Presented by Justin England in Design / Development.

I would like to tell the story of learning to DevOps. How I set up a devops strategy for a client. And explain the process so that any developers in the audience can take home a cook book on how to set up their own development environments.

Presented by Jenny Munn in Blogger / Business.

I’d love to share my story of how I learned to optimize my freelance copywriting WordPress website when I started my business 6 years ago. Through successfully applying DIY SEO and learning from the school of hard knocks, generating passive consistent leads helped sustain my business and take me from copywriter -> SEO copywriter – > SEO training and consulting for other small to mid-sized businesses and design agencies.

Presented by Kevin Conboy in Design / Development.

A great design can start in the code editor, with image editing tools only peeking in at the periphery. Find out how to begin your designs in the browser and why WordPress and Open Source are your friends.

Presented by Jeremey DuVall in Design / Development.

The idea of publishing to a blog can be daunting. First, there’s the looming issue of what to say. Maybe you don’t feel like you have anything worthwhile to add to a topic or you’ve just hit a creative block. This talk would be about getting out of your own way to publish constantly and have more ideas for your site than you know what to do with. Creativity isn’t a mystical power; it’s a learned skill. We’ll cover four strategies to get out of your own way and generate more ideas than you ever thought possible.

This talk is loosely based on a Daily Post topic that I published.

Presented by Rachel Toburen in Blogger / Business.

Happy Tails is the story of building a WordPress site for a small dog rescue run entirely by volunteers. In this talk, I’ll discuss the process of determining what the rescue needed, and giving them the site that would meet their needs best, in terms of both style and function, theme and plug-ins. This is a great example of a way to donate work and time to a cause when you can’t donate as much in terms of money.

Presented by Keya Lea Horiuchi in Design / Development.

I recently worked with a hacked site, but it took me a while to figure it out because I didn’t understand the signs.  We’ll take a look at what it did, then how to harden WordPress sites.

Presented by Patrick Rauland in Design / Development.

This talk is the story of how powerful blogging can be. Not just to refine your own thoughts but also to show others what you know.

Presented by Michael R. Hunter in Blogger / Business.

This talk will discuss how WordPress has evened the playing field for website creation.  Today, with WordPress, someone who knows no code, can create a website that just 3-5 years ago would have only been possible with a dev. background.

The amount of resources available to the WordPress community is vast.  I’ll share tools, tips, strategies and resources to help new WordPress users, freelancers, and small businesses get a great looking and effective blog/website up fast.  I have a 6-point checklist that I use to analyze whether or not a theme is a good fit for any website or blog.  People attending my session will be able to pick out the perfect theme for their website or blog.

Presented by Brian Richards in Design / Development.

Since founding WPSessions in 2013, one thought has been at the forefront of my mind every single day: there is so much more I want to learn!

It can almost seem overwhelming at times – all of the technologies, all of the resources, all of the disparate and unrelated interests I have to learn about. But, after I set forth with an intention to learn not just something new everyday, but something *useful*… well, that’s when everything changed.

Come hear about what dozens of different WordPress experts, plus a few carpenters, taught me about learning.

Presented by David Hayes in Design / Development.

My journey toward JavaScript enlightenment went through the long path which touches jQuery, vanilla JavaScript, Backbone, and Ember. For each stage in that journey, I want to give a summary of what I understood of JavaScript in specific and programming in general, what I didn’t, and what specific value each tool offered.

Presented by Shawn Smith in Design / Development.

This talk will broadly cover why slow websites suck, and how to avoid having one.  Topics covered include:

• Why speed matters
• How to reduce page load time
• Server/Networking Methods

Presented by Jamal Jackson.

This session has been cancelled

In this talk I will be going over how you can power a mobile app with data supplied from a WP site utilizing the WP REST API.

Hopefully, the audience will walk away with a better understanding of what the possibilities of the future of WP can be, a better understanding of how the WP REST API works, and how to handle data on mobile apps.

Presented by Diane Whiddon in Blogger / Business.

I LOVE WordPress.  I’ve been a WordPress-exclusive shop for 6 of the 9 years I’ve been building websites.  Here’s why: my fave thing about what I do is helping my clients build stellar content for their businesses.  My strategy is that the more of YOU that is in your website, the better you’re going to be able to market, sell, and just generally rock your stuff.  That is SO MUCH EASIER with WordPress because I’m all about empowering my clients to do it themselves.  I have no interest in being a website factory where every site is the same.  I want each of my clients to have an individual site that works for them and what they do.  WordPress is the only way I can deliver that.

Presented by Larry Kokoszka in Blogger / Business.

Communication between WordPress professionals and non-technical clients is an age old problem that eats up budget, leads to unmet expectations and prevents us from delivering superb results. I’d like to talk about the aha moment I had in the middle of a client conversation that led to the birth of Rollerblade (rollerbladeapp.com), review some common client problems and offer solutions.

Presented by Joe McGill in Design / Development.

Responsive images have come a long way in the past few years, including  browser support for new HTML elements and attributes that we can use right now. As WordPress designers and developers, it’s hard to know how and when to make the best use of the new markup patterns in our themes and plugins. As a member of the Responsive Images Community Group, and a lead developer on the RICG Responsive Images Plugin effort I’ve learned a bunch of the nitty gritty so you don’t have to.

Presented by James Laws in Blogger / Business.

Being successful in business is challenging. When we started we were late to the party in a very saturated market. We weren’t getting very far and needed to find something that would differentiate us from the other players. Then we discovered the add-on business model and it fit beautifully with our product.

This add-on model allowed us to engage with the greater WordPress community like never before. It turned our struggling company into one that is well respected and growing almost faster than we can keep up with. In many ways, it has shaped our very ethos on how and why we give back to the WordPress community.

