Sessions

Veteran WordCamp Philly speaker Tessa Kriesel will return this year, this time as keynote speaker. She will present “The Art of Building Community with WordPress.”

The blog is growing up, and how we use WordPress is, too. As we move into an ecosystem driven by blocks, user-centered design will play an increasingly important role. Whether you manage a site, build sites or apps for clients, or develop for any part of WordPress, there are several user experience principles that you need to know in order to deliver the best product possible. Learn how to take your WordPress solutions beyond the blog by putting UX and UI front and center to create successful user experiences for your WordPress navigation, login, onboarding, form, and e-commerce components.

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Your nonprofit’s website should help your organization meet its mission. One of the ways to do that is to raise money to pay for your programs. This session will show you what you need to turn your WordPress website into a fundraising tool. This includes making important information easy to find, how to use compelling copy and images to evoke an emotional reaction from potential donors, and different ways of setting up a donation form.

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You know security is important and want your site to be secure, but what will actually help? There’s so much information to be found on securing your site, but what are the myths and what actually helps? Find out how to avoid the myths and implement real security.

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The recent shift in the WordPress editor serves as a harbinger of the exciting changes in store for the rest of WordPress. These changes, however, also carry with them some fear and concern for developers about how to adapt their code properly. In this talk, we’ll discuss the conceptual framework surrounding the need for JavaScript blocks and the role that PHP continues to play for the new editor. We will also produce a plugin that can serve as a basis for incorporating the many snippets found in the Gutenberg Handbook documentation.

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No need to feel stuck using the 40 blocks that come with the new page editor out of the box. Gutenberg plugins — a new type of WordPress plugin — gives you an opportunity to use all types of new blocks for your content. These blocks let you add new UIs to your content such as adjustable columns, pricing tables, a table of contents, a clock countdown and many others. See how five Gutenberg plugins will make creating WordPress easier and a lot of fun.

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The Yoast plugin adds powerful SEO functionality to WordPress. This talk will show you how to use it effectively in order to get the most out of it, from beginner to advanced features. Step-by-step instructions will provide valuable takeaways for you to take home and implement on your WordPress sites.

In this talk we will discuss how to how to activate the know, love and trust factor using social media.

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Learn how WordPress, and Gutenburg in particular, is changing the role of designers and opening up more opportunities than ever. The role of the designer has evolved dramatically in the last decade, and as designers continue to create more work for digital spaces, it becomes more important than ever to be able to understand computer languages and how the network works. This talk will cover how designers of all types can continue to grow their skills by applying the lessons in design thinking we can learn from code.

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Inheriting sites and the onboard/audit process to make life easy and provide your clients with huge value.

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We live online today. Whether it is for your business or cause or your client’s organization, getting found online is a must. Just as important is getting found by the right audience. The panel will discuss getting your message to the right people through your website content, SEO, branding, and social media as well as how to prepare for new ways of getting found like voice search.

We live online today. Whether it’s for your business or cause or your client’s organization, getting found online is a must. Just as important is getting found by the right audience.

Recognizing the importance of an online presence, WordCamp Philly will host an extended panel on “The Art of Getting Found Online”, exploring how to get one’s message to the right people through website content, SEO, branding, and social media. It will also touch on how to prepare for new ways of getting found, such as voice search.

This year’s panel is the length of two talks (one long, one short) to provide panelists and audience members more time to cover a topic that touches on web content, social media, search, analytics, and inclusive brand building.

Design systems are codified ways for organizations to bridge the gap between design and development. Creating a design system is a collaborative task that includes key professionals from each discipline. This talk will show you the power of design systems and how to use WordPress to host your design system.

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Daniel Olson will talk about the future of WordPress by starting with the past. Specifically, the challenge to learn JavaScript deeply and why he believes it’s still our biggest opportunity. He’ll also discuss the JAMstack, a modern web development approach using JavaScript, APIs, and Markup. It sounds new, but in fact, WordPress has been doing this since the first Gutenberg block. He will demonstrate using this approach with concepts related to Gutenberg, the WordPress REST API, the role of accessibility, voice as an interface, and more. This session welcomes all WordCamp attendees, from seasoned developers to community newcomers. It’s designed to inspire and set the stage for what’s possible.

