Sessions

Learn how to improve the sustainability of your business model as a small agency or freelancer. This workshop will address contracts, cash flow, pricing / margins, and client expectations, Kori Ashton will share seven key steps that she’s learned as she grew her agency from her couch to a full crew in just a few short years.

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Cypress is a JavaScript-based automated end-to-end testing framework. Essentially, it can act like a user on your website by visiting pages, filling out forms, and clicking buttons.

Join in as we learn the basics of how to use Cypress and some of the nuances of testing WordPress plugins, themes, or websites.

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When it comes to branding and marketing strategies, have we confused ‘fast’ and ‘loud’ for ‘effective’ and ‘good’? Join brothers and co-hosts of the podcast Hello, WP!, Micah and Josh Dailey, as they talk about why one of the largest brands in WordPress decided to stop and listen to users, thought leaders, competitors, and critics for more than a year. They’ll share lessons they learned producing the podcast that reshaped how they approach everything from email and social marketing to partnerships and community. Learn how sharing your platform – and saying less – is more.

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Over half of WordPress sites focus the UX on the front end. But what if a site has multiple users with multiple use cases? Using built-in features of WordPress such as user roles, custom post types, & capabilities we are able to create specific user experiences for everyone in each team. Combined with the new Gutenberg editor we are able to get more granular than ever.

We can restrict contributors from publishing their own stories. For advertisers we restrict certain blocks. We can even identify keywords in a story that flag it for a review by legal. Does a user always switch to full-screen mode with the top toolbar? We attach those preferences to their user identity across publications using an external authentication system.

We even have made a revision history display plain text instead of Gutenberg markup for writers but still display Gutenberg markup for devs debugging any issues.

Networking is a great tool to grow your business: it can help you find new ideas, new customers, new partners and even a new job if you are looking for a career change. Networking comes natural to some people but can be dreaded by others. It can be hard if you are not an extrovert and it is definitely time-consuming.

The good news is you can learn how to network. How do you get out of your comfort zone to push yourself to talk to potentially interesting people? How do you measure the return on investment? How do you find a good balance between the schmoozing and getting down to business? Let’s find out together!

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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 like, (I mean, sound like)? In this talk, I explore the components of a verbal brand, 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.

In order to get the life you want, you have to face your fears and dump the imposter syndrome. If you are a woman and work in tech, let’s chat about ways to ensure you are achieving your career goals. Whether you are a marketer, designer, or developer— we will cover ways to advocate for yourself in your work, salary, and more.

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Right now there are so many different marketing channels to choose from it can sometimes feel impossible to make a choice. Applying the same marketing strategies used by VC back SAAS companies won’t work for most WordPress plugin businesses. In my presentation, I will show the benefits of content marketing done right and why it should be the single most important channel to focus on for WordPress based businesses.

In this presentation, attendees will learn…

• Why content marketing is more important than ever before.
• What’s working in content marketing for WordPress plugins in 2020 and beyond.
• The positive long-tail effect of content marketing for your WordPress business.
• How to develop a sustainable 80/20 content marketing system no matter your budget.
• How content marketing builds loyal customers.
• Connecting product and content marketing.
• And much more…

So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it. Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it. What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral..

When your WordPress finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it. The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it. But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, you need to understand how many people can fit in it otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.

This talk will cover the philosophy of load testing, why it’s important, and a demonstration using easy-to-use cloud tools that everyone can access right now.

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Almost every week, a new vulnerability is discovered in a popular plugin or theme, and developers have to scramble to fix it before it’s widely exploited. Surprisingly, almost every one of the most common critical vulnerabilities boils down to one of a few mistakes that are easily avoidable. In this talk, we’ll cover why the “is_admin()” and “admin_init()” functions aren’t a safe way to control access, how using “update_option()” can go disastrously wrong, how XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) can happen in the most unexpected places, why nonces are important, and more. Appropriate for beginner to advanced WordPress developers, this talk will cover currently accepted best practices for securing access control, sanitizing user input, and preventing unauthorized changes that can lead to a site takeover.

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The thoughts we choose to believe have a direct impact on the actions we take and the actions we take effect our outcomes in all areas of our lives. In this brand new presentation, you’ll discover how to gain greater control over your thoughts, beliefs, actions and results and unlock the hidden pathways in your brain that will lead you to greater success in your business and more happiness in your life.

