Sessions

In this talk, Mitko will speak about how you can leverage the WordPress REST API to build awesome websites. Using React.js for rendering the frontend outside the WordPress Theme implementation, by using the processor class inside the Reactj.js that will handle all the layouts that your website needs.

If you’re thinking about selling online, what should you start with? A great product? An audience? Or building your online site. Come hear a particular take on how to get started.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. During this session, you’ll learn about the WordPress user roles and when to use each one, the available tools, and the various settings options for your WordPress site, as well as best practices for your settings. By the end of this session, you’ll have your settings and site dialed in and aligned with current best practices.

When leveling up as a developer, one of the most intimidating aspects often is using the command line interface, or CLI. In fact, it might seem downright terrifying.

The reality is: If you can type, you can use the command line.

Every senior level developer will remember a time when they got overwhelmed by opening the terminal. Those same people will tell you this is one of the most important capabilities they acquired. Bash can unlock the true potential of any machine.

Besides gaining more control of your device, Bash lets you leverage hundreds of power tools like WP-CLI, Drush, npm, composer, and Behat, to name a few.

Leave this session understanding:

• How to stop being afraid of the command line
• A brief history of Bash and how it does what it does
• The basic commands for manipulating your files and folders
• An overview of tools that are only available through the command line
• The basics of scripting to automating anything

Google Site Kit is Google’s official, first-party integration for WordPress—a plugin that securely brings the power of tools like Analytics (Marketing Platform), Lighthouse, Search Console, and AdSense right into WordPress: Site Kit not only offers a secure, first-party way to setup tools like analytics tracking, it adds actionable insights and data right inside WordPress.

My company—10up—partnered with Google to design and build Site Kit, starting in the Spring of 2018. This talk provides both a walkthrough of Site Kit and its features, and a high level, inside look at the technical and design challenges involved in making Site Kit a secure, reliable solution, that meets Google standards and material design language, all while feeling like a natural extension to WordPress and a developer-friendly solution for an open source community.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. During this session, you’ll learn about finding, installing, and changing WordPress themes and get tips on how to find a quality theme. You’ll also learn about WordPress plugins, how they extend the functionality of WordPress and help you to more with your website, and where to find plugins, as well as some best practices on working with plugins.

Have you ever wondered how some bloggers earn exclusive invitations to amazing events and get free stuff from brands and businesses? Do you want to join other local bloggers at special media nights and be included in media opportunities? In this session, Natalie Bourn will share the tips, tricks, and lessons she has learned as a blogger attending private media events and theater opening nights. She’ll also share insights from successful local bloggers and media professionals on what you can do to make your brand/blog attractive to potential partners.

You will learn what Website as a Service (or WaaS) is, everything to consider before starting one, and the beginning steps of starting your own WordPress.com-like site. You’ll learn a few options for setting up WaaS with WordPress multisite and a few plugins options.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. During this session you’ll learn all about WordPress page and posts, how they are the same, how they’re different, and how to work with them. You’ll also learn about blog post taxonomies like categories and tags.

This session will cover a little about adding and working with content, images, and media like audio and video, but the instructors won’t go into too much detail about that until the afternoon sessions, when they walk you through the new WordPress block-based editor—formerly called Gutenberg.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. During this session, you’ll learn all about the new WordPress block-based editor—formerly called Gutenberg. You’ll learn how it works and watch a site change from the Classic Editor to Gutenberg to see exactly what happens to existing content.

William has worked with WordPress for over a decade. For the most part that meant writing a lot of PHP, with a bit of JavaScript sprinkled in and usually powered by jQuery. But with the arrival of Gutenberg, the future of WordPress is in JavaScript.

In this session, William will walk through how he navigated the transition of writing mostly PHP to more modern JavaScript and show you that it’s nothing to be scared of.

It will cover:

• How he was able to wrap his head around the general differences in the languages
• Some basics of tooling and build processes
• Working with React and starting to build things with Gutenberg

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 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!

Over the past five years, Beaver Builder has enjoyed wild success in the WordPress community and now powers over one million websites around the world.

This session aims to illustrate the different facets of building a successful WordPress-based product business. After a brief introduction, the session will consist of an “Ask Me Anything” panel with several members of the Beaver Builder team.