In business, failure is inevitable but it doesn’t have to be terminal. Many times success comes to those who hang on through the dips and are willing to find potential in unlikely places.

Presented by Eric Suzanne in Design / Development.

In a world of closed-off one-size-fits-all solutions, WP gives you both a five-minute install (with themes), and nearly infinite customization. We’ll discuss the layers of abstraction that make it possible, and then apply the same approach to front-end style toolkits. How do you build systems you can take from one project to the next, with easy setup and infinite customization?

Presented by Tracy Malone in Blogger / Business.

Plugins add functionality to your website, but how do you know how to choose the right plugin? When you search plugins do you get overwhelmed at the long list of possibilities? Have you downloaded a plugin only to have it not work? Sometimes we download plugins only to find we have no idea how to make them work on our website. In this class Tracy Malone will show you how to choose a plugin, and once you download it how to figure out where it gets configured, and how to add a widget to your website.

Presented by Cory Miller in Blogger / Business.

I’ve been through a divorce, had to fire friends, lived — almost daily — with insecurity no matter how successful we or I have been, felt the guilt of success as well. I talk openly about how I see a mental health counselor and am an advocate for good mental health, especially as an entrepreneur who now leads a team of 23 people. Would talk about some of the strategies outside of having a counselor that I have done/do to maintain good mental stability in this often crazy job.

Presented by Adam Silver in Design / Development.

I came into the WordPress community full force, looking for  business and paid work. and learned that was the wrong approach.  The WAY wrong approach.

Since that time I’ve learned what the community is about, how to thrive, make friends, laugh, teach, learn and even cry.

I work from a place of abundance these days vs scarcity and it makes a huge difference.  Sure I have a FT “day job” but it doesn’t lessen my value/pricing to my freelance clients.

Presented by Chris Lema in Blogger / Business.

Chris will tell the story of managing software developers who create WordPress sites, plugins, and custom themes – using the concepts of freedom, constraints, complexity and chaos.

Presented by Frederick Meyer in Design / Development.

At WPShout, we recently interviewed 15 of the best and best-known WordPress developers in the world (like Pippin Williamson, Helen Hou-Sandi, Tom McFarlin, and Curtis McHale) on the principles of WordPress development. We asked each developer to walk us through code they had written, and to describe how they personally approach WordPress development.

In this talk, I’ll present our key takeaways from across these 15 interviews: what we felt tied these folks together as top developers, and what they said in common about how to be a great WordPress developer, both in terms of coding practices and broader approach.

Presented by Bethany Siegler in Blogger / Business.

Each time I go to WordCamp, there is a group of folks (either site owners, newbie bloggers or graphic designers) who want to understand the basics of WordPress.

They struggle to fit in, they don’t know how to get started.

By sharing tales of my own start in 2005, as well as how my colleagues, collaborators and clients got their feet wet (sometimes falling on their eventual road to success), I believe it can do several things:

• Fill a missing gap in the beginner’s struggle
• Provide confidence (and tips) to overcoming the curve
• Begin their day feeling connected and ready to learn from the rest of the event’s storytellers

As for the folks who have already ‘been there, done that’, they can recall overcoming their own hurdles – and a feel a sense of accomplishment.

It might be fun to do a short series of post, prior to the event, telling a tip or trick that some of the speakers provide of things they wish they knew early on (during their own beginner days).

Looking forward to continuing this conversation!

Presented by Ryan Kanner in Design / Development.

I’ve always been part of small WordPress teams that need to do a lot of work in a short amount of time. With these time and manpower limitations I’ve had to find ways to speed up my team’s workflow without cutting any corners. By using starter themes, frameworks, parent themes, as well as some carefully crafted plugins and automation tools I have helped small teams build large sites extremely quickly.

Presented by Rafi Yagudin in Blogger / Business.

This is the story WordPress’s role in education, more specifically a lab at Tufts University called “The Center for Engineering, Education, and Outreach”. From college-level CS classes to an international LEGO competition, my old lab at Tufts is constantly finding new ways to leverage the WordPress platform in the context of education and help students around the world enjoy a better education experience.

While a graduate student at Tufts University, my old lab called “Center for Engineering Education and Outreach” (CEEO) wanted to jump on the “online virtual classroom” bandwagon. I was tasked with finding the appropriate platform to kick-start our venture into this space. I decided to go with WordPress due to it being free and supported by a large, healthy community of diverse people around the world.

Presented by Nathan Porter in Blogger / Business.

Are you a nonprofit web manager? Are you using your website as a tool to interact with your constituents? With Nathan Porter’s favorite box of tools, you can maximize your website interactions, display data in a more personalized way, collect information on how your viewers interact with your website, and display dynamic data to your visitors.

Presented by Angela Bowman in Blogger / Business.

Did you know your WordPress website can be hacked without your knowing it? You usually won’t find out your site is hacked until things get really bad, such as when:

Without knowing it for months or even years, your website could be “innocently” promoting porn, pharmaceuticals, or pay day loans; infecting your friends’ computers with viruses, trojans, or other malware; or participating in a botnet that is infiltrating sites across the world. Security scanners and plugins like Sucuri and Wordfence do not pick up on many of these hacks. So, even if the site shows as “clean” that doesn’t meant it is.

Why should you care? Because getting off the phish tank list is hard. Your search engine rankings could tank. You could lose clients who are angry that your site directed them to a site that infected their computers. And, well, caring is the ethical thing to do as a business owner.

Attend this talk to learn how to spot a hack in your WordPress files and dashboard, clean up a hacked site, and prevent hacks. Cleaning up a hacked site can take a lot of time and expense. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. This fast and furious presentation will leave you wishing you’d never heard it but so glad you did.