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Do you know how fast your site loads? What about on 4G? 3G?! More than just solving an annoyance, reducing long load times is more critical now than ever before with speed officially a factor in both desktop and mobile search ranking. This talk will cover five steps you can take today to enhance the performance of your WordPress website.

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You have prepared endlessly and proudly pitched your client. Now you wait, only to hear they have selected another agency or maybe a freelancer. When faced with rejection, how do you keep yourself focused and motivated to continue? This talk will focus on ways to stay positive while continuously improving your pitch (and yourself).

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This talk addresses the unique challenges that enterprise sites face when using WordPress and various ways to combat them for a smooth experience.

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In an effort to deliver a beautiful site for clients at a reasonable cost, some designers rely quite a bit on the intuitive interface of page builders. Working this way has several advantages, but it is not without its problems. In this session, graphic designer Lou Fuiano will share some of these experiences and hopes they will lead to a lively discussion.

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Large companies have used WordPress as a headless CMS for a few years now, but lately it’s easier than ever for developers to leverage technologies like the WordPress REST API and WP-GraphQL with React and Vue to build JavaScript front ends instead of traditional WordPress themes. There are some great performance, security and developer experience upgrades gained from decoupling, but also some hazards speaker David Ryan wished he knew before starting headless projects. In this presentation he’ll explore a few of the best tools for going headless and how to solve some of the problems you’ll encounter along the way.

With the explosive adoption of smart speakers, the primary interaction with your content will become auditory instead of visual. On the World Wide Web, our brand revolves around a URL, logo, tagline, color palette, font, images, etc., but when your audience is no longer engaging with your content through a screen, traditional brand elements become invisible.  In a voice-first environment, when your audience just asks for what they want, they expect the answer to be returned verbally.

In a voice-first world, what does your brand look  (or sound) like? In this talk, Chip Edwards explores the components of a verbal brand and how to prepare for the shift from written content to verbal content, as well as the future of voice technology and how to prepare for it.

Computers are good at doing things quickly, but some things take longer than others (even for computers). Transients are a great tool for freeing your website from repetitive, time-intensive tasks. This talk will look at examples of when a transient can be helpful and the code used to implement them.

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Beth Soderberg built her first base theme in 2016 using _s (also known as Underscores) and rebuilt the theme this year to be fully Gutenberg-compatible. The original theme used conventions she developed during several years working as a developer in agency settings. In rebuilding the theme she incorporated some significant non-Gutenberg-related changes and learned a lot about reasonable Gutenberg defaults. This talk will cover the changes to the base theme that Gutenberg required, the process she went through to rebuild, and the reasoning behind the architectural changes made to the theme that are not tied to Gutenberg. She’ll also talk about how she intends to iterate on this theme and add improvements over time. You might ask: but what is a base theme? A base theme, also known as a starter theme, is a bare-bones theme that includes default templates and very basic styling that is intended to be hacked and transformed into a fully custom theme. Using base/starter themes are often the next step in the learning process for a developer who has been modifying themes by using child themes. This talk is for anyone who wants to build (or rebuild) their own base theme for use in building custom WordPress themes.

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Pictures and logos are a necessity on a website, but not all images are created equal. The wrong images could slow down your site or even worse, cause users to leave before your page loads. Speaker Kim White will walk through the basics of the most used image format types and some optimization techniques. She will also do a review of what WordPress does when you upload your image file.

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WordCamp is an empowering experience for the WordPress novice, expert and everyone in between, but processing all the information at the end of the conference can sometimes be overwhelming.  Elevate your WordCamp experience with some tips from Aida Correa. You’ll learn how to gather, sort and apply all the great information you’ve learned from the conference, plus how to effectively apply WordCamp skills, knowledge and information for better social media engagement.