The audience is encouraged to ask questions and the team do their best to answer them. Areas of discussion may include but are not limited to:

• What makes a product that people want to use (a lot!)?
• How to gain brand recognition?
• Working well in a distributed team?
• Facilitating community-building around your product?
• Creating a rock star support team?
• Starting a brand new product from scratch?

The Beaver Builder team has been blessed with great success and we want WordCamp participants to leave inspired that they can achieve similar success in their own projects.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento beginner Track. During this session, you’ll learn about the individual content blocks within the new block-based WordPress editor—formerly called Gutenberg and discover how to use them. You’ll also learn how to find and install new blocks to create more flexibility in your content design.

In this discussion, we will cover using the REST API and Nuxt.js (Vue) to setup dynamic components and build out a home page. The whole idea is to get your feet wet and feel comfortable using some amazing tools that are readily available and simple enough to start with.

We’ll go over how to handle SEO, SCHEMA, what’s SSR and why it’s important, and much much more. By the end of this discussion, your concerns will be washed away and you’ll see just how powerful and simple this can be!

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. During this session, you’ll learn how to build custom content layouts using the new WordPress block-based editor, change content layouts around, switch block types, and more. This session will help you work with your content and design your content.

Did you know your website can rank better than #1 in Google? You’ve probably noticed answers to your searches appearing directly in Google. That’s called position zero. Learn how to leverage your content to rise above the competition and achieve position zero results. We’ll share a 4 step process you can apply to your content marketing efforts to leap to the top of Google.

We’ve been hearing for years about WordPress’s famous 5-minute install. The plugin ecosystem makes sites infinitely extensible, and WP-CLI provides additional flexibility for the platform. What if we introduced another modern tool to the mix? In this session, I will discuss Composer, a command-line utility used to easily pull in code that your project needs, including WordPress itself.

In this talk, Emily will cover the 13 things she has learned over the last five years as she has been blogging on emilylema.com.

This session is part of the WordCamp Sacramento Beginner Track. The previous three afternoon sessions in the Beginner Track provide an introduction to the new block-based WordPress editor, walk you through how blocks work and how to use them, and teach you how to use the new editor to create custom content layouts.

Wrap up the day by joining all three Gutenberg-focused instructors for a panel discussion where you can ask questions and get clarification.

Design Patterns are tried and true solutions used in Object-Oriented Programming (OOP). With PHP 5.6 now the minimum recommended version for WordPress, knowing these patterns equips you for best practices in building solid themes and plugins. Using the right Design Pattern today can save you a lot of time tomorrow and make you feel super smart.

In this talk we will walk through the following OOP Design Patterns with examples and practical use cases: – Singleton – Factory – ValueObject – Decorator – Dependency Injection – Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV)

This talk assumes the audience has at least a moderate understanding of OOP. It’s intended to take mid-level OOP programmers to the next level.

You have a WordPress product or service to offer and you have a signup form. But now what? Collecting email addresses is great for vanity metrics but even better if you bring them into your sales cycle.

In this talk, Amy Hall, a certified MailChimp expert, and partner will help you define your sales cycle, drip campaign, and how to nurture your subscribers. Sales are the goal of any good nurture campaign and, when done right, will help convert your website visitors into sales. 

The WordPress HTTP API allows you to gather data from other parts of the web and present it however you wish. We’ll take a look at how it’s done, while taking into consideration performance issues. We’ll look at both examples of what can be done as well as code samples to accomplish specific goals.

What happens the morning after your website goes live? We will talk about everything you need to know to grow your website. Topics include backups, SEO, security, content creation, blogging, tips to get people to your site, and more.

We often talk about websites the way we talk about cars. Are you driving a flashy sports car or a stable hatchback? And is yours a lemon, no matter how pretty the paint job? And if you just got one used, what’s going on under the hood? There’s a way to address these questions about your website, and it’s called a technical audit.

The vast majority of site owners live in fear of the day their site “breaks down.” Performing a site audit can ensure you understand the current state of your site, from the back end code level to the front end performance. It can also help you see potential problems when it comes time to add features (like that sweet audio system).