There comes a time in most people’s careers where they make the leap from primary contributor to manager. While this looks different for everybody, together we’ll discuss some of the challenges, symptoms, and ways we can identify ourselves within our new role. We’ll also talk about what ‘success’ looks like and how managing tasks is different than managing people

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Trains, buses, planes, cars, cruise ships, parks… In todays digital age, every single one of these places can be your office. Are you curious what it is like to work remotely while traveling the world? I am happy to share my experiences as I ventured off to China, Japan, Europe, and more over a 2 month span, in addition to many other adventures I have taken. If you have been provided with the opportunity to work from home I highly recommend taking the opportunity to travel while doing so. During this session you can learn tips and tricks that can help you start traveling the world today all while being successful at your day to day job, and learn why you HAVE to try it!

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Web professionals are often responsible for the collection of personal information by building websites that have contact forms or email newsletter sign up forms. Their clients often look to them for advice on how best to navigate the Internet and keep out of trouble. The truth is that respect for privacy rights is a new phenomenon in the United States. With two states releasing new privacy laws and ten states proposing new ones, the privacy landscape can be confusing. In this talk, I would talk about:
(1) Which websites need a Privacy Policy;
(2) Why certain websites need a Privacy Policy; and
(3) Why web professionals should be the ones to talk about Privacy Policies to their clients.
Upon the conclusion of my talk, web professionals will be more confident discussing privacy with their clients and will understand why they should be the ones to lead the industry in the respect for privacy rights.

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Zac Gordon has been supporting himself through selling online courses and training resources for the last several years. With a Masters in Education and a decade teaching at the high school and college level he brings an in-depth look at some important lessons from pedagogy around how to best design and build courses. From his work with companies like Treehouse, Udacity, Udemy, Frontend Masters and others he will share a ton of tips on how to best sell and market your content. Finally we will explore how to grow a community around your content, support it at scale and leverage it for new opportunities. Of course you’ll also get lists of hardware, software, plugins and more that will support your efforts. Tune in for 100 great tips that will surely inspire and help you creating and selling your own courses and content online. No experience necessary.

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“As more and more of the internet’s traffic travels over HTTPS, it becomes more and more obvious when a site fails to offer a secure connection. At this point, there’s no reason for your site to be one of them.

Despite assertions that an encrypted connection only matters for credit card transactions, TLS is an important technology that is of massive benefit to the privacy of your users in an increasingly hostile internet. A lack of available encryption makes your site look unprofessional at best, and at worst it tells your users their browsing privacy is unimportant to you.

In this talk, we’ll look at the real differences between HTTP and HTTPS traffic to illustrate just how much data is made visible on an unencrypted connection. We’ll examine real-world examples of ISPs manipulating the HTTP traffic of their users, and why it would have been impossible over HTTPS. Lastly, we’ll go over the resources available for implementing TLS on your sites, most likely for free.”

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“When designing WordPress themes, one of the biggest challenges stems from a core component of WordPress itself: the ability for site owners to change, modify, and build new content themselves. After all, modern web content needs to be flexible and evolving, but not everyone is a developer who can build custom layouts to fit each use case.

As content and functionality become even more modular thanks to advances like the Gutenberg editor, theme designers will have to accommodate even more flexible ways of visualizing and presenting information. How do we anticipate and accommodate the needs of a constantly evolving website while providing visual solutions that are clean, thoughtful, and consistent?

In this talk, we’ll discuss the principles of Atomic Design, how to stop thinking of your content as “”pages”” and “”posts”” in favor of the concept of “”building blocks,”” and how to extend this mindset to utilize the potential of Gutenberg as it is now, and where it might be going in the future.”

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“Is your website accessible for people with disabilities (for instance, people who are blind)? Maybe you have heard about businesses like Domino’s and entertainers like Beyoncé being sued over inaccessible websites? Did you know that in 2018 more than 2200 businesses and organizations were sued because their websites were not accessible?

Sometimes websites are not made accessible because of the perceived large increase of costs — and it can cost more to make a site accessible. But accessible websites have good ROI (return on investment) for both developers and businesses who make their sites accessible. It’s not just good karma, it’s good business!

