WordCamp Phoenix 2013

Chris Eggleston is “bringing it” in his presentation for WP 101 Session on Post, Categories, & Tags. Take a look below to see what Chris has in store.

New WordPress users are often confronted with some initial confusion. That confusion comes mainly from new terminology and a lack of understanding of all the different components of WordPress and how to properly use them.

Three of these unfamiliar components are Post, Categories, and Tags.

In my training on Friday, I’ll be covering the fundamentals…

What are Post, Categories, & Tags
How these three components relate to each other
What are their core functions
How to create and use Post, Categories, & Tags

I’ll also touch on the different features available within the Post editor…

Excerpt
Send Trackbacks
Sticky Post
Format
Custom Fields
Discussion
Featured Image
Slug

You will learn enough about post, categories and tags to feel confident enough to start publishing on your WordPress website or blog. Although this class will have some structure to it, I expect to have plenty of time for questions, and addressing specific concerns.

WordCamp Phoenix 2013 presents the second round of “community” sponsors. Each of the sponsors below has generously served the Phoenix WordPress community not only through their financial contribution but through the dedicated work of their respective companies.

SiteGround offers high quality full featured WordPress hosting services currently used by more than 60,000 WordPress fans. Their special hosting package optimized for outstanding WordPress performance includes special server setup to enhance security, fast and furious machines for unmatched performance, one click WordPress installs, WordPress auto-updates, 24/7 support by real WordPress experts, and many more hosting goodies like free domain name, free e-mail accounts and more.

Brainstorm Media has specialized in WordPress for a long time, so we are often able to deliver a lot of extras, like responsive design (one layout that adapts for desktop and mobile), custom content types, and drag-and-drop layouts. It is our policy that if a client runs into HT ML in WordPress, or has to find a checkbox three-levels deep to manage some content, we are doing something wrong.  It is important to us that everything is clear and thought-through. That is why we also set them up with video tutorials and analytics in their WordPress admin (even though they did not have an analytics account!), configured hourly and nightly backups, XML sitemaps for search engines, and made sure none of their old addresses would lead users to dead ends by setting up 301 redirects.

Vuurr builds metric-driven, digital marketing campaigns. By focusing on both organic and paid search engine strategy, analytics integration and reporting, and conversion-oriented custom development, Vuurr provides each of our clients with ROI motivated results.
Vuurr’s clients expect marketing and development methods driven and analytically customized by their own customer trends — not trends based on the latest, random, online poll. They expect we will make the most of their budget, and push everything to achieve their goals. Our clients can expect this because we are dedicated to supplying a level of high caliber service and fresh intellect that cannot be found anywhere else.

Presented by: Kurt Payne and Josh Hansen, CISSP

You’ve done it! Your plugin has 10,000 downloads and a perfect 5 star rating! Weeks of work are paying off. Users love it!

But somewhere in the dark, hackers lurk, just waiting for you to make a common programming mistake. Then they can use your plugin to attack WordPress sites.

We will show you how hackers get in using three of the most common and potent vulnerabilities found in real WordPress plugins. Watch as we hack WordPress (our own) sites live and then we’ll pull back the curtain and show you how we did it, and how you can fix it.

We will also arm you with tools and resources for performing advanced security audits on your own application.

Friday WP 201 Class is full of great pieces of information that will further your ability to use WordPress and take it to the next level. Here is what Cliff Seal has planned for a portion of the 201 class.

While content is “king” may not be the best analogy, the importance of well-written, useful, textual content cannot be overstated. Tone can affect engagement, keywords can make or break your SEO, length can kill interest–great writing is vital. Content is not just blog posts or “About” pages, it is everything that gives information (including the way the information itself is presented).

You have a great business or cause, but there are countless others just a click away. How do you find the right people to get involved, and how do you make them care?

In this session, we will refresh how you view your own web content by seeing it through the eyes of the user, and we will discuss methods of improving UX by employing simple and effective psychology alongside common-sense SEO. We will also explore how methods of effective in-person conversation can be applied to web content strategy. Then, since better prospects will be finding and reading your content, I will show you how to target your audience, measure the results, and constantly improve your outreach.

Through being both appropriately satirical and data-driven, I take a unique approach to getting content creators to spend some time in the shoes of their audience, revealing some of the absurdities of our assumptions and demonstrating how to challenge and test them. Data, empathy, logic, and optimization, together, always lead to better engagement. More concretely, we will discuss:

• How visitors measure and absorb value when viewing web content (using data, psychology, and theories)
• How real conversation teaches us how to engage with visitors
• How to systematically and sustainably empathize with your target audience
• How to make content memorable through positive emotional interaction
• How to define and focus on your target audience
• How to identify and test your assumptions about user interaction

Written by Michael R. Hunter

Hey there, my name is Michael R. Hunter and I’ll be one of the guest speakers at WordCamp PHX 2013! I’ll be sharing some of my newest research and information with you during my presentation on Sunday, January 20th, 2013! To give you a little taste of what I will be talking about, I have created a short teaser blog post for you.

