Sessions

This session kicks off the two-day WordCamp Sacramento 2018 Beginner Track with an introduction to WordPress, the open source software powering 30% of all websites across the globe. You’ll then receive an overview of the WordPress Dashboard, an outline of the “How To Use WordPress” Saturday Beginner Track, and some recommended resources to kick start your WordPress journey.

In this session, we’ll look at a framework for understanding how people make decisions online, particularly in ecommerce settings, and then how you can leverage this to help you get better conversions on your store.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Developers write code every day. What if there was a way to automatically enforce standardized code formatting for yourself and others on your team? Good news, there is a way! It’s called linting, and beyond improving code readability, when code is formatted in a standardized way it is easier to bring new people into a project (or return yourself after weeks or months away), reduces cognitive load, and avoids common coding errors.

In this talk, we will cover:

• An overview of linting – what it is and how it can help
• Specific tools and techniques for linting CSS/SCSS, JavaScript, and PHP
• A look at different linting configurations and how to pick one that works for you
• Examples of how you can incorporate linting into your development processes

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

At first glance, the WordPress admin can be pretty daunting, especially if it’s your first experience with a content management system (CMS), let alone WordPress. This talk will give designers and developers tips and tricks on ways they can customize the admin to create a better experience for their clients and create peace-of-mind for themselves. We’ll cover things like how to customize the Dashboard widgets, hiding menu items, defining roles and capabilities, creating an Options page, and a variety of plugins that can help.

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor, is coming. Have you tested the beta version? Have you seen how the new editor will work? Have you heard about the new features?

While there isn’t a date for the Gutenberg launch, it’s a good idea to know what it is, how it works, and how to prepare (or not prepare) your site for Gutenberg.

In this session, you’ll:

• See the new Gutenberg Editor in action
• Learn about how Gutenberg works and the parts of the Gutenberg Editor
• Watch a demo of creating, adding, and moving Gutenberg content blocks
• Learn how to switch Gutenberg blocks from one format to another
• Get tips and resources to learn more about Gutenberg and what’s possible
• Hear how Gutenberg will affect WordPress page builders

Skill Level: All

Creating your WordPress website or blog begins with searching for, finding, and installing your WordPress theme (template). In this session you’ll learn about the themes dashboard, where to find themes, and how to install a theme. You’ll also receive tips on choosing a theme and an introduction to the WordPress customizer.

Skill Level: Beginner

ElasticPress is the only WordPress search solution that offers all the features you’d expect from a modern search engine (fuzzy matching, autosuggest, synonym matching, geo-search, etc), while remaining fully open-source across the entire stack. If your site has outgrown basic WordPress title/content search, or you need to handle complex queries that normally would take a long time on a MySQL database, ElasticPress is a great option.

We’ll cover the typical uses for ElasticPress (better, faster search) and then also dive into some of the lesser-known features, such as faceting and related content. Attendees will leave the talk with a solid understanding of how ElasticPress can help improve their site and how ElasticPress integrates with WP_Query. For the more technical attendees, we will also cover how to do local development and testing with ElasticPress and Elasticsearch.

Skill Level: Intermediate

This session covers everything you need to know about creating new web pages on your WordPress website, a complete overview and detailed explanation of the WordPress editor, when you may need to use Text view vs. visual view, and tips and best practices for adding content and formatting it so it’s easy for visitors to read.

Skill Level: Beginner

Moving or redesigning a site? Wondering about how to preserve your site traffic without affecting your SEO? This presentation will arm you with info on best practices. Even if you normally don’t pay much attention to SEO, it pays to keep the potential impact on SEO in mind when you change your site. In this informative session Kathy Alice Brown will teach you what to watch out for so that you keep your hard earned organic traffic.

Skill Level: Beginner

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!

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. 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.

Watch the blog for more information about how this session will work!

Skill Level: All

While most people know you can use the media library to upload, store, and add images, audio, video, PDFs, and other files to your WordPress website or blog, the media library also has many features most people don’t even know exist! This session will begin with an overview of the media library and how it works. We’ll then cover the media library features and tools that you may not know about and how to use them, as well as tips and tricks to optimize your media.

Skill Level: Beginner

Attendees will learn the best practices and fundamentals behind marketing funnels, discover a few “funnel blueprints” they can implement in their businesses, and learn about different tools (themes, plugins, etc) they can use to design, build and enhance their funnels while leveraging the WordPress environment.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

Single Page Applications (SPA) are simple, powerful, and above all, FAST. Using SPAs with the WordPress REST API, developers can rapidly deploy WordPress sites that are theme and plugin agnostic, incredibly easy to edit, and a breeze for visitors to use.

