Sessions

Presented by Ben Byrne in Peace.

In an attempt to figure out how to build better WordPress sites faster, we at Cornershop have developed an approach that leverages WP-CLI to dynamically inject configurable, pre-written code (html, php, JS and SASS) into our in-house starter theme. This novel approach speeds up our custom development work by allowing us to quickly assemble oft-used functionality without littering our theme with superfluous code.

Come learn about the decision-making that led us to go down this road, and see exactly how we’ve gone about building our extensible framework as a plugin that extends WP-CLI. Whether you’re an agency or a solo freelancer, hopefully seeing our approach can lead to fruitful thinking on how you can deliver the most value to your clients.

Presented by Matt Cromwell in Love.

This presentation covers the most important factors in creating a nonprofit website with WordPress that communicates your story, drives more volunteers, and generates more donations. These items may sound obvious, but doing them well, with the right tools takes time and consideration. Matt will provide you with his insights both as the developer of many nonprofit websites, and his experience with thousands of nonprofits he supports via his online donation plugin.

Presented by Jennifer Bourn, Kayla Butler, Terry Webster Schrandt, Dorothy Kern, Margaret Andrews in Peace.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog or you’re thinking about starting a blog, this session was designed just for you.

In April 2015, Jennifer Bourn launched her own personal blog Inspired Imperfection, and while she knew everything she needed to know about building the blog, developing content, and optimizing every thing possible for search engines, the blog monetization piece was a different story and she had A LOT of questions like:

• What’s the best, most profitable monetization strategy? Ads? Affiliate promotions? Brand partnerships? Information product creation?
• What’s the best monetization strategy for new blogs with low traffic?
• How do you build up traffic to your blog or a community excited about your blog that will share your content?
• What’s the best approach for ads on a blog? Google Ads? A third party ad network? Native or direct ads?
• What are the best practices for disclosing brand partnerships? Affiliate promotions? Sponsored content?
• What type of affiliate promotions work the best? Are there certain affiliate platforms that are better than others?

While organizing WordCamp Sacramento, Jennifer had an idea — what if she gathered several successful bloggers from the Sacramento region together for a moderated panel discussion where she could ask them questions AND the entire Sacramento WordPress community could benefit too?

The Blogging Success And Monetization Panel Discussion experts include:

• Margaret Andrews: co-founder of the Sacramento Bloggers Network, author of the humor blog, Nanny Goats in Panties and the blogging tutorial site Sticky Readers
• Kayla Butler: photographer from Ivorymix, where she provides stock photography, resources, and support to creative bloggers and digital makers of all kinds
• Dorothy Kern: blogger at Crazy for Crust, a popular dessert and baking blog
• Terri Webster Schrandt: blogger at Second Wind Leisure Perspectives all about living a leisure lifestyle

Presented by Sallie Goetsch in Peace.

What do speakers, authors, non-profits, and startups have in common? When you’re on a mission to change the world, you need media coverage. And whether you’re looking to appeal to YouTube stars or the New York Times, your website needs a pressroom.

The amazing thing about many online pressrooms is that they are so bad. Despite readily available information about the key ingredients journalists are looking for, many organizations bury their press contacts, don’t make logos and photos available, and make it hard to find existing coverage and press releases.

There are services that combine building and hosting an online pressroom with media monitoring, contact lists, and press release distribution, but most of them are aimed at large, successful businesses that can afford to pay thousands of dollars a month.

Not in the Fortune 500? Don’t worry, you can still have a stellar pressroom, and WordPress is a great tool to build it with. Join WP Fangirl Sallie Goetsch as she walks you through

• What journalists want to see in an online pressroom
• Examples of online pressrooms built with WordPress
• Displaying news about your company
• Setting up a press release options page
• Adding logo, photo and video galleries to your pressroom
• Including printable press kits in your WordPress pressroom

If you’re a developer, you’ll learn about a great add-on service for your customers. If you’re a nonprofit organization or business owner, you’ll learn how your website can have media appeal no matter what your budget.

Presented by Mendel Kurland in Freedom.

If you’ve done all the ‘recommended blog promotional stuff’ and are looking for some fresh ideas to expand your niche audience, this is the session for you. Whether you’re a travel, food, business, or home building blogger, learn how to take your business or hobby to the next level by building a community.

