Sessions

Dealing with multiple themes, layout editors, and plugins is hard. The key is having a semi-standard workflow for getting sites from concept to production efficiently. You’ll see how using a few standard tools (Plesk, Elementor, Gravity Form, ACS) you can efficiently build complex sites for yourself or your clients.

• Video

Starting a blog changed my life not once, but twice. That was never my initial intention. It was meant to be a passion project that helped me rekindle that long lost love of writing.
I share the ups and downs of my blogging journey, the many mistakes I’ve made, what I’ve learned and where I am now (running a consulting business, an instructor at Sheridan College).
I’m a huge believer in sharing your story because you never know who is reading, who is watching and who is listening.

• Slides
• Video

This session will teach participants the essentials of any website, (Home, About, and Contact pages) Using WordPress.com and Gutenberg in one session. This includes some of the blocks that you might need to build each of these pages that make a more complete experience and save you time.

• Video

In this talk, I will introduce several tools and best practices for developing WordPress sites in a local environment. I will compare the most popular options and show a quick 5 minute tutorial on how to use each of the top 3 (Local by Flywheel, Desktop Server and MAMP)

• Video

In our last episode, dear campers, we learned about Custom Post Types (CPT’s) and Advanced Custom Fields (ACF’s) and why we need them. We had everything clear, right? Enter Gutenberg…

Until Gutenberg, we had to copy over content from one old post to the new. The other option is to use CPT’s and ACF’s. What’s the difference? When should you use one or the other… or BOTH?

In this session, we’ll take a quick review of CPT’s and ACF’s, then compare them to Gutenberg Blocks and Templates, and discuss when you should use each and why.

• Slides
• Video

Performing theme, plugin and core updates on your site can be intimidating and overwhelming, especially for older and more complex sites with many interconnected plugins – Woocommerce, I’m looking at you!

The solution is simple: use a staging site – a private copy of your site where you can safely test updates and resolve problems before your users ever experience an issue.

I’ll guide you across a number of ways to create a staging site depending on your specific needs, performing these updates, and then applying these updates to your main site. You’ll leave with a concrete plan for how to set up your own staging site, and will fear the update process far less!

• Slides
• Video

This technical session is for developers as well as users with at least a little coding experience. After a brief introduction to what Gutenberg is and what it can do, the presentation will show simple bits of code and demonstrate how these bits of code translate into a Gutenberg block.

• Building a Gutenberg block is very simple
• Gutenberg blocks make the editing experience a lot richer

• Slides
• Video

WordPress is a great place for visual artists to share their work, but getting things set up can be challenging. In this talk, I’ll cover everything from preparing imagery of artwork for the web, useful built-in WordPress functions, recommended plugins, and improving the user’s viewing experience. I will also demonstrate my free WordPress theme, optimized for artists.

• Video

Does it feel like keeping up with SEO has been a wild ride the past year?

The one constant in SEO is change, but the past 12 months have been especially turbulent. And the rapid pace of change promises to continue. Hard to know which changes to pay attention to and what to do about them

• Voice Search?
• Mobile-First Index?
• E-A-T and algorithm updates?
• Site speed?
• Structured Data and Schema?
• Major changes to SEO Tools (Hello, Yoast SEO and Google Search Console!)

Whew.

You’re not alone in feeling overwhelmed. We’ll get right into the nitty-gritty of understanding how we need to adjust our thinking and adapt our WordPress sites, content and processes to succeed in this new reality, while maintaining our sanity. And slay a few sacred cows in the process.

We’ll particularly focus on the needs of small business sites, bloggers and small to medium, e-commerce sites while keeping the jargon under control.

• Video

How do you eat an elephant? Answer: one bite at a time. Like anything overwhelming, breaking it down into bite-size, easy to achieve components is the way to become efficient and efficiency is the path to profitability.

All too common in the free and open source software market are developers who are financially frustrated, to put it lightly. Would you like to level up your profitability?

What’s stopping you as a freelancer from financial freedom? Let’s work on some of the practical things that, with just a bit of tweaking, can help you earn $100,000 in one year.

In this talk by Mike Demopoulos (his friends call him “Demo”) will talk about ways to streamline your process, have client outreach like the big brands, and become profitable.

• Slides
• Video

Are you struggling to keep your clients on-track and interested through their website project? Do you often experience scope creep, late payments and the dreaded Never-Ending-Project?

Learn how to use and create processes, workflows and systems to put your projects on autopilot and nurture your clients through the entire web design process, get them excited and have them singing your praises!

From the brains of @themattyg comes a panel discussion on the use of page builders now that Gutenberg is in core. Joining us will be @MichelleAmes and guests yet to be announced!

Questions that could be touched on:

• What does Gutenberg solve that Page Builders don’t? Vice Versa?
• Should page builders continue to be their own interface or adapt and integrate into Gutenberg as a collection of blocks?
• Why would a user want to use both a page builder and Gutenberg on the same site? Would they want to?
• Should developers focus on developing for page builders, Gutenberg or neither?
• How are you using Gutenberg today? How are you using page builders today?
• How do we change our approach to building sites for clients, when they have this new level of control?
• When starting a new WordPress site, what considerations would you take when choosing between a page builder, Gutenberg or the classic editor? Which one would you choose?
• If you already use a page builder on your site, would you consider switching to Gutenberg?

• Video

Have you ever had a client insist on having admin access to their website? They own it, so they have that right…but how long did it take before they called you to fix what they broke once they logged in?

While clients who break their own sites are guaranteed revenue, those calls never come at a convenient time and are ALWAYS urgent.

So what can we do to both empower our clients and make sure their sites continue to run well?

This talk will present several ideas for ways that we can do just that, including:

• Helpful plugins
• How to train a client in WordPress
• How to set user permissions
• How to set pricing for fixing mistakes
• Creating a user manual
• Other tips for managing the client relationship

Attendees will leave with some good ideas and action items to better help clients help themselves…or not.

• Slides
• Video

As a developer in the WordPress ecosystem, you’re part of a large open source community; and being part of a community, being a good neighbour goes a long way. You’re thinking of or already developing components for WordPress, but developing is just the beginning: allowing your code to be used or modified easily will get you more goodwill within the community. That means documentation; meaning useful code comments, user manuals and API docs.

We’ll discuss documentation standards, best practices, and how to make your users and other developers sing your praises.

• Slides