This talk will focus on the following points:

• Basic overview of SPAs and the WP REST API
• How SPAs affect Themes and Plugins
• SPAs and SEO
• Examples of the SPA and WP REST API at work

Skill Level: Advanced

In this session Chris Ford will talk about how she’s used her 23 years of experience as a designer to problem-solve the project management challenges she encounters at Reaktiv Studios.

She’ll discuss topics including how the design principle of hierarchy helps her write better emails, how the concept of iteration applies to more than UX and code, and how design systems translate to project management systems.

Skill Level: All

This session will cover everything you need to know about using widgets and working with menus on your WordPress website. You’ll receive an overview of the widgets dashboard, discover how widgets work, and learn about the different widget types. You’ll also gain knowledge about how WordPress menus work, how to create menus, how to add items to your menu, change menu items, and drop down menu items. This session will also cover best practices and recommendations.

Skill Level: Beginner

Gutenberg may be the latest and greatest in WordPress content building, but the concept of modular design isn’t new. WordPress templates and themes are robust and feature filled, but building truly dynamic web pages is limited by the old concept of static pages and posts. Modern web content needs to be flexible and evolving, but not everyone is a developer who can build custom layouts to fit each use case. Page builders, custom fields, drag and drop interfaces, and bespoke solutions have all tried their hand at solving the problem of separating the technical/design components from the content itself. But what is modular design, and what does it have to do with WordPress?

In this talk, we’ll discuss the principles of Atomic Design, how to stop thinking of your content as “pages” and “posts” in favor of the concept of “building blocks,” and how to extend this mindset to utilize the potential of Gutenberg and other similar tools as a web designer.

Skill Level: All

This session will cover everything you need to know about blog posts, categories, tags, and post comments. You’ll learn how to create a new blog post, why you may or may not need to use the “more tag,” featured images, and more. You’ll learn about how categories and tags work, what they are used for, and best practices to keep your site well-organized and valuable for visitors. You’ll also walk away with a complete understanding of how comments work, options for allowing comments, when you may want to disable comments, and some helpful tools to help better manage comments.

Skill Level: Beginner

Josh will explain what the JAM Stack is and how he incorporated it into his WordPress process. He will compare and contrast the JAM stack options available then explain why he chose his particular configuration to work with WordPress.

Learn from a high level, how Josh actually got things to work and get an overview of the details, and discover some pros and cons of using WordPress with the JAM stack. By the end of the talk, you should have a familiarization with what options are available and be able to begin the process of deciding if it’s right for you too.

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

In today’s day and age, customers want to be able to make purchases when, where and how they want. For the WordPress developer, this means accommodating these demands for an omnichannel experience by ensuring transactions run seamlessly and support all payment types across all sales channels. In addition, the various departments within a business, particularly finance and sales, require a streamlined reporting process for recording and projecting business figures. The change of sales models from pay-per-product to subscriptions, the dependence on cloud computing storage and applications and the plethora of new, connected mobile devices have only increased the complexity presented to a developer to solve.

This session will provide WordPress developers with a guidebook on how to design and approach their modern-day business with a customer and payment-first approach while addressing the needs of tomorrow’s customer. With high processing fees and a multitude of plugins available, attendees will learn how to break through the noise by understanding the advantages and disadvantages of a payment facilitator that aggregates payments for distribution versus a full merchant account. In addition, the session will dive into the ins and outs of different transaction types used by merchants, including credit and debit cards, invoicing and wallets. Operationally, developers will learn how to utilize payment gateways, what integration methods to choose and how to support businesses in dealing with one-time payments, repeat customers and recurring payments.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

Learn why building a website for your podcast using WordPress is the best way to optimize, grow, monetize and present the entirety of content your podcast has to offer.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

This session will cover everything you need to know about the options listed under the Tools and Settings menu in the WordPress admin menu. While it will briefly touch on the tools, the majority of this session will be spent walking you through all of the individual settings options for your WordPress site to make sure you understand what they are, how they work, and what setting will be best for your WordPress site.

Skill Level: Beginner

Gutenberg is so new and comes with many built-in blocks, but how do you create interactive, dynamic and advanced Gutenberg blocks? We’ll cover topics like API calls to third-party services, server side rendering, advanced settings, using custom React components and other topics to help attendees start making advanced Gutenberg blocks.

