Presented by Danny Santoro in Power User Track.

In my talk, I’ll discuss how powerful the plugin/theme model is and go over some common scenarios – membership sites, profiles, hidden blogs, team forums, etc.

That’s just the surface, though. Did you know you could run an entire pen and paper RPG with WordPress? I’ve done it! Did you know you can create extensive databases, interactive maps, and complicated connections between post types? The tools are there!

In the talk, I’m going to dive into a few of my wildest projects to show how you can use normal tools in unorthodox ways to create something well beyond what the plugin author ever could have dreamed of.

As a note – in most of the situations, the user can accomplish the things I discuss with backend tools and UIs, so they won’t have to dig into PHP. However, they should have a base understanding of post types and taxonomies as well as familiarity with HTML and CSS.

Presented by Sal Ferrarello in Developer Track.

Your WordPress site likely involves a lot of third-party code that does not need to live in your Git repository. A dependency manager, like Composer, allows you to tie this third-party code into your work without adding it to your repo. Composer can be used in the context of your whole site or a single plugin or theme you are developing.

We’ll cover how to install Composer and start using it today.

Presented by Zoe Rooney in Developer Track.

WordPress is an incredibly powerful CMS on its own, but the possibilities explode even further once you start taking it out and letting it socialize with other platforms. This session will cover ways to integrate WordPress with other systems and platforms, touching on everything from plugins to RSS to using the new WP API to pull information from other platforms (such as Shopify) into WordPress, and to push it from WordPress elsewhere.

Presented by Davis Shaver in Power User Track.

Like many in the WordPress world, I started as a cowboy coder. Editing .php files right on the FTP server? You betcha. This is a great way to develop – if you don’t mind potentially catastrophic fatal errors, and unhappy stakeholders.

I’ll share some strategies from our team at Fusion for integrating quality checks into a WordPress-specific product development process, plus some tips on keeping it fun.

This talk will introduce you to the following concepts (including easy steps you can take to followup):
– Product requirements document (PRD)
– Github workflows and code review
– Linting
– Test-driven development (TDD)
– Hackdays and team culture

Presented by Helen Hou-Sandí in Developer Track.

A common refrain when building software is “think of the user first!” Let’s take a look at how we define our users, how that shapes what we build for them, and what that might mean for the holy grail of a core fields API.

Presented by Lauren Pittenger in Designer Track.

The command line can be an intimidating thing. We will walk through setting up a local WordPress install via the command line. We’ll look at how to download the software and create and edit files using the command line.

Presented by Taylor McCaslin in Power User Track.

We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do.

With great power, comes great responsibility. During this talk, Taylor will step through the do’s and don’ts of Multisite Networks. He will share how WordPress Multisite can be your best friend or worst enemy… but usually both… at the same time.

Expect pro-tips, eureka moments, and hard lessons learned from his experience setting up and running multisite networks for small private company intranets, all the way to global enterprise brands.

By the end of this talk you will know the pros and cons of WordPress Multisite Networks, best practices for setting up and running a multisite, and know about alternatives if multisite isn’t a fit for your next project.

Presented in Novice Track.

Provide sandbox sites for attendees.

Presented by Aaron Jorbin in Designer Track, Developer Track, Novice Track, Power User Track, User Track.

WordPress’ biggest strength is not the user experience, hundreds of contributors or widespread adoption; it is its philosophies. Successful projects share this common trait: A unified system for making decisions. Let’s look inside the philosophies of WordPress core and how those influence the decisions that it makes. This will help you understand the principles that guide WordPress. From there we’ll look at how defining philosophies in your own projects will make them better, too.

Presented by Brian Messenlehner, Susan Walker, William Earnhardt, Cameron Barrett, Charlie Reisinger in Designer Track, Developer Track, Novice Track, Panel, Power User Track, User Track.

WordPress is versatile, to say the least, and it is often used in the Education field. From large public school systems to universities, educational institutions are finding ways to use WordPress to accomplish not only their educational mission, but for administrative and organizational purposes as well. Our panelists will discuss the varied ways that WordPress implementations are accomplishing these goals in many educational settings.

Presented by Maura Teal in Designer Track.

An introduction to Sass for beginning developers or power users who already have a basic understanding of CSS. This talk will go over getting started with Sass in WordPress theme development, including: Sass vs CSS, setup options (theme file structure or use of a CSS plugin), understanding variables, nesting, mixins, extends, and libraries like Compass and Susy.

Additionally, this talk can cover use cases for integrating the Sass version of frameworks like Bootstrap or Foundation without having to clutter your theme’s markup. With that you get the best of both worlds (bespoke and human-readable classes and the springboard for development and design that frameworks provide).

Presented in Novice Track.

Roles, Media Library, and Tools: Import/Export content from wordpress.com site. Resources – websites, books. Wrap up and Q&A.

Presented in Novice Track.

Logging in; creating, formatting and publishing posts (“blog posts”); explore all the options.

Presented by George Stephanis in Developer Track.

Security is hard. Over the last few months there have been a number of high-profile plugin security vulnerabilities, but there is suprisingly little familiarity in the developer community when it comes to properly evaluating and remedying issues when they are discovered.

In this talk, we’ll be explaining in basic terms how several types of vulnerabilities work (including Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), SQL Injection (SQLI), Cross-Site Request Forgeries (CSRF), and Clickjacking, see what can be done to defend against them, and what to do when you have a vulnerability reported to you.

__Please Note:__ This is a development-oriented talk, but will not get too deep into code.

Presented by Joe Casabona in Designer Track.

This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk Joe gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles he spoke about and putting them into practice, he will talk about how in Parsec he made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass. While earlier talks focused more on design decisions and planing, he will talk about coding this time around, so bring your developer hats!

Presented by Sharon McMullen in User Track.

When I left my day job, I thought to myself “I’ll have so much more time when I’m fulltime working on my own business!” But that wasn’t the case. With clients knocking at my door and trying to grow the business, there were a slew of things I wish I had done before I left my steady paycheck to make the transition easier. I’ve gathered my top 10 things to work on before you quit your job to follow your design or development solo career.

Presented by Aaron D. Campbell in Developer Track.

Learn to use WordPress’s built in functionality (especially the HTTP library) to integrate with external APIs. We’ll touch on properly caching results to keep your site fast, fault tolerance, and even how to handle those strange APIs that send you data when you didn’t send a request for it (PayPal IPNs anyone?). We’ll talk theory, but mostly we’ll look at plenty of code and walk through examples from plugins that you can constantly refer back to for example code.

Presented by Joel Bronkowski in User Track.

In this talk I will discuss the emergence and popularity of WordPress + eCommerce and how it has quickly become the most popular way to sell online. From a general perspective I will discuss the drivers of this growth and how the community and stakeholders have taken WordPress eCommerce to the next level. From my role at WooCommerce I will discuss some of the lessons we’ve learned in looking at growth data and share some of the issues and perceptions which need to change to promote future adoption of WordPress + eCommerce at the enterprise level.

I understand there is some risk of this talk becoming a sales pitch or WooThemes/WooCommerce love fest but I will be sure to keep the focus on how the open source project is flourishing and how users are utilizing WooCommerce. I think in general the performance thus far and general future of WordPress + eCommerce will be an interesting topic for users/developers to hear about and it is encouraging for WordPress users to see a premium product flourish and power global commerce especially when considering all the global stakeholders.

Presented by Carolyn Sonnek in User Track.

You’ve set up your blog with WordPress and you’re pretty happy with how easy it is to add new posts, add images to those posts, and publish them to your site.

But now what? You might think that it would be nice if you could notify your Twitter or Facebook followers when you make a new post on your blog. What about selling your cooking e-book to your readers? What to do with all this spam and how do you make sure your site is backed up in case anything happens?

There’s an answer to all these questions (and even more you didn’t ask): use plugins!

Presented by Pete Schuster in Designer Track.

This session will cover CSS style guides and architecture. It will introduce and explain the benefits of OOCSS, BEM, and style guide driven development.

Presented by Rami Abraham in Developer Track.

As browser compatibility with WebGL grows in support, rich 3d interfaces are more in demand with each successive year.

Moreover, even if a browser has no support for WebGL, we can degrade gracefully, and show the user an alternate site view with no more hassle than enqueueing modernizr.

This talk will initially showcase a few examples of using 3D environments in WordPress.

I’ll then go over helpful tips about WebGL and the relevance to WordPress, and discuss frequently-used JavaScript libraries that make our lives easier, followed by how to use them properly within WordPress.

I’ll then provide an example – along with links to more thorough guides – on how to pull in data from WordPress into JavaScript as globals, and make it available for use in your 3D application.

This will be followed by briskly picking apart a basic WebGL ‘Hello World’, looking at each component:

– The _s theme
– A custom page template
– The 3.js library
– Custom js for the page template
– WP ajax functionality

If all goes well, attendees will conclude the talk having a good understanding of the features and caveats of 3d application development in WordPress.

Presented by Christopher Lauzon in User Track.

Learning how to manage your own WordPress site can be pretty hard. Whether you are new to WordPress, or have been using WordPress for a while, there are a lot of easy ways to support yourself. Overview on how to pick a good theme, plugins, and appropriate hosting services. Different strategies for supporting your own WordPress site, and learn when (and how) to ask for help.

Presented by Tim Sisson in User Track.

We’ll be talking specifically on how to utilize WordPress to further your non-profits mission. This includes theme selection, donation collection/management, event registration/management, email marketing, e-commerce, and finding a champion.

By the end, WordPress.

Presented by Andrew Nacin in Developer Track.

Presented by Zac Gordon in Developer Track.

This talk starts with an explanation of what WordPress action and filter hooks are and how to use them. We then go into the most common and helpful hooks for theme and plugin development. This will include helpful information for people who have not yet begun to use hooks much as well as supply those who do use them regularly with some helpful hints.

Presented by Melodie Laylor in User Track.

I will discuss the benefits of choosing WordPress to power a nonprofit website, point out special considerations and must-haves, cover recommended plugins and themes, and share resources available online to help nonprofits with their websites. I will draw from my experience as designer and webmaster for a house of worship and a couple of nonprofits, and showcase several nonprofit websites powered by WordPress.

Presented in Novice Track.

Provide sandbox websites for Novice Track attendees.

Presented by LeeAnn Kinney in Designer Track.

LeeAnn will give you a brief overview on the principles of accessible front-end design and show you how easy it is to start building a better web experience for everyone. We will cover what accessibility means in WordPress design and development, 10 simple steps to audit a website for accessibility and I will provide you with tools and tips on how to easily add accessibility into your workflow. You will walk away with a better understanding of how you may be excluding certain users from your sites and immediate actions to prevent it from happening.

Presented by Justin Sternberg in Designer Track.

Bridging the designer/developer gap is a challenge not often accepted. Designers who are comfortable in PHP and in the ‘back-end’ of WordPress are rare enough that we’ve coined the term ‘unicorn’ to describe them. My personal favorite is ‘designeveloper’ (yep, it’s even on my Twitter bio). My transition began from a house painter and part-time graphic designer to a web designer for WebDevStudios. Over the course of my 4 years at WebDevStudios, I made the transition from a web designer to a developer and now even, a developer lead. I aim to give some practical insights and resources to help make that designer/developer transition and learning curve a little less scary. Maybe… even a little exciting.

Presented in Novice Track.

Appearance: Themes, Customizer, Widgets, Menus, Header and Background

Presented by Courtney Robertson in Designer Track.

If you are a more visual thinker, building your own theme without needing to first know how to code can really make all the difference.

Get a preview of the Headway theme. Headway is among the original WordPress Drag & Drop theme frameworks and has a solid code base behind it. Headway will allow you to build your site how you envision it without a bloated code base or load time.

If you still love to dive in from a code based approach, Headway works with that as well. Take a quick peak at Headway Hooks and Child Themes.

Presented by Erica Sterling in Power User Track.