People attending this session will learn the basic building blocks of performing a technical audit. Approaches for auditing different aspects of your WordPress site: custom code, theme and front-end functionality, back-end configuration and modules, accessibility, etc. Tools that can be used to run these tests. Tips on what to watch for when managing a WordPress website over time

Mary has been a type nut for 44 years. Seriously. She has OPINIONS on the shapes of PARTS of LETTERS. In the scheme of things, you probably don’t want to get as picky as she is, but still, you do want to make sure your type is easy to read and that it speaks in the same voice as your site and looks like it belongs. The good news is you don’t have to spend decades to learn the basics. Just come spend a few minutes learning a few things that won’t change with the tech — at least as long as people still have eyes!

We’ve all either heard of or experienced some of the problems that can happen when designers and developers struggle to collaborate on a project: timelines can slip, revisions can multiply, frustrations can grow. What’s the difference between a project delivered on time, on budget, and with minimal client back-and-forth and one that… isn’t?

Designer-turned-project manager Chris Ford has found herself on both sides of the equation. As an agency and freelance designer she’s provided wireframes, prototypes and comps for hundreds of websites built by other developers. As a project manager at Reaktiv, a WordPress.com VIP partner, she works closely with their clients’ in-house designers and design agencies implementing their design decisions. She’s seen her share of both wildly successful and satisfying collaborations and  with projects that never saw the light of day.

In this talk Chris will talk about how she’s personally combined some of her core beliefs (like mutual respect, clear expectations and a common vocabulary) with immediately actionable tips (like documenting your process and making sure to schedule ample QA time) to help designers and developers work together to build not just better products for our clients, but a better experience.

This session will cover taking the right steps to create a better overall designed product from concept to a finished site. It will also outline a better web design process that fits all levels of experience and explain the steps it takes to create a website that sets you apart.

#sitemap #wireframe #prototype

Are you one more bad month away from walking away from your WordPress business? The anxiety of unpredictable income can make you miserable. In this talk, Nathan will explain how to stabilize your business with a growing stream of recurring income.

Key Takeaways:

• Why recurring income is crucial
• How to package, price and sell a WordPress management plan
• Easy to use worksheets to help you create new services for recurring income
• The difference recurring income can make

WordPress is so huge that sometimes it is difficult to figure out the where to start. This is especially true if you are new to the WordPress world and are trying to build your website. You might be overwhelmed by the sheer number of options available.

Every site is different and requires a different set of plugins. But, some plugins are common and are required for all the sites irrespective of the size and type of the site. I will talk about the most important plugins you will need to get started with your new WordPress site.

Let’s look at your Death Star (or website) from the rebel (or hacker) perspective and how they find the exhaust ports which can ruin everything you’ve built.

This will be an interactive session with the crowd participating in hacking a live site to look at web security from the hackers perspective, showing you how these various attacks occur. We’ll see just how easy it is to write insecure code and also how easy it is to write secure code.

From this session, you should gain practical tips to secure your site, your users, and their data. Armed with this you can hopefully keep those pesky rebels from foiling your attempt at intergalactic domination.

Modern browsers, JavaScript libraries, and CSS3 have made it easier than ever to create exciting, dynamic animated experiences within web interfaces. But we have also seen the unfortunate side effect of trying to do too much: websites that are resource hogs, eating up bandwidth and slowing load times to a crawl, all for effects that are ultimately just there for the “show” factor.

This talk will discuss how to use these animation skills for good: to establish context, convey status, give feedback, and yes, even add a little delight. Along the way, we’ll discuss the principles of animation that guide everything from your favorite feature films to the actions of a button on your screen, and learn how deliberate animation choices can improve the experience for your user.

“If you build it, they will come” may work in the movies but in the highly competitive online space, it’s crucial to have a strategy in place that will drive success. Cue your most reliable supporting actor: Google Analytics.

In this session, we’ll discuss the metrics every site owner should care about, along with getting the most out of Google Analytics to track and analyze this data. Plus, for store owners, we’ll touch on specific sales metrics that will help boost revenue and drive customer engagement.

That’s not all! In addition to getting the right data in the right place, we’ll take a look at just what to do with it. From improving your content to adjusting the browsing experience, these metrics will shine a spotlight on the star of the show, your site.

As a business owner, would you turn away one out of every five customers who came your way? Of course not! But if your business website doesn’t meet accessibility guidelines, you might be doing just that. 1 in 5 Americans has a disability, so it’s important to make your website usable for everyone.

