You might love your website — but does your target market? More importantly, are the people you seek to serve actually converting in terms of your website’s goals? It’s easy to get caught up in bias when it comes to a project that you’re closely involved with. One way to get around this involves inviting unbiased third parties to try using your website, while narrating their experience. You may be surprised to see the major differences that come to light in terms of what you expected to happen versus how people actually navigate your website. This process, known as user testing, can quickly become expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. With experience designing websites for 15+ years, UX enthusiast Maddy Osman will provide an actionable process (complete with tool suggestions) for performing user tests on a budget.

This session is for people who want to implement BDD in their WordPress projects. Through examples the role that each tool plays will be presented. The relationship among them and how they build on each other will also be exemplified. By the end of it you will have an overview of how to use Behat, Mink, WordHat, and Selenium to write BDD tests for WordPress. Learning objectives: – How to set up Behat and WordHat to run tests for WordPress projects. – How to write non-javascript enabled tests using driver Goutte driver. – How to write javascript enabled tests using the Selenium driver.

This talk provides a transparent account of why Bristol chose to do_action, what successes and challenges we faced, who it helped and how it made an impact.

Joining such a welcoming and inspiring community as is the WordPress project can be exhilarating and makes people want to contribute their part to join the movement and strengthen their feeling of belonging. The initial enthusiasm can easily lead to contributors slowly spiraling into overcommitment and a feeling of obligation and responsibility towards the project. There’s a cost attached to anything we do, even when we’re talking about unpaid volunteer work done in the spare time. And that cost will be paid in some way, no matter what. We need to more openly talk about the adverse effects of doing open source contributions in an unsustainable way, destigmatize the money topic when it comes to “”free”” software and directly address immediate issues of frustration and burn-out as they surface. Let’s all have our fellow contributors’ backs, and make sure we’re all in it for the long run!

In this talk, I’ll cover the basics of how to get to the bottom of technical issues, and to set up a workflow that prevents your site visitors’ experiences from being disrupted. You will walk away armed with the tools you need to confidently click “Update” every time, without fear of bringing your site down. As an added bonus, you will have an antidote for that voice in your head that says silly things like “but I’m not technical” or “I’m not a coder” as a way of avoiding leveling up.

David Wolfpaw: The Power of CSS: Cool Things To Do With Styles

This session emphasizes ways web teams can rely on automation and standardization at one level of the hierarchy in order to move their focus to a higher level.

Regardless of how passionate we are about our niches, blog posts don’t always flow effortlessly out of our brains. Luckily, there are some great ways to get your readers to generate high-quality content for you. And WordPress has excellent tools to help you accomplish this. We’ll discuss different options for user-generated content, how to select an option that aligns with your goals for your website, and how to engage and encourage reader participation and contributions. We’ll look at examples of WordPress plugins for a few types of content.

It’s never been a more exciting time to be writing PHP in the WordPress ecosystem! WordPress core recently bumped the minimum-supported PHP version from 5.2 to 5.6 and plans to bump it again later this year all the way to 7.2! Whether that least sentence incites feelings of jubilation or anxiety in you, this talk has your back. We’ll take a deep dive into ways devs of all levels can breathe new life into their plugins and themes with modern PHP features and principles. We’ll cover back-compat gotchas, including how to deal with version-specific features and code partial plugin activation so you don’t break users’ sites with your upgrades. We’ll also go over modern principles such as using autoloaders and namespaces, setting up group aliasing, using return type declarations, leveraging traits, and more. Finally, we’ll talk about how to create a development plan for the short- and long-term so that continual and improvement and iteration can keep you up to date with modern PHP development. Full presentation slides: https://www.slideshare.net/DrewAPicture/wordpress-development-in-a-modern-php-world-162879124

Gabriel Mays explores the conditions of WordPress’ success (it’s not what most people think) and why that won’t work for us going forward to reach 50% and beyond. He will also explore the core elements he feels is holding WordPress back–complexity and fragmentation–and ways we could possibly resolve it.