Presented by Justin Busa in Peace.

The thrill of developing a plugin or theme that is used by hundreds of thousands of websites is exciting but also comes with many unavoidable challenges that need to be faced in order to be successful.

In this session, we’ll discuss things to consider when writing plugins and themes for mass distribution such as providing developer APIs, following WordPress best practices, compatibility issues, security considerations and what to do if you mess up.

Presented by Bridget Willard in Peace.

Content marketing for your nonprofit doesn’t have to be difficult. You can reuse and repurpose content. You have more content at your fingertips that you realize. I promise. In this session, we’ll talk about how nonprofits can repurpose content from marketing materials, incorporate user-generated content, refresh older content, and more.

In this media age everyone is a publisher — even nonprofits.

Presented by Jon Trujillo in Peace.

This session will cover different ways to setup custom post types, including by hand, with the wp-cli scaffold command and using WordPress plugins. See real-world client examples to illustrate specific ways custom post types can be used and the reasoning behind their use, such as why you’d use a custom post type instead of just a tag or a category. We’ll also cover WordPress templating for custom post types and adding custom fields.

Presented by Mike Fitzpatrick in Freedom.

WordPress Multisite is a powerful tool when used properly and for the right use case. Use it wrong and you will wish you never heard of it. In this session, you will learn how to determine if WordPress Multisite is the right tool for the job. We’ll cover some use cases that went right, as well as some that went wrong. You will leave this session with a better understanding of Multisite along with some cool ideas and tricks to get the most out of it.

Presented by Jake Goldman in Love.

In the era of Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, mobile apps, Flipboard, and RESTful APIs, creating and distributing digital content is no longer just a conversation about a website.

From design to monetization, digital content creators need a strategy to thrive on the modern, multichannel web. That means that forward looking content management systems can no longer be thought of or marketed as “website makers” – template systems for spitting out content in HTML. The modern CMS must be the digital hub that enables distribution to the various channels where audiences are finding and consuming content, including new and different ways of making a “website,” sometimes outside of the CMS.

Part history, part philosophy, and part practical tips and tricks, this talk will walk through the evolution of web content distribution and consumption, help you sell and position WordPress as a future-proof platform built for where the web is going, and introduce plugins, tips, and tools to make sure your content reaches and engages the widest possible audience on today’s web.

Presented by Cory Miller in Peace.

Cory will share stories of the toughest times from the last 10 years as an entrepreneur and how he’s handled and copes with the biggest lows in business. He’ll talk specifically about his experiences handling adversity in two key areas: people (customers, team, partners and family) and money (sales, cashflow, profit), and the mistakes made and lessons gleaned from those stories.

Presented by Ivan Villa in Peace.

SVGs have become a hot topic for modern developers — the file format allows you to incorporate fluid vector based designs into the web that are quite flexible and powerful. In this talk you will learn not only what makes up an SVG graphic and how to create and optimize them, but also how to make them more interactive, and how to securely implement them into your WordPress development workflow.

Presented by Justin Sainton in Peace.

Have you ever lost sleep because you were afraid your client’s site would crash with their next big product launch? Sweat through a few shirts? Anxious about a client’s hosting bill going through the roof when they tweet about their cool new eCommerce site you built? Or maybe you’re just frustrated with how slooooowwwww WooCommerce is on a production site.

Justin has been there, working with clients who are probably a lot like yours — small businesses, selling goods or services who are frustrated. Frustrated that they have to deal with technology problems, frustrated that their site is slow, and frustrated that things keep on breaking. It’s our job (and yours!) to make their lives better by helping their site do more, perform better, and save them time and money — rather than just giving them headaches.

Out of the box, WooCommerce can be great for a lot of sites, but once you hit a lot of active users, a lot of orders, or a lot of products, it can cause some serious problems. This session will talk through the right ways to extend WooCommerce — plugins that are safe to use (and some that aren’t) — as well as some advanced topics like using the right APIs for accessing the right data, swapping data stores and fine-tuning the performance of your site.

Finally, we’ll make time for Q+A to talk through any questions you might have about WooCommerce development, the right (and performant) way.

Presented by Amber Hewitt in Love.

