Speakers

We have an exciting lineup of speakers at this year’s event, from local GTA speakers, to speakers from all across Canada and the US. See below for a full list, or visit the Schedule to see an hour-by-hour breakdown.

Shanta Nathwani

Shanta R. Nathwani is an IT and Social Media Consultant and an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few.
Shanta is a problem solver and it has been said she has the patience of a saint. She can explain even the most difficult concepts to the most basic user and has developed training documents that allow clients to learn for themselves. She thrives on understanding the needs of her clients and students. She believes in making websites as simple as possible and making it fun, which allows her clients to seamlessly incorporate it into their organization.

Speaking Session

Thank you Shanta for being willing to step in due to a cancellation!

Tom Auger

Tom Auger is Senior Partner at Zeitguys, a downtown-Toronto based digital design agency.

Tom believes passionately in the value of Open Source, and his personal philosophy and professional profile mirror these convictions. He is an active member of the local and global WordPress community, while also attempting to be the creative and tech lead of a growing digital agency, a dad of two confirmed rapscallions, an Ontario Great Lakes surfer, a Toronto cycling activist, an educator (currently with Centennial College in Toronto), and a craft beer connoiseur (not necessarily in that order).

Tom is able to survive on 4 hours of sleep each day, has negligible body odour and the uncanny ability of being able to identify a type of clam from 100 meters. Consequently, he hates shellfish. He is immune to hyperbole, riddled with muscle, and obviously the one who is typing out his own Speaker post on the WordCamp Toronto 2014 website. Who gave this guy admin access, anyway?

Panel Moderation

I do nothing in moderation, but I will be moderating:

Agency Panel in the Agency track

What do you hope people will get from the panel?

I’m hoping that this panel will have something for everyone. I’m pretty stoked. We have curated a bunch of really cool, WP-dialed-in folk from independents through to large development studios, so there’s going to be a lot of variety in the answers and perspectives these people have.

I think this panel will bring different things to different people. Folk that are looking to have WordPress website done for them are going to enjoy asking some blunt questions about pricing, workflow and what to look for in a vendor. Freelancers are going to be able to ask questions around project scoping, best practices and taking it to the next level. Webdev shops and studios will wonder about challenges and “gotchas”, and how to overcome them. And I’m hoping there might be some dialogue from other big agencies (10Up, I’m looking at you!) around scalability and how to monetize / justify contribution back to the community.

What drew you to WordPress in the first place?

For years I dreamed of creating our own web-based CMS. I even had an entire roadmap planned out for it. Then one day I stumbled upon WordPress and realized “oh crap. This does all that, and a whole bunch of other stuff I never even thought of”. We dropped the whole homegrown CMS instantly and moved all our energy toward WordPress and haven’t looked back since.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme and why?

I’m generally wary of commercial themes, though we’re re-evaluating our opinion of their role in the WordPress ecosystem as a lot of them are starting to mature and developers are becoming more conscientious about adhering to the WordPress coding standards. So I’m not going to go out there and recommend a theme. Our own starter theme is based on _s (pronounced “underscores”) so of course we’ve named it _z (pronounced “underscorez”) which is, frankly, cooler. But I’m sure wd_s (pronounced “dubya dee ess”) is better.

As for plugins, I’m digging Ben Moody’s Post Ratings Plugin, because it’s really cool and, he’s put me on the contributor list.

Why did you decide to speak

I’m not going to lie. Ego.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Um. Everything?

We have met weekly for half a year to put this sucker together and it’s going to be awesome. The people I have met putting this together, from volunteers to speakers to attendees who have reached out have been just amazing. I’m just excited to meet y’all and learn how WordPress is making your life better.

And the afterparty @ the Gladstone. That should rock.

Dre Armeda

Dre Armeda is the VP of Operations at WebDevStudios, a premiere WordPress agency for big brands. Dre is a Co-Founder and previous CEO of Sucuri Inc.

Dre is a Harley enthusiast, and a Chargers fan (Ed: Go, Seahawks! Ooops, sorry). He wears many hats, and love tacos. He is infatuated with WordPress, web design, and web security. Dre hopes to make the internet a safer place!

Dre presents at various WordCamps and other events every year. Dre is a proud WordPress contributor and was the lead organizer that brought WordCamp to San Diego. Dre can also be found attending local WordPress meetups at the Inland Empire WordPress Meetup and the WordPress San Diego (North County) Meetup.

Dre is the Co-Host of the DradCast on Wednesday nights. Pressing all the words!

Panel session

Agency Panel in the Agency track

What made you decide to speak?

I never shut up, it’s how I roll!

What’s your favourite plugin or theme?

