Description

Jonathan Wold talks about the history of WordPress, its current state, and its future through the lens of serving as an Operating System for creating on the Open Web.

Biography

Jonathan Wold has been living and breathing WordPress for 14 years. He’s been building websites himself since he was 12 and began doing so professionally at 17. He started working with WordPress back in 2005 and has been full-time in WordPress ever since. After a wide range of experiences in a wide range of companies over the past decade he’s back to where it all started – a company of one.

He has a strong personal mission, to help make WordPress the best it can be as an operating system for the Open Web.

Description

WordPress is set apart by its vibrant, passionate community of enthusiasts and stakeholders. As WordPress continues to grow, the community will continue to grow with it. There will be things we might have to sacrifice to build an even larger tent, and things we will allow to constrict our growth — in order to preserve our culture. Andrea Middleton outlines a few of the choices already made, and some choices we’ll need to get ready to make in coming years.

Biography

Andrea supports WordPress community organizers, helping them plan community events (meetups, WordCamps, and more!) that inspire people to do more with WordPress, connect the WordPress community, and contribute to the WordPress project. She cooks great food, loves to talk about wine, and knits a mean scarf.

Description

Internet privacy is more important now than it’s ever been. In 2017 the Department of Justice approached DreamHost with a problematic subpoena for customer data. When the request was refused, an avalanche of international media attention followed, bringing the issue of internet user privacy to the global stage.

In this case study, Brett Dunst discusses how one company used its core values to turn a public dispute over website logs with the DOJ into a wildly successful global campaign for internet privacy, and why open platforms like WordPress are so important to preserving a free and open internet, especially in times of crisis.

Biography

A passionate communications strategist and fierce branding advocate, Brett Dunst believes that a brand’s unique voice and tone can often be its most valuable differentiator in a crowded marketplace. Having managed marketing, corporate communications, press/analyst relations, and more at DreamHost for nearly two decades, Brett is passionate about brand storytelling.

Brett currently serves as Vice President of Corporate Communications at DreamHost where he oversees communication strategy and public policy.

Description

Successful consultants will always recommend the right tool for the job. This is how you elevate yourself from a vendor to a trusted partner. If we stay huddled within our own community, without paying attention to what is going on outside the WordPress community, we’ll be out of touch with customers and prospects. Knowing your preference (WordPress) is different than understanding all your options. Understanding the difference is critical to staying competitive in today’s industry.

Steve Zenghut discusses the current landscape and the process a prospect goes through when evaluating a WordPress proposal, including a brief look at some of the competitors for content management, eCommerce and SaaS platforms.

Biography

Steve founded Zeek Interactive in 1995 and he has been the creative technologist behind the Huntington Beach based company since its inception.

Steve is the organizer of the OC WordPress Meetup and has helped build the community to over 2,100 members. He is a two-time lead organizer of WordCamp Orange County, and has served on the organizing committee for WordCamp US and on the organizing team for WordCamp Los Angeles.

Steve is a frequent panelist and speaker at industry trade shows, including SXSW, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and various WordCamps. He is a member of the Producer’s Guild, a past Adobe Advisory Board Member, and a past Advisory Board member at the Art Institute. In addition, Steve has participated as a mentor in the American Film Institute eTV Workshop. He has also taught interactive development courses at University of California Irvine, University of Southern California, and California State University Long Beach. Steve has a BA in Film from Cal State Northridge.

Description

WordPress now powers over one third of all websites on the internet. The decisions that the WordPress community makes ripple out and make an impact on the ways people use the web, how web developers and designers do their work, and influence future technologies and development. That’s a lot of power in our hands – are we using it wisely? We have a responsibility to lead by example.

Natalie MacLees explores the influence our community is having on accessibility and inclusive design, the things we’re neglecting, the impact that our decisions are having on people across the globe, and what we could be doing better.

Biography

Natalie MacLees is a web developer and UI designer. She is founder + principal of Digita11y, an accessibility-focused interactive agency. She is the author of jQuery for Designers, now in its second edition. She was the lead organizer for WordCamp Los Angeles 2013 and 2014. She founded Website Weekend LA, a 48-hour hackathon matching web professionals with nonprofits in need to websites. Along with Nathan Tyler, she’s a founder of N Squared – a tiny software company that has made Draw Attention, Simply Schedule Appointments, Plugin Detective, and other awesome WordPress plugins. She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.

Description

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.

Biography

Using WordPress for 10 years, currently Head of WordPress at GoDaddy. Prior to GoDaddy founded two WordPress startups. Prior to that was a Captain in the Marine Corps, spending two years between Iraq and Afghanistan operating on small teams.

