match your production environments. Say so long to MAMP, XAMP, WAMP and start using Vagrant and VVV.

10:00-10:50 am | Vasken Hauri

Better Living through Event-Driven Caching

Most sites use some form of caching to improve performance, whether it be popular plugins like WP Total Cache, drop-in plugins, or even custom solutions. While these solutions can significantly improve performance for most of your visitors, they can’t guarantee that your custom code will be properly cached and updated seamlessly. The good news is that WordPress’ event-driven architecture of hooks and filters makes it a simple process to cache and intelligently update content only when you need to, for the best possible visitor experience. We’ll cover some code examples to illustrate how to leverage event-driven caching, and de-mystify this powerful and often-overlooked part of WordPress.

11:00-11:50 am | Luke Woodward

Robots Write the Docs

http://developer.wordpress.org/reference has become the canonical source for documentation. This source comes from pulling out internal documentation from the WordPress code base. The best part — this is open source software. We’ll explore how we can take the work the core docs team has done on the WP_Parser project (a super smart robot) and repurpose it to make our lives, and our plugin and theme docs, much better!

12:00-1:15 pm

LUNCH

1:15-2:00 pm | Peter Chester

Coding with a Team

As Modern Tribe has grown from a small team to a team of nearly 50 people, we have had to adopt a bit more organization in our workflows. One thing that we’ve been working on recently is refining our code sharing, review and deployment practices. In this session, I’ll share a workflow for collaborating with your team. Using this workflow, you will reduce delays, bugs and improve the technical skills of your colleagues.

2:10-3:00 pm | Jason Cosper

Way of the Future

With the performance gains promised by HHVM and PHP 7, WordPress site admins are living in pretty exciting times. The PHP world at large is in a proverbial space race, and every WordPress site will (eventually) benefit. But early adopters and folks who manage their own servers shouldn’t be the only ones who get early access to these face melting bumps in speed. In this talk, I’ll be introducing you to things you can do to get your code ready for these next generation hosting environments. And we’ll cover where you can host your code once it’s ready. If you’re interested in attending this talk, a passing familiarity with the command line helps, but isn’t a hard requirement.

3:00-3:30 pm

BREAK

3:30-4:20 pm | Zack Tollman

HTTPS is Coming: Are you Prepared?

Google, Firefox, and the IETF are currently engaged in major initiatives to convert the web to be secure by default. Page ranking, new browser APIs, and HTTP/2 are all pushing websites to require HTTPS. An HTTPS only web is imminent. Unfortunately, according to SSL Pulse, 75% of the top 1 million websites that use HTTPS are not actually secure because of misconfiguration. Do you know how to configure HTTPS properly? In this talk, we will discuss the key aspects of HTTPS to empower developers to deploy truly secure HTTPS sites.

4:30-5:00 pm | Rob La Gatta

The Art of Replying to Reviews on WordPress.org

Anyone who has a plugin or theme up on the WordPress.org repo has likely faced them: user reviews about your product, running the gamut from gushingly enthusiastic to barely-masked rage. Reviews are baked into the WordPress.org experience, and it seems like they’re here to stay. Not only that — you can’t turn reviews off for your theme or plugin, which means that no matter how hard you try to ignore them, they have an influence on prospective customers investigating whether to use your product. And the icing on the cake? Since everything on WordPress.org is free, the odds are high that every second you spend reviewing/replying to reviews is time taken away from more profitable efforts.

The good news is that there are strategies that can help turn even the most negative of them around into something positive and meaningful for both your business and your user community. Whether you’re a plugin developer watching new reviews flow in without any idea how tackle them, a support person tasked with keeping the community happy or a user who has left reviews without a clear understanding of what the plugin team does when they read it, this session should be a useful overview on making reviews work for everyone.

In this session, we’ll walk through:

  • Why every WordPress.org review deserves a reply in a timely fashion
  • Strategies for turning negative reviews around (1-star to 5-stars, baby!)
  • How to develop a scalable system for replying to reviews that minimizes growing pains, making the task easy to delegate/share among team members as your user base and support team both grow

5:00-5:30 pm | Sallie Goetsch

Not Everyone Is A WordPress Expert

Is it easy to build a website with WordPress? The answer to that question depends on what you have to compare it to.

When viewing a site, clients see the header, footer, sidebar, navigation, and main content area of a WordPress site all on one browser screen, and expect to be able to click and edit that material the same way they would in a Microsoft Word file. But when logging in to WordPress, they have to manage widgets on one screen, menus on another, and content in another place — or another, and another depending on how many post types the site uses.

Fortunately, it’s not difficult to learn. There are steps you can take to make sure your clients feel confident managing the content on their sites and appreciate the power and flexibility they don’t get with hosted solutions. If we put in a little extra effort when building sites, we will turn our clients into WordPress fans—and fans of our products and services.

5:30-5:45 pm

Closing Remarks

Pretty Amazing, Right?!

Whether you’re new to WordPress or casually use WordPress, you’re an advanced user or developer, or you’re somewhere in between, we’ve got something for you.

Remember, the WordCamp Happiness Room will be open all day, so at any time you can mozy on in and get all your WordPress questions answered and even get help with your WordPress site!

Here are some helpful links: