All posts by Tom Auger

WordCamp 2014 Tracks

We’re a month away and it’s time to reveal the great content we have lined up for you at WordCamp Toronto 2014! With 10 content tracks and over 65 speakers, it’s going to be a packed weekend with something for absolutely everyone who might be in contact with WordPress: from bloggers with a simple WordPress-powered website, to agencies, to seasoned WordPress developers, there’s tons of content pitched directly at your level!

Here are the tracks we have lined up for you:

  • User / Admin: this is the perfect track for WordPress users and small site administrators, whether you’re completely new to WordPress, or have been maintaining a site for some time. The track kicks off with an awesome session on getting the most out of WordCamp! A real “must” if you’re new to the WordCamp scene.

  • A11y: “a11y” is the accepted short form for “Accessibility” and refers to ensuring access to people of all levels of ability. Learn why accessibility best practices on your (or your client’s) websites benefit everyone, not just people with disabilities, and discover tools and techniques for accessibility testing, accessibility audits and accessible theme development.

  • Designer: Graphic designers, web designers and visual artists will all benefit from this track that talks about the creative side of WordPress without digging into the nitty-gritty of coding. Compelling and effective WordPress site designs require a different approach than conventional “static” HTML website design. Discover User Experience tricks, wireframing best practices, web typography, content design strategies and more in this engaging track.

  • Developer: If you’re new to code, learning to code, or an experienced coder, we have tracks for you. The “Beginner Dev” track will introduce you to WordPress development best practices, including powerful tools and workflows to increase your learning curve; the “Advanced Dev” has well-known core contributors and big names in the WordPress developer community presenting latest WordPress APIs and technologies, and killer tips. We’re also dedicating an entire morning to JavaScript and Backbone.js so you can get up to speed with the new way of working with JS within WordPress.

  • Agency: If you’re making a living developing and deploying WordPress sites for client, then this track will have great business-focused topics to help you improve your business practices, workflows and project management. We’re also pleased to be hosting a stimulating, 2-hour business panel, where we’ve invited a carefully selected group of professionals from across the entire spectrum from freelancers to small-to-mid sized agency owners, to big agencies, who will be there to answer your questions in a moderated and interactive forum.

  • Content and Business: sessions in this track are targeted toward a non-technical audience who want to learn how WordPress can help them grow their business and reach a wider, more targeted audience. Topics include Search Engine Optimization (SEO), content creation, monetization and analytics, and includes a 2-hour website “clinic” that invites you to submit your live site to a duo of experts to provide feedback and advice on how they can become more effective.

  • Community: We’re really excited about this new track, which is specifically crafted to help those who wish to get more involved with the WordPress open source movement and community. There are so many ways to get involved, from participating, volunteering, and organizing events, to answering support questions, to helping with theme reviews and accessibility, to contributing code and patching bugs. This track should not be missed by anyone who has been benefiting from this free software and its fantastic community and wants to start giving back in whatever capacity they can.

  • Contrib2Core: Are you a WordPress developer who has always wanted to contribute a patch and get their name up in the WordPress credits page? Are you a technical speaker in-between sessions and want to hack out a bug with Automatticians and core contributors? This is where we’ll be hanging out, to help new contributors find patches and tests they can do in the time they have available. We ran this last year and 6 of the attendees’ names appeared in the credits of the next WordPress release!

  • Happiness Bar: This is a staple of every WordCamp: an open, casual zone where you can come with your WordPress-related questions, problems or challenges, and find an expert volunteer to steer you in the right direction. We’ve got a great venue for the Happiness Bar this year (and it will be right next to the coffee and snacks) so come on over, hang out and snag a “Wizard” for a few minutes. You’ll be glad you did!

Am I restricted to just 1 track?

No! By no means. The tracks are just ways for us to organize sessions that seem to have a similar focus. We’re organizers, that’s what we like to do. You are free to mix and match and attend sessions from any and all tracks. For the convenience of attendees, we tend to keep all the talks for a track in the same room, so you don’t have to be constantly switching rooms. But folk will switch rooms to attend talks across any of the sessions according to their interest.