Description

This talk is aimed at freelancing WordPress professionals and small WordPress agencies who want to grow their business into something bigger than a one-man band. Linda Gunn will share her story and lessons she’s learned over the decades – focusing on hiring staff, managing stress and creating processes to set yourself up for success as a scalable WordPress agency.

Biography

Linda began her company in her living room in the 1980s. She was just a single mother who needed to find a way to take care of her children. And now, her WordPress agency has 35 full-time employees working out of a beautiful two-story office in North Long Beach. And one of her children works with her.

Gunn | Jerkens specializes in websites and marketing for real estate and architecture firms in North America. They build all their sites using WordPress. They host the Long Beach Chapter of Los Angeles WordPress Meetup every other Tuesday evening and have hosted Uncoded Meetup events in the past.

Besides supporting the local open source community, Linda is an enthusiastic advocate for the arts. Her office is a museum of installations and sculpture. Come to the Long Beach Chapter of Los Angeles WordPress Meetup to tour her collection!

Description

WP-CLI is the official command line tool for interacting with and managing your WordPress sites. You can use it to speed up maintenance and deployment tasks, and to aid in theme and plugin development. Join Diana Thompson to learn more about this powerful tool for managing and developing WordPress.

Biography

Diana began using WordPress while working as a nonprofit arts administrator over 10 years ago, beginning her transition to WordPress developer. She works with businesses, nonprofits, and agencies through her company, Like the Goddess. When she’s not behind the computer screen, you’ll find her organizing her Tiny Free Farm Stand or hiking in the redwoods. Her online abode is diana.fyi.

Description

You built a plugin. It was fun — until it wasn’t. Now the support takes away from your family time. If you stop supporting the plugin, it can weigh you down with creator’s guilt. So, what are your options? We’ve seen big products sell like iThemes to Liquid Web and Sucuri to GoDaddy, but is your product worth selling? Mike Demo breaks it down.

Biography

Former MousePlanet MouseStation Podcast co-host, Mike “Demo” Demopoulos is a lover of open source first, specific tools later. Before coming to BoldGrid as a community evangelist, Mike spent years building a strong client base in the financial and insurance industries. He believes in sharing his business acumen and marketing insight and has spoken on various open source topics including WordPress and Joomla! (where he was a board member) in addition to marketing related talks which include A/B testing content. Be sure to say hi to Mike on Twitter at @MPMike.

Description

Anastassia Zukova will discuss the impact site builders and builder themes have on quality, creativity, and dignity of the web design profession and the future of automation in digital design.

Biography

Anastassia practices design research, UX, UI, and traditional Graphic Design as part of her position of a Creative Director at a company she founded, GRIDDL. She has taught IxD at Cal State Pomona last year and has since been invited to teach at other Cal State Universities. She is currently in her second term serving as a Content Director on the Board of AIGA, the professional organization for design. In her spare time, she advances her skills, learns new ones, and educates herself on the new trends and happenings in the industry.

Description

Everywhere you go, you hear about it: data is everywhere. Data about us, our tastes, our health, our friends and relationships. The implications to privacy and security are obvious, but we also need to talk about attention (our ability to process data has not grown nearly as fast as data have multiplied), memory (should databases ever forget?), comprehension (how do you keep up?), and truth (critical reasoning matters).

The first half of this presentation will be dedicated to data literacy – what everyone (especially tech professionals) should know about data. The second half of the session will review tools you can use to manage your attention and decision-making in light of all this data flying around everywhere. Then, speaker Evan Volgas is gonna bring it all back to a WordPress neighborhood near you and go over five things you could immediately start doing to work smarter with data and WordPress.

Biography

Evan is a Licensed Caffeine Therapist & Data Geek who builds data teams and leaders.

Description

Everyone wants more enterprise clients, right? Seemingly endless budgets, cool projects, and on time payment of invoices without any question … or is that just a myth?

Roy Sivan talks about his experience(s) using WordPress in the enterprise sector, and what that looks like as a full-time employee, as well as what it may look like for a contractor / consultant. There are many great reasons to work with enterprise, but there are some things you should know first.

Biography

Roy has been using WordPress since the early days. Nowadays he is a senior software engineer that specializes in front end technologies at The Walt Disney Company. He loves seeing how far he can take development and think outside of the box to build new and crazy things, or combine bleeding edge tech with WordPress. He’s also socially awkward, but apparently people say hi to him all the time anyway.

Description

New to WordPress? Ever wondered what difference is between WordPress.com and WordPress.org? Then this is the session for you! 

Join Justice Anderson to learn the difference and get tips on how to build your first self-hosted WordPress Site. 