Readability is an important part to any website. Choosing the right font can make all the difference in any design. Discover where you can get web fonts (free, subscription, or download and install yourself). Learn how to select the right fonts, size your fonts correctly, and add them to your WordPress website without slowing it down.

Presented by AJ Morris in Love.

There’s so many things to think about when you first start your site. The biggest item on your list should be how are you going to get people to read what you write, buy what you’re selling. In this session, we’ll take a look at what tools are out there to help you build an email list and generate qualified leads.

Presented by Amanda McCoy in Love.

Do you have a process for choosing a color palette? We have millions of colors at our disposal, it can be just overwhelming. We will look at strategies for finding a core color idea, or manageable starting point.

Once you have an idea for your color scheme you’ll need to refine it. Color is not just pretty; it has a job to do. We will look at making color work on different screens, in different lighting conditions.

Presented by Leslie Staller in Love.

Google has made it clear that page load speed is important for website ranking. The average website page is now over 2 MBs. And images consist of over 50% of that average web page size, thus unoptimize images can significantly degrade the page load speed of your site.

Learn the importance of using images on your Website and how to effectively optimize them for both your WordPress website and search engine optimization. This presentation shares how to correctly resize image dimensions, reduce image file size, correctly name images before uploading to and in the media library. You’ll also understand the power of image captions to capture reader attention and how they can be a useful part of your SEO plan.

Presented by Jen Miller in Love.

A blog post is not meant to be stand-alone content. It should prompt action and connect to an overall goal. Watch as business blogger Jen Miller shares tactics she uses to bring eyes to blog posts and build each post into a valuable piece of content. Jen will cover social promotion, newsletters, guest post connections and how to repurpose posts into page content, white papers, podcasts and even books! You’ll leave this session understanding the true value of blogging and have the question of, “Now, what?” answered.

Presented by Tessa Kriesel in Love.

The struggle is real. Managing WordPress core settings as well as other settings, like Advanced Custom Fields setup, and carrying those things over to other environments without completely wiping and replacing the entire database is a major pain point.

Maybe your production environment is holding your content where your client is entering data but your development or local environments are still being developed and settings and configurations are still changing. You do not want to push up your entire development database to your production environment and lose all the content your client is creating. That’s where configuration management comes into play!

We will cover what configuration management is, how you can start to use it and the concepts to take it even further!

Presented by John Locke in Freedom.

Many developers start by using premium themes to build client sites. This saves time, money, and oftentimes gets you 80% of the way to your goal. But, when you are using a premium theme, you should consider using a child theme to make necessary changes. Child theming helps protect your work and theme changes when the original theme releases an update.

This session will outline what you need to know about creating a child theme, best practices for child theme development, and applications for child themes.

Presented by Brian Bourn in Freedom.

Jetpack is a free and very robust plugin made by the Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com. The WordPress plugin icnludes many useful features, giving self-hosted WordPress site owners many of the bells and whistles available on the free WordPress.com platform. In this presentation, you will get an introduction to the most useful Jetpack features Cat uses on WordPress sites and a look at the premium features available in the plugin, such as security, backups, SEO, google analytics, and escalated support tickets.

Presented by Vasken Hauri in Love.

As WordPress continues to add new APIs and streamline existing ones, it’s becoming increasingly useful to a larger contingent of engineers, including those familiar with traditional Web APIs, such as REST or Soap, who are now approaching the CMS for the first time.

This session will focus on an API-first approach to understanding the fundamental concepts of WordPress engineering — an approach that may seem backwards at first to WordPress veterans and historians alike. The reality in 2017, however, is that API consumption has become the norm for front end development on the Web in general, and WordPress is no exception, becoming a first-class citizen with its newly-launched REST API. Similarly, though perhaps less well-known, PHP APIs such as Metadata API have also continued to evolve, and can be harnessed by those with limited PHP knowledge to safely and efficiently retrieve and display WordPress data using server-side code.

If you’re an experienced engineer new to WordPress looking to understand how to get developing quickly and correctly, or you’ve been using it for years and are curious about what all the fuss about APIs is all about, this talk is for you!

Presented by Kim Shivler in Love.

It is the final stages of building and launching your membership website… You have selected and configured your membership plugin. Your payment gateways are ready to start taking credit cards. You have entered your private content. But now what? What do you need for a successful Membership Website Launch?

