WordCamp Sacramento Is A Wrap
It’s hard to believe that WordCamp Sacramento 2015 is over. The entire organizing team is so proud of the Sacramento WordPress community for coming out, contributing to, and being part of a truly fantastic day of learning and networking.
Sacramento’s inaugural WordCamp was a tremendous success.
With 19 different speakers presenting on a variety of topics, covering design, content, development, business, client service, and customer support, it was a long day. Our heartfelt thanks go out to all of the attendees who hung in there until the very end at 5:45pm — and posted about the event using the hashtag #wcsac.
Both tracks were packed from the first session all the way until the very last session!
To thank each speaker who volunteered their time and expertise to create and deliver great talks, a beautiful speaker dinner, planned by Heather Hogan, was hosted in their honor on Friday night before WordCamp at Ten22.
Now we know you took notes, but we also know that so much information in one day can be a bit overwhelming and you may want a quick memory boost or recap. So we’ve gathered up the links to the slide decks for each speaker and included them below.
Speaker Slide Decks
Local Development with VVV
@jontrujillo | View Slides | @jontrujillo
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.
Better Living through Event-Driven Caching
Vasken Hauri | View Slides | @vaskenhauri
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.
Robots Write the Docs
Luke Woodward | View Slides | @lkwdwrd
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!
Coding with a Team
Peter Chester | View Slides | @peterchester
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.
Way of the Future
Jason Cosper | View Slides | @boogah
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.
HTTPS is Coming: Are you Prepared?
Zack Tollman | View Slides | @tollmanz
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.
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.
Not Everyone Is A WordPress Expert
Sallie Goetsch | View Slides | @salliegoetsch
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.
The New Age of Content
Greg Taylor | View Slides | @grtaylor2
Content Marketing isn’t new, but now if you don’t have a solid multi-faceted content strategy you will get left behind. In this session, we’ll dive into how you can create a solid content marketing strategy that includes video, podcasting, Ask-Me-Anythings (AMAs) and how to execute your plan with WordPress.
Content Design: Getting The Most From Your Content And Images
Dawn Pedersen (@bluelobsterweb) | View Slides | @bluelobsterweb
This session takes you beyond the cut and paste addition of content to your WordPress site, and digs into the details of content formatting and image management to create beautiful pages and posts visitors actually want to read. You’ll learn: best practices to make your content feel easy, fast, and interesting to read; Tips on working with images to attract attention and keep page load speed fast; Visual considerations the best content designers take into account that give their site design and content presentation an edge.
Lessons Learned From Reviewing 30 Membership Plugins
Chris Lema | View Slides | @chrislema
What happens when you review 30 membership plugins? You learn a lot about writing reviews. You learn a lot about products and product marketing. You learn a lot about membership plugins. Come hear the stories of these lessons if you’re either a product developer, in marketing, or a membership plugin user.
Git Source Control: for the Rest of Us
Nolan Erck (@southofhshasta) | View Slides
Most “Intro to Git” presentations assume the user does source control management via the command line. However, for a lot of people — like front-end developers that came from a Photoshop background who are doing HTML/CSS work — that’s simply not the case. If you’re a designer or developer using WordPress and aren’t using GIT, or you’ve ever asked the question, “how to use a GUI tool to start learning Git?” then this session is for you. In this session, we’ll cover:
- An intro to what “source control” is and when / why I need it
- An intro to what Git is
- How to use Git from a GUI
- The difference in Git and GitHub
- Some next steps: branching, reverting, merging, using some real code/asset files
Posts are for Blogs (WordPress IA Basics)
There is more to the WordPress than just Posts and Pages. This talk will look at the information architecture of sites that are more than simple blogs, and how custom post types, combined with custom taxonomies can be used to help you organize and publish your content. We will look quickly at ways of working with the code to do this manually, as well as ways to achieve the same goals with plugins.
Using CSS3 in WordPress
Suzette Franck | View Slides | @suzette_franck
There is not much documentation on using CSS3 in WordPress, and while not many of the new CSS3 modules have reached official recommendation by the W3C, support is very good across all of the latest browsers. This session will aim to inform, enlighten, and delight attendees with the right way to include CSS in your WordPress theme using child themes or a plugin such as Jetpack, and we will also cover some of the best new features of CSS3 that you can put to work right away.
Ad Revenue 101
Ben Ilfeld | View Slides | @benilfeld
WordPress is easy! Ads are… not so much. Are you curious about some of the basics of the industry? Maybe you’d like to earn some revenue from your site? In this session we’ll look at options for monetizing your WordPress site.
Taking WordPress from Hobby to Side Job as a Freelancer
Bernice “Be” Lee | View Slides | @StudioBeLee
There is group of people who began using WordPress as a hobby, then soon began getting paid for WordPress work as freelancers. Once you start getting paid, the government sees it as income — even if it’s just a side job. In this session, we will be cover basic things to consider when you begin working as a freelancer, what to include in a basic business plan, and tips from other freelancers.
Plugins Part 1: iThemes Security
John Locke | View Slides | @Lockedown_
Security is an important part of keeping your website safe and minimizing risk to your business. Since WordPress powers one in four websites, it is an appealing target for malicious hackers. While no site is 100% un-hackable, there are things you can do to deter malicious attacks to your own site. One of these steps is to use a security plugin to harden your site. iThemes Security is one of the most popular security plugins, with over 600,000 active installs. In this talk, we’ll go through the major features this plugin offers, and how you can use it to keep your own site more secure.
Plugins Part 2: eCommerce
Alex Christensen | View Slides & Comparison Chart | @designsbyac
How to effectively start an ecommerce website with WordPress by selecting the correct shopping cart solution to keep your business focused on the foundations before expanding.
Great job! We really enjoyed the day and the excellent group of Speakers — Bill co-host of WP-Tonic.com
Thanks Bill! We’ll be publishing a post with links to the review/recap blog posts and conversations and we’ll be sure to include the WP-Tonic recap :)
This was my first WC and I was very impressed. They speakers were awesome and the organizers and attendees were all so nice and welcoming. I was thrilled to find out that all of the slides and talks would be online. It allowed me to put away my notes and just be fully present listening to the speakers. Thank you all for putting this on. I hope to see some of you again at the meetup.