The Underscores theme is pretty slick as a boilerplate. So much so that WebDevStudios has even expanded their own named WD_S

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

The people and community!

Monika Piotrowicz

I’m the Front End Dev lead for Shopify’s Toronto and have worked on the HTML, CSS, and JS side of things for over 6 years. I love FED and getting to work along side other developers and designers to create both elegant user experiences and code bases.

Speaking Session

Accessibility – A feature you can build in the Accessibility track

Why did you decide to speak?

I love introducing accessibility to developers and hope to have some great discussions on experiences, tips, and tools.

(Ed: Monika graciously agreed to fill in for a very last-minute cancellation. You rock, Monika!)

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

A chance to meet more of Toronto’s awesome dev community

Brent Kobayashi

Brent Kobayashi has been making the online world friendly for more than 19 years as president of Toronto digital marketing firm Kobayashi Online. Heavily involved with the WordPress community, Brent helps organize the Toronto WordPress meetup group of over 1200 people and is a co-organizer of WordCamp Toronto. He thinks he’s funny, but we’re not so sure – check out his daily shenanigans on twitter and judge for yourself… @brentkobayashi

Panel Session

Avery Swartz

Avery Swartz is a Toronto-based award-winning web designer, consultant, speaker, and tech skills instructor. A self-described design geek, she helps demystify the web for small business owners, charities, and arts organizations. Avery offers a friendly and casual approach with all her projects.

In addition to her web design work, Avery is the founder and CEO of Camp Tech—a learning hub that provides practical tech training in a fun and friendly environment. Avery provides on-site instruction for corporations and has facilitated interactive technology workshops for over 1000 students.

Avery is the Web Director of the Art Canada Institute, acts as a Digital Advisor for Willow Breast & Hereditary Cancer Support, and teaches Digital Publishing & Production at Ryerson University. Avery regularly appears on CTV News as a guest tech expert.

Panel session

Why did you decide to speak?

I’ve learned so much about building a business (two businesses, to be precise) and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. I hope to share my knowledge with others, so they can learn from me and hopefully not repeat some of my blunders! I want to share the knowledge that I wish I had myself 5 years ago.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I first started using WordPress because of its CMS capabilities (I was previously making HTML, CSS and Javascript websites that my clients couldn’t update themselves). I started using it more and more, and now love building with WordPress, sharing it with my clients, and teaching beginners how to use it.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Akismet, because it’s light, lean, and does a great job (for the most part) keeping comment spam away from me and my clients.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Spending time with the Toronto WordPress community. Everyone is so friendly and we have a great time together – I can’t wait to catch up with my WordPress pals that I haven’t seen since last year’s WordCamp.

Robyn Larsen

Robyn is a former nuclear engineer now blurring the lines between work and play as a front end web developer, mentor and entrepreneur. Her tools of choice are HTML5, CSS3, Sass, responsive design, and Javascript. She lives by challenging assumptions, improving process, and never settles.

Born and raised in small town Alberta – over the past few years she has snowboarded some of the world’s most majestic mountains, travelled to over 23 countries, cultivated movements and mentored students. Now you can now find her based in Toronto working with brands from all over the world.

Robyn holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Engineering from the University of Alberta and is an alumni of HackerYou in Toronto.

Panel session

Agency Panel in the Agency track

Why did you decide to participate in the panel?

I love stories and I always feel it’s important to share the hard lessons learned so others don’t have to go through them.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Ease of use and adoption.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Gravity Forms, and Genesis Framework. Consistency and reliability through each major WordPress release.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting other developers and learning about what people are excited about this year.

Denise Williams

Denise Williams has been working with digital content tools for more than 15 years, producing websites and print publications from alt-weekly newspapers (like the Santa Barbara Independent) to luxury custom publications (like Mercedes-Benz) to iOS Newsstand magazines (like Reader’s Digest). Now at Automattic, she works directly with users to spread WordPress love and learning.

Speaking session

WordPress Media Tools for Creatives in the User / Admin track

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Everybody’s needs and audiences are different. I want people to leave informed on how to choose the right audio, video, or visual presentation for their work in particular.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love coaching people on WordPress, and it’s always nice to share with a larger group.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I’ve been managing publishing in all sorts of formats forever, and as a production manager, I get a little obsessed with the back-end tools and workflow possibilities for editorial and design teams. Even back in the earl(ier) days, WordPress was straightforward, easy to teach and use, and it clearly had a community dedicated to its future progress.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

For my own self-hosted uses, I am very attached to Advanced Custom Fields. Sleek, well-organized, but not overloaded with features I don’t use.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Over in Montreal, Toronto is just far enough away that there’s not a ton of regular crossover. It’s so nice to join the Toronto WordPress community at least once a year! Looking forward to seeing all the faces.