Throughout the 3-day event, you will be educated and entertained by some great speakers in the areas of content marketing, SEO, social media, WordPress design and development, and more. There is no doubt that you will learn new skills and techniques at WordCamp PHX 2013.

My presentation will be geared toward helping you understand the importance of those skills, how they all fit together, and how to be more effective with the new knowledge you will be gaining. Whether you are a rookie or a seasoned veteran, there is always a way to be more effective at what you do and a way to get yourself or your business to operate on a higher level. My goal is to help you do that.

Below are two of the main topics that I will be covering in my 25-minute presentation.

The #1 Reason Why Small Businesses Fail

The statistics say that 9 out of every 10 people who read this post will be out of business in the next five years. If you have been in business for a while or have just started your business, this statistic should not be news to you. Everyone knows that 90% of small businesses fail, but what I have realized is that business owners and entrepreneurs have simply accepted that number as fact and virtually no one is doing anything to change it. I can count on one hand the people that I know who are actively providing credible and relevant information to small businesses to help them succeed.

At WordCamp PHX 2013, I will be revealing the #1 reason why small businesses fail and you will walk away with a series of specific action steps for your business.

The Importance of Marketing Integration

I will also be covering the importance of making sure that your entire business presence is integrated and your online and offline marketing efforts are working together. Something I always tell my clients is there are only three categories for an online presence, Good, Bad, and Non existent — and two of them are not good. Nothing angers me more than a business that has an okay website that is linked to 15 social media profiles that are all terrible and have not been updated in months! I am a huge fan of concentrating energy and effort into a couple of different channels and doing a few things very well rather than attempting to do it all, and failing at all of it!

In my breakout session at WordCamp PHX, I will walk you through the way I help my clients decide on what social platforms they should be using for their business and you will walk away with a complete understanding of why marketing integration is essential to the success of your business.

Why you should come to my session

Not only will you walk away with a handful of specific action steps for your business and a deep understanding of marketing integration, but everyone who attends my breakout session will have the ability to download my slide deck for free and one lucky audience member will win a custom branded social media package for their business. If none of that sounds good to you… well, you should probably go to one of the other breakout sessions and miss all the fun.

I look forward to meeting you in person in a few weeks!

Until then, be happy, think strategically, and do something ridiculously awesome today!

Talk soon,

Michael R. Hunter
Founder, Entourage Marketing
Creator, Strategic Marketing Compass

Presenter: Luke Hewlett

There is no shortage of research on the topic of increasing student achievement. Whether the proposed solution is smaller class sizes or expensive new-fangled technology, the same question always seems to emerge.

“How can we do more with less?”

Let’s take some time to discuss how educators in the K-12 space can increase student engagement and meaningful instruction. Let’s see if we can enrich the learning of our high-level students while supporting our students who struggle. Let’s talk about how we can extend student learning well beyond the end of the school day. Let’s figure out how to reduce the number of hours teachers put into clerical tasks, while increasing their involvement with students. And let’s do it all, for free, with WordPress.

As developers, we are often on the leading edge of technology. We download beta software, sign up for new hardware updates months before they release, and push our clients to use as-yet-unfinished markup specifications in finished products. It is fun to be in the lead, and even more exciting to show off our new toys and tools when we make a flashy new thing.

Unfortunately, we are leaving most of our users, our customers, behind.

Two of the more popular buzz words in web design right now are “responsive” and “mobile-first.” Both refer to building your web project in such a way that it is optimized for a modern smartphone. Like most of what we do, it is cutting edge and exciting.

Mobile != Mobile

Only 30% of the global cell phone market is using a smart phone. To the other 70% of mobile users, you website is inaccessible to their device. They often have text-only browsers and have to rely on specially-built “feature apps” to use rich sites like Facebook, so your content is ignored by a huge chunk of your potential audience.

In some countries, this is the way most Internet is consumed, not on a MacBook or through Windows 8 or with an Android tablet. The end user does not benefit from your CSS media queries, HiDPI images, or user-agent-detecting JavaScript polyfills. They just do not get your content at all.

Likewise, many are unable to produce content of their own. The WordPress dashboard does not work in a text-only dashboard, and WordPress apps require a smartphone with a data plan to publish content.

I will cover the current landscape and explain a few of the tools that exist today to mitigate these issues, including a prototype I built that allows publishing WordPress posts from anywhere in the world via SMS. This will lead into an unconference where we can discuss additional tools and strategies for helping bridge the gap between WordPress and users with limited access to technology.

Feel free to connect with me beforehand with any thoughts you might have: @ericmann

ATTENTION:
If you have purchased a ticket that includes Friday, please make sure you’ve selected which track (101, 201, 301, or 401) you’d like to participate in. Seating is limited, read details below.