In addition to increasing your market reach, making sure your website is accessible and inclusively-designed has these additional benefits:

• Meets legal accessibility requirements and minimizes legal liabilities 
• Faster page download times
• Better usability for everyone
• Better cross-browser and cross-device compatibility
• Better SEO
• Easier content management
• Demonstrates your brand’s commitment to inclusion and social responsibility

We’ll go through tools you can use to test your website, how to fix common accessibility mistakes, tips and tools for keeping your website accessible and inclusive, and tips for hiring help if you need it.

Just as we do in the tech community, the world of agriculture is wrestling with the sometimes competing interests between a world of closed-source innovation and patents developed by large established companies, contrasting with a growing community encouraging open-source sharing of everything from seeds to knowledge.

Based on lessons learned from the speaker’s recent experience starting a local gourmet mushroom farm after nearly 20 years in the technology industry, the talk will focus on parallels between seemingly unrelated industries, and create compelling examples of why open exchange of information can ultimately benefit all of us, regardless of whether we work in a digital or dirt-filled medium.

WordPress powers one-third of the internet, and hackers understand economies of scale. As such, WordPress sites are always under attack by bots looking for signs of vulnerability. Even a small website is a juicy target. Fortunately, there are a number of easy ways to protect your site by making good security decisions.

We’ll go through some of the most common methods hackers use to get into WordPress sites through some entertaining (and sometimes scary) stories.

You’ll learn key security principles to help you make good decisions to prevent intrusions, detect them, and recover from a security event if you are ever compromised. 

Have you ever wanted to build a WordPress based Amazon Echo skill? You know the whole “Hey Alexa, ask my website what’s new…” and get an answer? I did it, and I’m here to talk to you about how to do it yourself in a case study: RIP: A Rest API

With the new Gutenberg editor, the possibilities for visually striking and engaging storytelling in WordPress have grown exponentially. For marketing content creators, journalists, and bloggers, harnessing the power of Gutenberg can improve the effectiveness of your messages, elevate your designs, and save you time. This talk will include an overview of marketing and content creation trends, as well as an introduction to block-based design, and how to make it work for blogs and content-heavy sites.

Key takeaways:

• In this talk, you’ll learn about current marketing trends in content design and how to put them into practice on your own site using Gutenberg.
• You’ll be introduced to wireframing content with a block design and how to find and use popular third-party blocks.
• I’ll share blogging and page design tricks that make the most of block design and can help your content pop and help your site be more successful.

When creating and publishing content for your business, a main goal is to push it out to your social networks and make it easy for visitors to share your content on social media. Likewise, when on social media sites, you want to drive people to your website.

In this session, we’ll dive into WordPress and social media and why they’re the perfect paring like R2-D2 and C-3PO.

Key takeaways include:

• Best practices for integrating social media with your website
• How social sharing buttons work and where the best places are to put them
• How to add social media icons to your site that link to your personal or business profiles and where to put them
• Recommendations of tools and plugins that make integrating your WordPress site with social media easy, including plugins that will help you gain more views for old yet relevant evergreen posts, better promote new posts, and provide automation opportunities that will save you time

Many (most?) freelancers and small agencies struggle to fill the pipeline with excellent prospects. Far too often they accept projects outside their expertise just to stay busy or, even worse, suffer the pains of an empty pipeline.

This talk will give actionable strategies for generating more of the RIGHT kind of business in a short amount of time each day including:

• How to ask for referrals
• How to leverage your existing network
• How to partner with others
• How to get the most out of events

After this session each attendee should leave with a few actionable steps they can take in just a few minutes each day to grow their freelance business or small agency.

With today’s abundance of distractions and interruptions, gaining the attention of your audience online is harder than ever. Luckily, images can help your content gain traction and compete for attention on social media, on your website, and throughout the web.

This session will cover the ins-and-outs of using images on your WordPress site, including:

• Best practices in using images on your pages and posts
• How to build your visual brand through your images
• Why performance matters, how images impact performance, and what you can do with your images to keep your site running fast
• Image optimization for SEO

Plus, you’ll also get a list of plugin recommendations to help you better manage and display your images on your site

Slow page load times make people want to leave. In this talk, you’ll learn how inexpensive or free tools can be used to help your WordPress site load faster than you ever though possible.