In this session we’ll look at the Nitty Gritty Business behind a successful launch:

• What are the 4 steps of testing you should implement to help insure a successful launch?
• What decisions do you need to make to market the actual launch and should you use a webinar to kick it off?
• What do you need to prepare to make sure you are ready for the customer service piece of your launch?
• Plus, get a Launch Checklist and a Pre-launch Planning Guide

Presented by Cameron Rhudy in Peace.

Believe it or not, having a general understanding of the law behind those Terms of Use and Privacy Policies can help make you a better WordPress designer, developer, and/or user.

• Will the site utilize e-commerce?
• Will personal information be collected and how will it be stored?
• Does the site respond to Do Not Track signals?

These are just a few decisions that can have underlying legal implications, and understanding those implications can help you provide appropriate design and development solutions for your clients or help you ensure your site is in compliance.

This session will cover some of the most common legal considerations you should be aware of when designing, developing, or using your WordPress websites.

Presented by Ben Ilfeld in Love.

Learn how to transform Google Analytics data from vanity metrics to actionable insights. In this session, you’ll learn how to create a measurement plan to connect your goals to specific metrics. You’ll learn about useful tools to capture those metrics and how to build reports both in Google Analytics and Google Data Studio.

If you want to improve your content strategy, boost your email capture, increase ad revenue or drive e-commerce, you must be able to measure.

Presented by Treighton Mauldin in Love.

This talk will go into detail about when, why and how to use WordPress as a decoupled CMS backend with a React / Node frontend. This talk is equal parts tutorial, existential dive into when it is appropriate to use modern web application architecture, and lessons learned from my journey building a React SPA with a WordPress backend.

Presented by Tony Perez in Peace.

While security is often associated as a non-revenue function, it’s one of the top critical pieces to the success of any website. The challenge website owners face with security however is that it can be perceived as technically complex, and the idea of effectively deploying security can be overwhelming. How do we employ a security framework that we can understand, maintain and deploy?

This session will present the idea of a basic Security Framework that any website owner can adapt and deploy. Whether a one man team, or an organization with a dedicated security operation center, this talk is designed to introduce and refresh the basic principles as they apply to Information Security, specifically websites.

Presented by Amber Hewitt, Katie Elenberger, Chris Lema, Justin Sainton, Jake Goldman in Peace.

Project management is the discipline of initiating, planning, executing, controlling, and closing work to achieve specific goals and meet specific success criteria. However, depending on the company, the role of a project manager and how project management is handled varies greatly.

You’re invited to join a panel of WordCamp Sacramento speakers for a frank discussion on project management, covering strategies, tactics, and tools, as well as potential hazards and lessons learned.

MODERATOR:

• Chris Lema

PANELISTS:

• Justin Sainton — Project management experience in client services and products
• Amber Hewitt — Project management experience as a solopreneur
• Jake Goldman — Project management experience in a large company with enterprise clients
• Katie Elenberger — Project management experience working with subcontractors and partners

Presented by Katie Elenberger in Love.

Explore actionable items to kick start your WordPress side hustle, allowing you to pursue creative passion projects, expand your skill set, build your freelance or live out entrepreneurial dreams. I’ll present a thorough list of do’s and don’ts, resources, project management tips and how to successfully build and maintain strong client relationships so you’ll be ready for your next step. Peppered with personal, relatable stories of how I lived and breathed the process from going in-house, freelance as a side gig to full time and now running a successful boutique agency.

Presented by Bill Conrad in Love.

We will go into the why of podcasting and the how. After this course, you will know where to find online free sources where you can learn how to get your first podcast up and running in one afternoon (four hours). I will also have my mics, mixers, and equipment with me to use in demonstrations.

Presented by Jennifer Bourn in Love.

Ask anyone who’s been to at least one WordCamp and they’ll all tell you the same thing: The people are the best part of WordCamp!

We happen to think the Sacramento WordPress community is pretty awesome, and we want to you to meet as many other WordCampers as possible, not only to grow your network, but to make friends and possibly find project partners, contractors, like-minded peers, someone to help you with your website, or maybe even a potential employee or client. Plus, then you’ll have new WordCampers to hang with at lunch and during the after party!

Our goal is to help you meet as many people as possible, and to do so in a meaningful way and for the first time ever, we’re hosting a Speed Networking session to help you get to know more WordCampers and members of the WordPress Community.