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

Spend time talking with a group of web business owners and the conversation will inevitably include someone’s unfortunate experience with a terrible client. Most web pros have a story or two (or eight). While bad clients can’t be completely avoided, there are strategic steps any business owner can take to contain the impact of a bad client. In this session, Nathan will explain the how to create a system that preserves workflow and keeps problem clients in check.

Takeaways for this session include:

• Four strategies that will keep problem clients in check
• Five monsters you should know and how to contain them
• The payoff of protecting your business by building good fences

Skill Level: All

This session will first dive into WordPress Users and the different user roles available. You’ll learn about each user role, what level of access to your website is included with that role, and when it should be used. This will help you better protect your site and manage permissions with accuracy. Next, you’ll learn all about the plugins dashboard, how to find and install a plugin and how to install a third-party plugin. You’ll get tips on how to evaluate plugins and best manage installed plugins.

Skill Level: Beginner

In this session, you’ll learn about the process of getting an online course published. This includes the steps and requirements, as well as some tools and best practices you will need to put it all together. This talk focuses on how to get the course built, but does not go in-depth on marketing or growing an audience (though we talk about it a little). You’ll learn about options and tools for creating your course and receive the inspiration, confidence, and plan you need to convert your knowledge into an online course that others love.

Skill Level: Beginner

The new visual editor sure does inspire consternation in the WordPress community. As with any disruption, there will be winners and losers in professional world — but what about the end-user? Can the new editor make life easier for them? And for professionals, how will Gutenberg change theme development? What about page-builders — things of the past? Instead of focusing on launch and transition issues, Alonso will describe how he believes the fundamentals of the WordPress experience will change (for the better) for both the end-user AND the professional.

Skill Level: Beginner

We live in a world of continuous integration, continuous delivery, version controlled code and configuration. Yet when it comes to delivering content we are relying on doing all publishing straight to the production environment and hoping it works, editing the live document to fix issues we only find once they are in production. I propose there is a better way.

Let’s build our content on our development instances the same way we develop code and configuration. Then using the power of Github, WP-CLI and Automated Testing tools like Behat, lets professionally deploy our content to production will full confidence it works as intended. Let’s give editors better tools to build better content in a word of Gutenberg while saving anyone the need to overwrite the production database ever again.

Topics include:

• WP-CLI for generating content
• Connecting Github and your WordPress site
• Leveraging multiple environment
• Behaviorally testing content

Skill Level: Intermediate/Advanced

In this session, you’ll not only discover best practices for building custom WordPress themes, but how to leverage custom fields to create complex page layouts and make content management easier for clients. Tessa will introduce you to a WordPress plugin called Advanced Custom Fields, how it works, and what it can do when used to build WordPress themes.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Google’s algorithm is vastly complex, so what makes us think we can outsmart Google’s 2,000 plus full-time engineers? This talk is about thinking like Google, doing the right things, and adding value to our potential clients. Jim will share Local SEO tips, tactics, strategies, and best practices so you can learn how to rise to the top of search engine results pages for exactly what your customers are searching for — and he’ll make it simple and easy to understand so you can implement new ideas over time.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

When Marla Todd started her blog in 2012, she thought she had no idea there was a huge diverse community out there ready to take her in and eagerly awaiting what she had to write. She learned that building a strong community around her blog and connecting to other bloggers can help make the difference between a blog that grows and a blog that quietly fades away.

In this session, see examples of unique blogs and bloggers and the successful communities they have created, learn about WordPress tools and tips available to bloggers, and get blogging tips to help grow your blog, get comfortable with your voice and ideas, and increase engagement.

Skill Level: All

If you’re interested in expanding your brand, growing your business, and making more money, you not only need a stellar website, but an email marketing plan to help you stay in touch with prospective clients and potential customers who have opted-in and said, “YES! Please keep me updated!”

In this session, Kelly will cover:

• What email marketing is and the best practices you need to follow
• Different types of email marketing, like newsletters, solo blasts, autoresponders, and email courses
• Email opt-ins, the best places to put them on your WordPress website
• List building strategies that are working right now to grow

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

When launching any kind of website, there are simple strategies to implement that will help start out your SEO right and make your site look more established at the same time. This talk will cover four pieces of blog content that should be published before you launch and why they are important. It focuses specifically on how those components work for good SEO and how to use them as a blueprint for continued good practices.