Moonlighting is having a second job in addition to one’s regular employment. It our case our second job will be a WordPress freelance business. This presentation will discuss how to start or maintain creating WordPress sites for clients by customizing WordPress themes while keeping your full-time job.

10 lessons learned from moonlighting with wordpress – updated from last year
Entrepreneurship
Small Business
Using WordPress Themes

Presented in Novice Track.

Types of posts; adding images and video; post categories, tags, templates and formats; pages; page templates.

Presented by John Eckman in Power User Track.

While the community (rightly) celebrates the tremendous growth of WordPress as a platform, there’s a significant disconnect between what community members know about WordPress and what folks outside the community know.

Getting outside the WordPress bubble – by participating meaningfully in other conferences, conversations, and communities – helps bring new ideas into our community and also helps us bring WordPress into new contexts.

I’ll cover what some of those other communities are (in my experience) and also some examples of what we can learn from them.

Presented in Novice Track.

Settings: General, Writing, Reading, Discussion (Comments), Media and Permalinks.

Presented by Allen Moore in Designer Track.

User’s of today’s web expect the sites they visit to be smooth, interactive, load quickly, and run well. The focus and priority of the Front End Developer, should be optimization of the front end experience for every site we create, for every device, and for every user.

In this talk, we will cover how front end performance affects User Engagement and Experience; best practices for performance driven front end development; and tools to measure front end performance.

Presented in Novice Track.

Plugins: Installing common plugins for contact form, image rotator backup and security.

Presented by Erica Varlese in Designer Track, Developer Track, Novice Track, Power User Track, User Track.

From bloggers to designers, developers to customer service experts, the bulk of our day is often spent sitting at the computer. Over the years, this can lead to injuries and health problems, since our bodies weren’t designed to be sedentary. In this short workshop, we’ll go over a few stretches and exercises you can do at your desk to keep your spine and neck healthy.

Presented by Nile Flores in Power User Track.

Keeping your website secure is important. No one likes a site that has nasty code injections or has been defaced. In fact, WordPress Security is one of the issues that continually needs to be taught to WordPressers around the world because for some people, their website is their livelihood.

I’m not here to make your head pop up with mind boggling hardening tricks. I’m hear to give you an introduction to WordPress Security. I might make you laugh, but security is a serious matter. I will be covering a couple methods to secure your WordPress website, and even a couple beginner tips on what to do if your site has been hacked.

By the end of this session, I hope you find a security method that suits you, and are more aware of the importance of securing your WordPress website.

Presented by Jamie Schmid in Power User Track.

This session is an introduction to putting the practice of Content Architecture to work on your WordPress site to build the most flexible and manageable site possible. You have your content all planned out, your site graphics are designed, and now all you have to do is… shove it all into WordPress? Somehow? This session will show you how to figure out what are your WordPress-specific content types, what they need to do, and how to build them. Understanding how to structure content in WordPress is an invaluable skill to have whether you are a user, themer, developer, project manager, SEO specialist, etc etc – and no matter what level you are at, you are going to understand these concepts and be really excited to apply them to your next project. I promise!

Presented by Scott Wyden Kivowitz in Power User Track.

What’s the most efficient way to sell images with WordPress? See the differences between popular ecommerce plugins, their strengths and weaknesses. Watch as a WordPress website is created and setup to sell images in 10 minutes.

Presented by Erica Varlese in User Track.

Picking your domain name is one of the most pivitol parts of setting up your own site. Your domain name is the foundation of your online presence and sets the tone for your marketing strategies. In this talk, we’ll go over how domains work, from the registration process to the mechanics of DNS. We’ll then move from the technical side of domains to put what we’ve learned into practice, exploring the importance of choosing a good domain name and basic FAQs as you get started with your brand new .com.

Presented by Bryan Nelson in User Track.

WordPress is home to tons of websites that are used by some of the world’s largest companies. My organization Agorans International is using WordPress to bring the voices of youths to the public eye.

FanSided.com is a network of over 300 websites all hosted on the WordPress platform. Now one of the most successful independently run sports websites on the web, the success can be attributed to how WordPress has brought us all together.