Speaker Preview: Chris Lauzon & Erick Hitter

Christopher Lauzon is the Head of Customer Happiness at WP Engine, focusing on providing excellent service and world class support to the WP Engine Community. Before WP Engine Chris specialized in eCommerce Consultation, helping and assisting 1000s of businesses with their web development projects.

Erick Hitter is a Boston-based web developer with Oomph, Inc. specializing in complex WordPress implementations for high-traffic sites, including several on the WordPress.com VIP platform. He is also responsible for the company’s BuddyPress projects and is a core contributor to WordPress. Erick has created a number of plugins available from the official repository, including WP Print Friendly and View All Posts Pages, as well as the WordPress.com VIP External Permalinks plugin.

What you can expect in their class, in their own words…

Developing and managing an optimized WordPress site can be challenging for anyone not familiar with how to scale a site. This presentation will cover some of the basics of putting together a WordPress site designed for excellent performance and scalability, followed by discussion about more advanced infrastructure topics.

Running a high-scale WordPress site starts with code optimization, including effective use of WordPress’ APIs. We’ll discuss WP_Query and the advantages of using it instead of direct database queries. We’ll also delve into the appropriate and effective use of WordPress’ two native caching APIs, which will lead into the infrastructure portion of our talk.

There are a million options when it comes to hosting your WordPress site, such as shared hosting, managed hosting, VPS, etc. Each has its advantages, which we’ll explore while discussing when stepping up to the next level becomes appropriate. We will also cover different methods of caching, including using database optimization methods, and implementing a content delivery network (CDN).

Want to hear more from Chris & Erick?

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Sponsor Shout-Out: WP Engine

WordCamp Phoenix couldn’t happen without our awesome sponsors, and this year we’re excited to have WP Engine as a Platinum sponsor! You’ve heard the rumors of pages being delivered in milliseconds, blogs scaling instantly when they get featured in The New York Times, and top-tier security.

This is WP Engine – the premier, managed WordPress hosting company. They serve 100 million requests daily, each one carefully and continuously tuned for speed, scalability, and security. They’re beloved by hundreds of bloggers from huge, popular sites down to small company home pages who care about their SEO ranking and their users’ experience. Perhaps best of all is their tech support, where only WordPress experts answer questions.

For WordCamp Phoenix attendees only, WP Engine is offering their most popular hosting plan, typically $29 per month, free for life! You heard that right, WP Engine is giving ALL WordCamp Phoenix attendees FREE HOSTING FOR LIFE!

Hosting includes:

1 Standard WordPress Installation
30 GB Bandwidth including CDN
50,000 Pageviews/mo
10 GB Disk Storage
Off-Site Automated Backups
One-Click Staging Area
Managed Upgrades

Check back soon for information on how to sign up!

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Speaker Preview: Helen Hou-Sandi

Our first speaker guest post comes via Helen Hou-Sandi, a Web Design Engineer with 10up LLC, doing both front- and back-end development for all types of clients. She is a WordPress Core Contributor and can be found in a special place on the 3.3 credits screen. She also maintains a special interest in WordPress usage in higher education and previously taught web development and content courses for musicians, including a section utilizing WordPress. In addition to her life as a WordPress developer, Helen is also an actively performing collaborative pianist.

What you can expect in her class, in her own words…

One of the best parts of working with WordPress is the beautiful admin UI that clients and users love and love to use. We’ll take a look at some of the interface patterns of the admin and how we can use it to our advantage in our own themes and plugins, as well as resources and some best practices. From there we will talk about custom post types and custom fields/meta boxes and how to integrate them into the admin in ways that are consistent, native, and enhance the usability. Since this is a class format, be prepared for code examples and maybe even a little discussion about how to determine your content structure with the end user experience in mind.

Want to hear more from Helen?

(HINT: You’ll find her in the 401 track.)

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30 Days Til WordCamp Checklist

The days separating you and WordPress heaven are quickly dwindling! With only 30 DAYS until WordCamp, 4 MORE DAYS of priority access to Friday class registration and 6 DAYS LEFT to use our killer hotel deal, NOW is the time to make sure you’re on top of your game.

What do you still need to do to get ready? Here’s a quick checklist:

Such convenient buttons! (We’re making this really, really easy on you.)

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Early Registration for Friday Classes

Open space in our Friday classes is going fast.

We’re talking “Michael Phelps in the 200-meter butterfly” level of fast.

Our speaker selections are stellar (if we do say so ourselves) and that means the most popular classes are filling up quickly. Fortunately, if you register now for WordCamp we’ll give you exclusive early access to secure a spot in one of our Friday classes. Yes, that’s right — skip the chaos and rest easy knowing you’ve beaten the crowds. (Hey, this is WordCamp, not a Black Friday shopping frenzy.)

Class registration will be open to the general public on January 29, so you’ll need to register before then to receive the magical early-access code and guarantee your spot.

FYI, many of our classes sold out in advance last year. Just sayin’.

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