Topics will include:

• Defining your target audience and developing a voice
• Selecting the right keywords
• Integrating keywords without sounding forced
• Using the Yoast SEO plugin to optimize your content
• What to do with the content once the site is launched

Attend this talk and you will leave with ideas and resources for types of blog posts that can easily be created and a checklist of items to complete in order set up content marketing before launching a website.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

Modern development is complex, with lots of tools to turn the code we write into the code used by the user’s browser. This can be as simple as minifying assets or as sophisticated as downloading dependencies, turning source code into production code, and running automated tests.

In this session, we will look at the top benefits gained from adopting a Continuous Integration workflow to automate the build process, testing, and deployment. Whether you’re a developer wondering why you should try Continuous Integration in the first place or a business owner wondering why you should let your team spend time on adopting a new process when the current one “just works” we’ll have answers for you!

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

Extending WordPress above and beyond the core functionality is part of what makes WordPress so powerful. However, the sheer number of plugins available can be overwhelming. A strategy for evaluating plugins makes both developing managing WordPress easier.

In this presentation, attendees will learn:

• Strategies and tools for evaluating one plugin over another
• Paid plugins versus free: do you get what you paid for?
• Managing plugins and updates
• Evaluating plugin security

Attendees will also receive a plugin evaluation checklist they can take home to help choose plugins that fit their project’s objectives.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

These days, most large organizations and businesses — and even many small businesses — have more than one website under their umbrella. Publishers and media businesses often own multiple networks or magazines; in higher education, every department often has their own site (even if it’s on the same domain); B2B and B2C marketers often attack multiple channels. And yet, when it comes to sharing content — events, news, product pages, biographies (you name it) — WordPress, like most Content Management Systems, don’t do much to address that problem.

Having solved variations of this same problem over and over again for clients like a major public university, a radio network with 60+ stations, and one of largest Bay Area unicorns (among others), 10up finally put together all of its lessons learned to build a expertly crafted solution: Distributor. Distributor is a free WordPress plugin that makes it easy to syndicate and reuse content across multiple websites — whether in a single multisite or across the web using the REST API.

This session will:

• Discuss examples of the problem that Distributor set out to solve
• Talk about the SEO implications of reused content, and how to ensure it helps, rather than penalizes, websites that share content
• Provide a thorough walk through of Distributor, from set up (including external REST API connections), to pushing and pulling content between sites
• Walk through the way the popular 9to5 network (9to5mac.com, 9to5google.com, Electrek.co, and others) adopted and extended Distributor for their real world workflow
• Provide developers some tips for customizing and extending distributor, using build in functions and hooks
• Tease the potential for Distributor for other use cases, like staging content for campaigns, or extending its Connections to other CMS platforms or content sources

There’s something for everyone in this talk: UX design / problem solving, REST API use case, content strategy, SEO best practice (for content reuse), tools for managing websites, and even developer tips.

Skill Level: Intermediate

If you’ve got a WordPress website or blog, chances are you’re also using social media. In this session you’ll learn best practices for using each of the major social media platforms, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, as well as tips and tricks for growing your social following through authentic engagement. You’ll also discover tools and solutions to:

• Push your blog posts from your WordPress site to your social media profiles
• Add social sharing icons to your blog posts so others can easily share your content
• Add social icons that link to your profiles in a WordPress menu or widget

Skill Level: All

Making sure your WordPress site is accessible is important for so many critical reasons, but it can be intimidating to sort through the details to determine which standards to try to meet — Section 508? WCAG 2.0 level AA? — and figure out if you’re meeting them. What’s important to keep in mind, though, is that ANY accessibility efforts are better than none. Being mindful of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, this session will cover: getting going, outlining some of the most important low-hanging fruit you should be sure to address, and highlighting easy and free automated testing tools you can take advantage of. Even some simple actions and tests can make a huge difference for your users! Accessibility perfection may be a journey of a thousand miles, but attend this and we’ll get you on the road and help you take the first few big steps.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate

This session is all about getting paid with WordPress — and not making money offering WordPress services or building WordPress products, but actually accepting money through your WordPress website. If you have ever thought about selling something on your website or wondered about being able to accept payments or donations, this talk is for you.

We’ll cover various reasons for collecting money through your website or blog and best practices to follow. We’ll also introduce you to several WordPress plugins and third-party tools — from the simple to the complex — that enable you to collect money, accept donations, sell digital and physical products, sell subscriptions, theme boxes, and more.