This talk will not deal with technical aspects of making sites accessible, but will focus on why building in accessibility on websites is good for business. Business owners will find this information helpful, and anyone who develops sites for businesses (and nonprofits!) will also find tips for “”selling”” accessibility to clients who may be unfamiliar with the concept, and how to get them to fully embrace it.”

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The block editor in WordPress (aka Gutenberg) offers a structured way of creating content through customizable “blocks”. But building custom blocks isn’t the only way to extend the editor; you can also register sidebars, enable custom toolbar buttons, and much more. In this talk, you’ll learn how to use these extension points to transform the block editor… without building a single block.

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“As a society, we’ve become obsessed with growing our followers and likes on social media. The problem is, followers and likes don’t correlate to having an authentic community for brands on social media.

In this talk, I’ll discuss how you can connect with your audience and grow your brand authentically on social media. You’ll learn why you shouldn’t obsess over ‘likes and follows’ and what metrics you should measure instead. I’ll also provide some actionable tips you can begin implementing on your social media channels to start growing a genuine community and provide some resources to help you do it. (Hint: it’s not bots and it’s not automated!)”

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Have you ever read or heard the phrase “”Don’t modify WordPress Core files? Many, right? If you are getting better and better in being a WordPress developer you will eventually come across hooks.

This talk will try to explain what hooks are, why do you need them and most importantly how to create your own hooks so that you have an even better control as to what would you like to do in order to become an even better WordPress developer.

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In this talk, we will look at the Google Analytics platform and how it can be used to help WordPress Users of all skills to understand how users interact with their WordPress sites. We’ll start with a quick intro to implementing Google Analytics using Google Site Kit. After we have reviewed the setup steps, we’ll take a hands-on look at some traffic and reports on a live site to get an understand of how this information can be used to make informed decisions about content, function, and design.

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In a world of ephemeral communication channels like Slack and Microsoft Teams, it’s easy for important details, decisions, and discussions to get swept up through the constant flow of chatter. When a question resurfaces, sometimes the search tool provides quick relief and sometimes an answer feels as though it could be lost in the ether.

As a fully-remote company, we at Pagely look to continually improve how we document the day-to-day details, and in doing so, we leverage a variety of tools to achieve a balance of quick communication and clear documentation.

During this talk I will break down the actions we take to handle the firehose of information that flows through Slack and other mediums, and the lessons we learned along the way.

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“Understanding Website Health the Big Picture
Folks like to talk about maintenance and tools and themes for their website but don’t often have a really great understanding of how all of these components work together. Building a great site is not a random collection of metrics and code you find online. It should be built from the bottom up with scalability and sustainability in mind. I will introduce a Website Health Pyramid that ties together all of the seemingly independent strings many follow. Website owners and website managers can gain an overview of how to approach their website health long term. This pyramid can be great for leveling up your own game as well as a useful foundation to explain development or maintenance concepts to clients.”

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There are a lot of options out there to run your website or online store. WordPress is one of them, and a popular one, but when and why should you choose it? Aaron looks at both practical and philosophical reasons for choosing WordPress while addressing some of the common misconceptions around cost, performance, and ease of use to help you know when WordPress is the right choice for you.

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Let’s dive in and learn the very basics of building fantastic Gutenberg blocks. We’ll explore the foundations of the block development, setting up a local block development environment, proper user experience techniques within blocks, and how to get involved with the Gutenberg design and technical community. While we won’t go super technical, you’ll leave the session with a clearer understanding of how to design and build Gutenberg blocks.

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In this session, we’ll hear first from John Hawkins — a longtime contributor to the WordPress community — and Steven Jacob Francisco Peralta — a Phoenix Coding Academy senior who first joined the community a few years ago — about their experiences getting involved with WordPress.

John and Steven will share their tips for all skill levels and all disciplines interested in learning how to give back to the open source project and community. Learn how to get involved locally, online in the WordPress help forums, contribute code, design, marketing, accessibility knowledge, testing, organizing community events and more!

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“Net Promoter Score is a one-question survey asking how likely someone is to recommend your product to their friends or colleagues. Based on those results, there are a number of things you can do with that data. You may need to triage unsatisfied customers, engage with passive customers and leverage your promoters for marketing efforts.