You can see why we are so excited to offer this WordCamp to you this year. There’s just so much great stuff to learn and so many awesome speakers who will be presenting.

Stay tuned over the next week as we reveal the full schedule, but don’t wait until then to buy your ticket if you haven’t already done so.

Local Developers Showcase submissions are open!

Update: Showcase submissions are now closed. Thank you to everyone who submitted!

One of the objectives of WordCamps is to promote local activity within the WordPress sphere. One way in which we would like to do this this year is to offer the opportunity for members of the local WordPress development community to show our attendees a new theme, plugin or tool that they have built that could be useful to other WordPress users, admins or developers.

Have you created a Plugin, Theme or Tool you would like to share?

If you are local (interpretations here vary somewhat) and would like the opportunity to stand on a soapbox at some point during the event and show attendees how this plugin, theme or tool could help them, please consider filling out our application form online.

Local Developers Showcase Application Form

Please note that at the moment we are just gathering applications to see if there’s a critical mass of developers to make this happen. We also want to avoid making this an opportunity for “free” promotion of services or products. If you want to promote your product or service, please consider being a sponsor

Calling all Speakers for WordCamp Toronto 2014

An energetic speaker points to a projection on a large screenWordCamp Toronto 2014’s call for speakers is now open! #WCTO is November 15-16, but we intend to lock our speaker schedule in early!

Do you have something to share about WordPress that will benefit the community? Are you a dynamic and organized speaker who can engage an audience and deliver great value? We’d like to hear your idea for a 50 minute talk to be delivered as part of this two-day event.

Submit a Speaker Application

This Year’s Focus

While we will be offering the usual diverse range of topics for a wide range of audiences, this year we are hoping the community will rally around accessibility to help raise awareness, compliance and the level of accessibility across all WordPress related projects. If you have expertise around web accessibility, AODA and WCAG compliance, assistive technologies or accessible WordPress projects, and are willing to share, we would definitely like to hear from you!

But if you don’t have an a11y related topic that’s OK! We’re looking for a wide range of interesting and informative content for diverse audience with a lot of converging WordPress related interests. So fill out a speaker application!

Topic suggestions

The topics, tracks and schedule this year will be entirely dictated by you, the Speakers, based on what you are offering to present. That being said, if you are eager to present, but are looking for inspiration, here are some ideas to get you started:

A11y

  • AODA Accessibility compliance
  • Building accessible WordPress themes
  • How to perform an accessibility audit
  • Finding an accessible WordPress theme
  • Accessible web forms
  • WAI-ARIA and JavaScript best practices
  • A11y issues from the disabled perspective

Coding

  • Theme development best practices
  • Leveraging the WordPress plugin architecture
  • WordPress Multisite best practices
  • Leveraging the Transients API
  • Development environment set-up and best practices
  • How to code with unit testing
  • Introduction to Backbone.js and WordPress

Content

  • Blog writing 101
  • Using the new Media Galleries introduced in 3.8
  • Working with video
  • Creating and maintaining a bilingual website with WordPress
  • Enhanced comments with third party services
  • SEO best practices and plugins
  • WordPress basics

Community

  • Women in WordPress / Girl Geeks
  • WordPress-related Open Source projects looking for contributors
  • Getting involved and contributing to WordPress
  • Toronto WordPress resources

Business

  • Pricing WordPress-based projects
  • WordPress project lifecycle
  • The business of WordPress plugin/theme development

See something you’d like to talk about? AWESOME!

Don’t see your topic on this list? AWESOME!

Either way, if you’ve got an idea, please fill in the Speaker Submission Form, and we’ll be reviewing them on a FIFO (first-in first-out) basis.

Submit a Speaker Application

** We’ll be accepting submissions until late August. Get yours in soon! **