Skill Level: Beginner

A common question in online WordPress forums is: “What plugin should I use to secure my site?” While there are several good security plugins that are a useful part of a security plan, securing a WordPress site requires more than a plugin. While a security plugin is a useful tool, it can give a false sense of security if the entire security landscape is not considered. Not every small business or website owner can afford an expensive, robust security and monitoring system, but there are basic actions that every site owner and user can take to help us all be more secure.

In this session, you’ll learn a framework and some essential actions to provide a basic level of security and “harden” your WordPress website.

Skill Level: Beginner

What is User Interface and User Experience Design?How to design user interfaces using a variety of tools. How to consider the user experience and overall journey. What are the many phases of designing websites with a UI and UX mentality?

Skill Level: All

Jamie recently released her first plugin on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This talk will give aspiring plugin authors a behind-the-scenes look into the process of building a plugin, submitting the plugin for approval, and handling support requests. The process wasn’t seamless, but she learned from her mistakes, and is hoping you will too!

Skill Level: Intermediate

If you’ve ever thought about adding a membership option to your WordPress site, creating a membership site with WordPress, or simply providing your subscribers/community a password-protected resource library, this session is for you. During this session, we’ll cover:

• Different types of membership sites and features
• Things you need to know and think through when planning your membership site
• Common mistakes new membership site owners make and how to avoid them
• Membership site best practices

We’ll also introduce you to various tools and solutions — from the simple to the complex — that enable you to create a membership site, add a membership feature to your current WordPress site, or integrate a third-party membership platform.

Skill Level: Beginner

Blogging is one of the fastest, easiest ways to gain brand visibility, expand your reach, position yourself as an authority in your niche, and be discovered online. But blogging takes time, constant effort, and a steady stream of new ideas, and it requires a long-term commitment to see real results. When done right, blogging can create new and exciting opportunities, attract new clients and customers, create an income stream, and build strong relationships.

In this session, you’ll:

• Receive ideas on how to quickly create blog content (even if you’re not a writer)
• Discover how to monetize and leverage your blog content for greater return on investment (ROI)
• Get a checklist of what to do BEFORE publishing a blog post
• Learn about tools and resources to make blogging easier and more effective

Skill Level: All

The purpose of a portfolio is to convince prospects to work with you. Whether your service is photography, design, development, or construction, your portfolio needs more than beautiful images. If you’re going to convince people to hire you and not your competition, you can’t just show people what you built. You need to explain the business problems you helped your clients solve and the outcomes you helped them achieve.

The first and most important step in creating your portfolio is determining what to put in it, which means knowing who your ideal client is and what they care about. But after you’ve done the content strategy work, what then? How do you create a portfolio with the elements you need, without adding unnecessary features? How do you make it easy for yourself to add new projects? And can you create it without hiring a developer?

It’s already possible to use code to customize WordPress portfolio plugins, and to use page builders to create layouts for portfolio archives and single entries. Those methods will both have a place for some time to come, but the new block-based Gutenberg editor provides a new way to build a portfolio template, and it might be even easier to use than a page-builder.

This session will review the elements of a good portfolio and explain how to combine core blocks and custom blocks into reusable block templates. The speaker will also address the question of where you might still prefer a page-builder and where you might need a developer — at least in the short term. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of how Gutenberg can make it easier to promote your business effectively.

Skill Level: Intermediate

Have you ever updated your WordPress site or plugins, and suddenly found yourself looking at The White Screen of Death? What you thought was going to be a routine update has just brought down your entire website, and the panic sets in fast. If this is your live website, that can quickly translate to loss of revenue, customer trust, and a lot of time and money down the drain. Not to mention the very bad day you are about to have. It’s so important to keep your WordPress site, plugins and themes updated due to the many security threats that are constantly being found and fixed — but what happens when one of these updates breaks your site?

In this talk, Jamie will cover tips and strategies for keeping your site updated safely, what to do if it breaks, and how to avoid breaking your live site in the first place through use of a staging site that runs alongside your live website. Big content changes, updates, and trying out new designs increases the potential for disaster when these changes are made directly to your live website. Fortunately, there are many options for creating and managing a staging site, ranging from the most simple click-to-push, to more complex solutions integrated into a developers’ workflow. She will also show you how to set up your very own staging server in a few different ways, so you can push that Update button without putting your live site in jeopardy.

Skill Level: Beginner/Intermediate