Biography

Justice is a former college professor who was tasked with selecting and teaching a content management system which brought him to WordPress. Justice has been working with WordPress on and off since 2009. After a brief time away Justice is reigniting his love affair with WordPress and plans to launch several new websites this summer and fall – stay tuned! Outside of technology Justice enjoys being the number one fan at his kids sporting events and learning about nutrition and fitness.

Description

Everyone in the WordPress community is talking about the new editing experience in WordPress. Wherever you fall in defense of or against the new editor, it changes how we interact with WordPress from a content editing and a development perspective.

In this talk, Chris Reynolds will explore some of the ways Gutenberg changes how we build things as well as the types of things we can build to enhance and improve the WordPress editing experience.

Biography

Chris is a Senior Engineer at Human Made. Before joining Human Made, Chris has been a Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager and support technician at Event Espresso, a freelancer, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, he can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City since 2011.

When not coding, he may be found cheering for his hometown National Women’s Soccer League team, Utah Royals FC.

Description

One of the most confusing (and exciting) features of using WordPress is plugins! And if you are not a developer or coder, how do you know for sure which ones you need and why?

In this session, Christina Hills will walk you though, step-by-step with lots of visuals, the Top 10 plugins you need and how to properly evaluate them. You’ll also learn the exact steps to take when a plugin goes “bad” so your website is up and running in no time. Attend this non-techie session and you’ll walk away understanding the Wonderful World of WordPress Plugins!

Biography

Christina Hills, the creator of the Website Creation Workshop™, has been passionately teaching WordPress non-techie small business owners, authors, experts, coaches and consultants. She puts the fun into teaching technology and empowers business owners to be in full control of their marketing and online presence. She has been running her online WordPress training program to an international audience for the past 12 years, and is often seen at events as an expert speaker teaching on a variety of topics such as email marketing, membership sites, and marketing, all with a focus on WordPress. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Christina Hills worked as a digital artist for the network promotions division of NBC-TV, and then as a senior technical director in the Feature Film Division at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic with film credits for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and ET the re-release.

Description

At a WordPress Meetup presentation, an attendee turned and punched Joe A. Simpson, Jr, in the arm saying, “accessibility makes me so angry!”

We’ll debunk common misconceptions designers, developers, and business owners have and learn how advocating for access to all improves your site SEO, design, user experience and function through interactive examples and discussion.

Biography

During sun-soaked days he works at Metro LA, one of the largest transit agencies in the country, fighting the good fight to ease gridlock around Los Angeles County. When their lead developer and CSS specialist both left to pursue other opportunities, Joe inherited a Headway-themed design (sans child theme) and the rest is history. Over ten years later, he manages a WordPress blog network consisting of dozen project-specific or transit news sites and growing.

Description

It’s a site owner’s worst nightmare: a site stops working completely and someone is panicking. Often, a configuration change or backup restore fixes things quickly. But what happens if a quick fix doesn’t work? What do you do when the site is absolutely wrecked? Recent backups are corrupt, data is overwritten or lost, and the quick fix isn’t an option. Often, a closer look may show the site being compromised in some way, and standard methods of recovery aren’t working.

In this session, Ramuel Gall looks at methods and techniques for finding what went wrong and how to fix it, from the most basic (such as replacing core WordPress files and using the Wayback Machine to get a better idea of the site’s prior state or recover assets), to intermediate (analyzing debug logs, determining which plugins and themes were in use so you can replace them), to moderately advanced (repairing damaged databases and Premium plugins and themes).

Biography

Ram is currently a QA Engineer at Wordfence, leveraging his ability to break things (usually by accident) to help ensure that they work correctly for others. He’s also a GIAC certified Web Application Penetration Tester, and has spent a lot of time cleaning infected WordPress sites and helping site owners recover from compromises. In his spare time he likes reading (mostly fiction), building odd electronic projects, tinkering with his car, and even going outside during the half of the year when Arizona is habitable.

Description

Why should you forget about the scores if you want to speed up your website? Why would using CDN might not help you improve your site speed? How do you get to know your hosting is fast enough? Why does Twitter with all its funny GIFs load lightning-fast and your visitors have to wait for ages while one single kitten gets loaded? How do you make video and images on your website load really fast?

Join Sabrina Zeidan for answers to all of these questions. You will want to take notes!

Biography

WordPress scaling fan, entrepreneur, swimmer, and proud WordCamp Kyiv co-organizer, Sabrina helps development teams in implementing WordPress Multisite and getting the most out of its functionality. She is fond of performance optimization and loves fast loading websites. Some of her experience is shared in her blog sabrinazeidan.com.