Don’t worry if you’re an introvert… We’ve got you covered! This is a structured session with facilitated networking, which means you’re not just going to be wandering around introducing yourself to people, feeling awkward, or wondering if you’re interrupting a conversation. Instead, you’ll be following a system that we provide so you can confidently speak about what you do and what you need and look like the pro you are.

We’ll be sharing more details about this special session on the blog as the event gets closer!

Presented by Carrie Forde in Peace.

How many hero banners have you built from scratch? One? Two?Twenty, or more? Stop rebuilding UI components for each project, and focus on actually theming your WordPress themes. In this talk, I’ll outline the power of component libraries by defining what they are, and how you can use them to speed up design and development. I’ll also share existing component library resources, as well as tips and tricks for building your own component library using WordPress and Advanced Custom Fields.

Presented by Tanner Moushey in Freedom.

While you can use BuddyPress to create a feature packed community site in mere minutes, it is often overwhelming for both administrators and users alike. I’ll share some tools and techniques that you can use to build your BuddyPress community while maintaining your sanity.

Presented by Nate Conley in Freedom.

WordPress includes jQuery in core, but there are numerous reasons why you might want to use plain, vanilla JavaScript. This session will cover how many common tasks, often accomplished using jQuery, can easily be done using vanilla JavaScript, from selecting DOM elements to making ajax requests to the REST API. It will cover common scenarios in WordPress development when jQuery is not the most ideal option and why this is so. Nate will talk about his experience as a junior developer writing JavaScript in an agency setting, and also how vanilla JavaScript can be a great starting point for advanced front-end frameworks and techniques.

Presented by Aaron D. Campbell in Love.

WordPress is open-source and we keep hearing about the open web, but what does it mean? Why does it matter? If it’s so important, how can we help? Find out why a concept that’s been written about for nearly a thousand years is so important to the modern web!

Presented by Jason Cosper in Freedom.

No offense, but most local development environments are overkill. Vagrant is great if you want to match your site’s production environment, but it can often be fussy, and slow to spin up. Docker runs faster and is more lightweight, but it can be hard to get up and running if you’re not intimately familiar with how containers work.

Laravel’s Valet project is a simplified, local, PHP development environment for minimalists that uses lightweight packages — not virtual machines — to speed up development time.

In this session I will demonstrate how to install Valet, show off some of the features that make it so useful for WordPress developers, and share some power user tricks that I’ve learned while using it.

Presented by Chris Lema in Peace.

Whether you’re an agency or freelancer trying to get more business, a blogger trying to increase traffic, or a theme or plugin developer that wants more sales, there is one thing you have to get right. This is the thing we all skip past because it’s hard. Because it challenges us to get outside of our comfort zone. And yet, Chris will lay out the strategy he’s used for doing it the whole time he’s been involved with WordPress. Peace, love and WordPress are all yours if you get this one thing right.

Presented by Andrew Taylor in Love.

WordPress 4.7 brought with it a host of great new features, particularly content endpoints for the REST API built into core. This session will discuss what types of agency projects are a good fit for the REST API — and which aren’t. It will also dive into some practical use cases and real world examples to see the power of the WordPress REST API first-hand.

This session will cover:

• Real world projects
• Use cases
• Definitions and terms
• Default content
• Modifying responses
• Custom routes
• Testing

Presented by Gregg Franklin in Freedom.

So far the WordPress Beginner Track has taken attendees through:

• What WordPress is and how it works
• Getting started with local development
• Understanding the WordPress Dashboard
• How to use WordPress to add/update content, add images, video, and audio, publish a blog post, edit the menu, edit widget content, and more
• Selecting, using, and customizing WordPress themes
• Finding and using WordPress plugin, including plugin recommendations

Attendees who have followed along throughout the entire track will now have a WordPress site built and an understanding of how it works and how it can be customized.

Now it’s time to deploy it up to a host — to put it into your hosting account so the rest of the world can see the website you have created. This session will walk you through that process and include time for questions.

Presented by Gregg Franklin in Freedom.

Here is an opportunity to spend sometime, hands on building a website. This will be a workshop were you will be able to build a site on your computer. So bring your computer with DesktopServer installed and get ready to build a WordPress website.