Alright, now that I have your attention, here’s the juicy details. I am super excited to be heading up the organization of this year’s Foundation Friday for WordCampPhx. I’ve taught the WordPress 101 class in past years, and this year rather than teach, I really wanted to improve the whole experience on all levels. 🙂 Excited to share what we’ve organized for you… so lets get started.

What is Foundation Friday?

Over the years, WordCampPhx has evolved to include a day of workshops dedicated to provide the community with at-skill-level foundational classes to get you introduced or revved up for a knowledge-packed Saturday, the main meat of WordCampPhx.

What Tracks Are Available?

This year we kept the structure of the 101, 201, 301, 401 tracks, they break down like this…

WordPress 101 – Capacity 110 – Chandler Community Center: Room 110
Crafted for the absolute website novice, these classes will be a hands-on start at the beginning and will cover everything from downloading, installing to setting up WordPress.

WordPress 201 – Capacity 110 – Chandler Community Center: Room 111
Moving on from the basics, these intermediate classes will cover topics like intro to site mapping, content strategy, information architecture, design and user experience. You will learn to be a WordPress “power user” including how to backup, extend, promote and secure your WordPress installation.

WordPress 301 – Capacity 100 – Chandler Library: Copper Room (Old Chambers)
These WordPress classes bridge the gap between user and developer and will give you a solid introduction to developing for WordPress and the development environment.

WordPress 401 – Capacity 65 – Gangplank: Magic Space
Advanced WordPress concepts for the seasoned developer. Topics will be selected by attendees, much like a developer unconference – whatever your super-dev heart desires – topics may include responsive width, supporting core, customizing the back-end interface or an in-depth look at WordPress’ inner workings… These discussions will be moderated by two super savvy WordPress development hot-shots.

If you are participating in the WordPress 401 track, take some time and specify topics you’d like to discuss/learn/hear about ahead of time to help out our moderators on these guided discussions.

How do I Select a Track for Friday Classes?

Each class has a different capacity, we want to make sure the rooms we have slated fit the number of people who are interested in attending a particular track. When you registered, you received a confirmation email with a link in it. The subject line of that email reads, “Your Ticket to WordCamp Phoenix 2013”. Inside this email is a link to your ticket. Click the link to edit your ticket and select your class. So if you’re a Friday ticket holder and you haven’t yet selected a track you want to participate in, I suggest you do so pronto. Otherwise, some of you might be left out of the fun, and we don’t want that!

This sounds interesting, but what else is new this year?

This year we’re doing some things differently…

Class – Structure: 8 classes for each track, 45 minutes each
There are 8 class sessions per track, check out the Friday class schedule to see a break down of classes per track.

For each class, we’re planning some kind of interactivity or “get started doing this asap” type of movement, our goal is to enable you to take what you’ve learned and apply it. Each Friday class will be an 45 minutes in length and break down something like this:

20 min – Lecture/Information
15 min – Activity/Next Steps/DIY
10 min – Q/A

Speakers as Teachers
Instead of getting instruction from a handful of experts, we wanted you to get a variety of voices, from all over (near and far) to give your their expert opinions on these concepts. To do this, we added the Friday topics to the speakers submission form, hoping we would get a few brave speakers that wanted to try their hand at teaching their subject of expertise. What we got was a resounding response from our speakers near and far who were willing to teach.

Class Locations
This year we have moved from Chandler City Hall (where we’ve held Foundation Friday in the past) to the Chandler Community Building, Library and Gangplank. More details on parking and classroom locations will be available immediately before the event.

Foundation Friday will be a great kickoff to your WordCamp experience. Don’t miss out, register today and select your classes.

CodePoet

If you use WordPress to build things for other people, we want to make
your life easier. No matter whether you freelance on a solo basis,
lead a small web shop, make plugins in a dark closet, or crack the
whip at a large design firm, our aim is to become your go-to source of
information and resources to help you expand your WordPress skills and
know-how. To make you better at what you do. To make it easier to make
your living and look great doing it.

You’re part of a tribe of WordPress designers and developers over
10,000 strong, spanning the entire globe. CodePoet.com aims to bring
the working knowledge and real world strategies of those people into
one place, for you tap into.

Software developers can be a bit strange; hardly a shocking revelation if you’ve worked with any. But developers, like many information-era workers, are highly tuned to productivity and shortcuts abound.

I’ll be talking about the techniques that developers employ to make their jobs easier. This includes:

• Assembling an editing environment
• Development workflows with more flow and less work
• Debugging with brute force and elegance
• Deployment tools magic

Software developers are prone to write software for developers (themselves and others). As a result there are tools for just about anything to help make programmers more efficient. For each technique that we discuss, I’ll outline software that helps get it done better and faster.

• Why Integrated development environments (IDEs) are awesome
• Settle the text editor debate.
• Examine version control GUIs
• Highlight some awesome command line scripts
• Look into automated build tools

Because this is a Sunday developer’s session, there is plenty of time after the session, in the un-conference portion, for live demos and discussion. I’d love to hear about all the cool tools and techniques that make your coding life easier.