WordPress can do so many things – amplify your voice, sell your widgets, transform leads into customers… the list goes on. What WordPress can’t do is build, grow, or maintain itself. That’s why you hired a developer, right? Finding the right developer or agency to help you realize your website dreams is no easy feat. How do you tell the difference between “good” and “bad” developers when you’re not speaking the same language? If you’ve ever: worried that your developer would take down your site if you complain; had a project last for 3+ months more than you originally expected; sent the same question to your developer multiple times without getting a straight answer; been abandoned once a project is over, the You need a better strategy for choosing a development partner or rehabilitating your relationship with your existing developer. Her talk will cover strategies for choosing a development partner or fixing an existing dysfunctional relationship, supported by lots of cute animal gifs and practical tips for finding your Forever Home and keeping your developer happy. Target audience: WordPress website owners who outsource some or all site development & support.

Come one, come all! Grab a cup of coffee and join Automatticians Konstantin Obenland and Michael Cain for a morning show-style WordCamp talk that’s buckets o’fun for anyone and everyone. We’ll break the session into three segments: news from around the WordPress world; a special guest interview with a WordPress “celebrity”; and a “shop talk” segment about a design or development topic that we’re hoping to learn more about by pretending to be experts in front of you, our audience. There will be laughter (hopefully?), there will be tears (regrettably?), there will even be some awkward silences (definitely). But most importantly, there will be plenty of that whole-grained, balanced-diet WordPress that you just can’t get enough of.

It’s easy to install an eCommerce plugin like WooCommerce and then wait for the sales to come in. In reality, there’s a lot of designing that goes into a high converting store – and it’s more than great photos.

For one of our customers, we required variable length arguments to be passed into plugin configuration options. WordPress core only supports scaler (single variable) assignment. So, we modified the plugin itself to support this. This talk will be a line-by-line code review on the work we did. The talk will be split between PHP and jQuery. Proficiency at both is assumed. If we need to do this for another (paying) customer, we’ll likely take that opportunity to make these modifications to core. Until then, the actual code we display will be publicly available under a GPL license. The rest of the plugin code will not be displayed, and has an indeterminate license.

Join Ashleigh Axios for behind-the-scenes insights into how communication design and community building were developed in-house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue during the Obama administration. Ashleigh will show-and-tell how her small design team transformed daunting challenges into successful digital campaigns. Behind the projects, hear her team’s scalable tactics for tackling limited resources, overcoming impossibly quick timelines, and experimenting while in the public spotlight.

I will be sharing my experiences in the theme business sector and the ways to succeed on it during my speech. I will be presenting many ideas, views, concepts, and strategies to elongate one’s Theme Business by emphasizing my own personal story. I, like any other person, have had many ups and downs in my professional life and I have had to make many changes within myself to be where I am today. So, I will be sharing all my life’s work amongst all my colleagues in the crowd. I will not be just talking about myself though. I will also be enthusiastically introducing the businesses that I currently am involved in, using WordPress, like DevotePress, NepalBuzz, ThemePalace, ThemeReview.co, etc., along with my theme site – Catch Themes. Most importantly, I will be telling people that theme business is a fun and innovative business to be in. With just a little bit of perseverance and dedication, one can have a fun and financially sound life ahead of them.

You may have heard about React.js and the WordPress API, but how do you get started using these new technologies? We’ll cover a simple, practical example of how to start using React.js with the WordPress API in a traditional PHP templated WordPress Theme.

My presentation will be ultra-visual, and I will be exploring actionable changes that attendees will be able to make immediately to improve their client relationships as well as their launch/site management workflows. Finally, I will address the financial benefits of offering a better user experience – in other words, how much more money freelancers and agencies can make by providing a solid user experience for their clients.

Many non-profits don’t realize that they have a problem until a volunteer half-finishes a website and disappears. Whether you create WordPress sites for others or as a non-profit employee or volunteer, this session will help you use WordPress to engage donors and volunteers, represent the organization as a good steward of donors’ money, and protect its security and reputation. Non-profits also have unique project management and maintenance needs, and we will discuss these as well.

In this talk we’re specifically going to look at how a combination of REST principles and modeling our processes and dialogs as state machines can dramatically simplify our client applications and API exchanges. Why would you want to hear more about this subject? As we all start working more in the browser and communicate back to WordPress via API calls it’s easy for the complexity to start stacking up and overwhelming us! In fact, API design isn’t necessarily intuitive and the web is full of noisy advice. We’ll use an example Gutenberg plugin to walk through a very common scenario dealing with interactive processes and we’ll see how a few design principles can save us the headaches of race conditions, code bloat, and changing requirements. We’ll examine how “state machines” can guide us and simplify complex business logic and we’ll explore how “HATEOAS” and REST pair with these machines to simplify complex application and UI logic. Whether you are just starting to write your own APIs and API clients or you have been churning them out for years I invite you to join this design session; we’ll stay away from nitty-gritty code details and instead focus on general principles we can apply in any coding environment. It’s my hope that after participating in this session you will be able to confidently work with: indicating loading states; testing and debugging forms, processes, and uploads; untangle complicated business rules dealing with things like authentication, limiting, validation, and triggering related activity; and end up with well documented means of doing so.