This session will be an introduction to WordPress, how WordPress works, and local development with DesktopServer.

BEFORE WORDCAMP, install the free DesktopServer application so you can work Locally with DesktopServer and download this blueprint which contains the file we all will be working with.

If you have any issue installing DesktopServer please contact the team over at ServerPress, they will be happy to help.

Presented by Heather Hogan in Freedom.

If you have a WordPress website and now want to add more functionality, this session is for you. In this session, we’ll cover how plugins can extend what you can do with and on your website, where to find plugins, and provide plugin recommendations for specific functionality like social sharing, photo galleries, selling digital products, search engine optimization (SEO), image optimization, and more.

Presented by Joshua Knapp in Freedom.

Learning and working inside the Dashboard is an important skill. In this session you will get a walk through on how to use the elements in the WordPress Dashboard and tips to help you use WordPress more efficiently and effectively.

Presented by Verious Smith in Freedom.

When you develop a WordPress site one of the key steps is picking your theme. In this session, we’ll answer questions like:

• Where can I find reliable WordPress themes?
• What determines if a WordPress theme will be great for my project?
• What is the difference between a premium and a free theme?
• What is a WordPress page builder and should I use one?
• Can I customize a theme?

Presented by Joshua Knapp, Verious Smith, Gregg Franklin, Heather Hogan in Freedom.

This session is dedicated to answering any and all questions related to the WordPress Beginner Track morning sessions.

• First, we’ll wrap up the morning sessions with a quick overview.
• Then the instructors will take the stage to answer any and all questions you may have.
• Finally, there will be time for some extra help if needed (or you can get to lunch early and avoid any lines!

Presented by Joshua Knapp, Verious Smith, Gregg Franklin, Heather Hogan in Freedom.

This session is dedicated to answering any and all questions related to the WordPress Beginner Track afternoon sessions.

• First, we’ll wrap up the afternoon sessions with a quick overview.
• Then the instructors will take the stage to answer any and all questions you may have.
• Finally, there will be time for some extra help if needed!

Presented by Matt Vanderpol in Peace.

WordPress has become a complex ecosystem with lots of moving parts, any of which can contribute to a slow-performing site. In the course of this talk you will learn an overall framework for thinking about the performance of your site and specifics tactics you can employ to make your site faster.

Topics will include:

• An introduction to the three tiers of performance
• How to analyze the performance of your current site to figure out where your performance problems are
• Specific tactics you can implement today to improve the performance of your site
• More advanced/involved tactics and long term strategies for keeping your site performing well

Presented by Arsen Rabinovich in Love.

Mostly overlooked and underestimated, technical SEO for WordPress can take on many shapes and forms. From URL paths and topic focusing to breadcrumbs and page speed, proper technical SEO implementation can mean the difference between exposing your content to targeted online consumers or hanging out on page 10 where no-one will find you.

This session will cover both basic and advanced technical SEO techniques, best practices and dive into the following:

• Siloing and organization techniques
• Canonicalization and pagination
• Topic focusing to prevent competition and dilution
• Breadcrumbs and schema markup
• Techniques for avoiding index bloat
• Crawl budget optimization
• WordPress taxonomy best practices
• Page speed optimization best practices

Session attendees will gain valuable information and walk away with actionable takeaways that can be immediately applied to their websites to increase search visibility.

Presented by Jarrett Gucci in Peace.

We all love WordPress but know that things can go wrong from time to time. What if you knew exactly what to do whenever a WordPress issue arises? This can include anything from a theme or plugin issue all the way to those really bizarre things that can happen leaving you clueless how to troubleshoot them. No high level amount of technical experience needed with the tricks we will show you. Being equipped to handle WordPress issues can really help you keep things running smoothly on your site and focus on the fun stuff rather than hair pulling and other madness.

Presented by Adam W. Warner in Freedom.

Do you have a plugin (or several) in the WordPress.org repository? Have you ever wondered how to turn your plugin development skills into a sustaining income-based business? Not sure how to go about it?

In this session, Adam details his story of creating a sustainable plugin business. He shares actionable advice that audience members can put into practice immediately to grow not only a user-base, but also a customer-base. Adam also explains the techniques he uses to guide free-users to premium products. Attendees will learn everything they need to know to create a plugin that people will love and recommend to others.