What You Will Learn:

• How to implement Net Promoter Scores in WordPress
• What scores mean & how to evaluate them
• Next steps for how to work with your customers
• Ways to leverage your happiest customers”

Each of you have something incredible to offer. You are one of the most impactful and influential people (even if you don’t realize it). You will impact the lives of others. And if you don’t buy it yet, you will at least be exposed to that possibility during this keynote presentation.Together we’ll take a journey to discuss some insights on influence and impact. You’ll get a chance to redefine the meaning of these words and hear about how pizza and ice cream have impacted and influenced my life. Then, you’ll be invited to go out to fearlessly use your impact and influence to make the world, or even just your corner of it, a better place.

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The Gutenberg editor brings us loads of fantastic JavaScript tools and components. These libraries aren’t limited to the Block Editor, they’re free for us to use in our plugins and themes as well. In this talk we’ll explore how you can use a number of these different libraries in custom WP-Admin React applications. We’ll take a look at some general strategy and the wp-components, wp-plugins and wp-data packages.

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One of the hardest things any business has to do is acquire customers. Once a business makes the first sale to a customer, it is significantly easier to make future sales to that customer. The customer is already familiar with the business, knows the product, and can relate to it. That’s why so many companies are moving to a recurring billing model. They don’t want to let that customer, who they worked so hard to acquire, slip away. In this talk, we’ll cover what types of businesses are well suited for recurring billing, other benefits of introducing recurring billing, and some of the technologies you can use to implement recurring billing in your business.

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If you provide design or development services using WordPress and are not also providing maintenance after launch, you’re leaving money on the table. But it’s about more than clicking update on your client’s behalf. In this talk, Allie looks at the basics provided in most maintenance packages, then explores how you can go above and beyond with your own packages to stand out in a crowded market.

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A proper investment strategy generally involves diversifying where you put your money. You try to manage risk so it’s optimized for where you are and where you are trying to go. Automated tests require a similar diversification in order to be a proper investment against bugs, defects, technical debt, and the dreaded 911 OMG BBQ ticket.

Let’s explore various types of automated tests, the tools at our disposal, and how a testing strategy can help you succeed.

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Dealing with a long or detailed designs can be daunting. This session aims to take the fear out of complicated page designs and highlights some different tools to assist you when implementing them on WordPress. We’ll discuss ways to break a design down into its visual and logical pieces and try to anticipate how the page might change over the lifespan of the website. Lastly we’ll discuss tools like Page Builders and Custom Field plugins that may help you accomplish a tricky site design.

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In this beginner-focused session, you will learn the basics of what SEO means, how search engines work, the basics of a successful SEO strategy, and what to expect from SEO. I’ll also share my favorite SEO plugins, sites, and tools.

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We’ll discuss

1. The nature of WordPress growth
2. How reducing complexity & fragmentation are keys to accelerating growth
3. Walk through examples of this with Gutenberg.

What’s in it for you?

Develop a better understanding of WordPress growth and the direction WordPress is going so you can:

• Users: Make better decisions for your own website.
• Freelancers & Agencies: Make better decisions for your clients.
• Plugin & Theme Developers: Make better decisions for your business.”

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One of the qualities of a good developer is the ability to find and solve a problem. We create plugins for client projects and then realize it has a wider use case. So, we submit it to the plugin directory or open our GitHub. Pretty soon, you have adoption and support requests. So, how can your plugin support itself?

After all, you can’t eat good reviews and the hard-to-find donation button only gets you so far. What are your options for monetization without taking out core features or annoying your loyal users? In this talk, we will explore effective options and ideas to financially support your product so you can continue to develop and build.

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The alphabet soup of relevant data privacy acronyms out there can be overwhelming: CCPA, GDPR, PII, FERPA, and more. We’ll discuss what all WordPress site owners and developers need to know, including data privacy tools of WordPress core, what to look for from your hosts and plugin/theme providers, and share a checklist to summarize it all to help ensure that you are on the right track.

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This is your chance to make your mark as a WordPress Contributor, whether through an individual contribution or as a team member. Make the choice to make a difference in your WordPress community through attending. Check out the video below to catch a glimpse into last year’s WordCamp Phoenix Contributor Day!