James Strang

I started designing websites in my youth. I taught myself HTML and CSS using online tools. I thoroughly enjoy website design and started learning WordPress in 2006, and loved it. In addition to website design I also enjoy working with Computers, Circuit Boards, and 3D Printers. Sometimes all at the same time…

Speaking session

How to take a free theme and make it yours in the User / Admin track

About your session

This presentation will show you how to customize any theme with only a little coding knowledge. You will learn how to locate the section, and how to use CSS to change an element.

We will cover using Chrome and Firefox to inspect the code, and how to easily change the code to suit your needs.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The attendees should be able to use a browser inspection tool to locate elements in the code of the website, and be able to redefine those elements to change the look and feel of their website quickly and easily.

Why did you decide to speak?

As I was volunteering in the happiness bar at the Ottawa WordCamp, I realized I had a wealth of knowledge in regards to WordPress. I felt inclined to give back to the WP community, and I thought that this subject would be good for my first WC Workshop.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I first used WordPress because I had a client who wanted a blog on his website, and I saw that it had good reviews. I really enjoyed using WordPress, and shortly after WordPress evolved into an amazing CMS and I have been using it ever since.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favourite plugin is S2member, because you can use it to monetize your website without the use of advertisements. It allows you to charge members for a subscription to your website, and it handles all the finances for you through various payment gateways.

Very well written, and very customizable.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I am looking forward to meeting like-minded people, and attending all the workshops I can.

Dawn Comber

I am a copywriter, providing web content and content strategy to small businesses, non-profits and individuals. I also teach monthly LearnWP WordPress workshops in Toronto with Ruth Maude (we’re doing a joint session).

I’m an experimental gardener – this year I grew over 100 sweet potato plants in a community plot. I won’t be going that big next year!

Workshop session

Website Assessment clinic in the Content and Business track

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

We want people to come away with practical tips make their websites better for users and better for search.

Why speak at #WCTO?

I enjoy sharing my WordPress and content experience. I also really like the whole concept of a sharing community – which is what WordPress has been for me.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was attracted to WordPress because it’s user-friendly regardless of your comfort level with tech/code stuff. For example, those of us with little or no coding expertise can still make a website do cool things. You just need to find a plugin. Now that makes me happy.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Another tricky question …. because there are so many. But Black Studio TinyMCE Widget is one of my favourites. This plugin adds a new Visual Editor widget type that allows you to insert rich text and media objects in widgets with no hassle.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Hard to choose but my top three would be:

  • Reconnecting with friends & colleagues
  • Talking about WordPress…
  • Learning new things about WordPress …

Ruth Maude

Hi I’m Ruth of Dandelion Web Design. I’ve been designing and developing web sites since the late 1990′s. I also co-teach LearnWP WordPress Workshops in Toronto with Dawn Comber.

Workshop Session

Website Assessment clinic in the Content and Business track

Why did you decide to present?

I’ve spoken at WordCamp Toronto for several years and it has always been a great experience. It’s one way I like to pay it forward, recognizing how much WordPress has given to me.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I came to WordPress in 2008 looking for a user-friendly, secure content management solution for my clients. I was sold on WordPress when I discovered that with plugins you could so easily add new functionality to your site and with automatic updates you would always have the latest and greatest WordPress has to offer.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Today’s favourite plugin will be the one that solves a need for my current project. If I have to pick just one, it would be WordPress SEO by Yoast.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m looking forward to seeing friends from the WordPress Toronto community. A whole weekend talking WordPress – what could be better?

Al Davis

I’ve spoken at numerous WordCamps over the years and am currently working on an book for new users to WordPress. I work exclusively in WordPress and have been for some time, whether as a developer, college educator or building a telco grade platform based on WordPress.

Speaking Sessions

WordPress 101 in the User / Admin track

About your session

In this presentation, I’ll demystify WordPress for the new user . Should you use WordPress.com or .org? Whats a theme? Whats a plugin. I’ll also address some of the common misconceptions that have arisen out of my classroom teaching. And tell a few bad cat jokes as well.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I expect people to walk away with a bit more of a comfort level in regards to Using WordPress and at the very least be able to ask the right questions to help their projects move forward

Why did you decide to speak?

Toronto is home and it wouldn’t have felt right not speaking at this WordCamp, despite taking the year off from speaking.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

As a Product Manager for web hosting companies, I had never really gotten behind a product until WordPress. Watching it maturation and it’s development geared towards both developers and new users is a very unique thing to see in the software world.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Gravity forms, hands down.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Reconnecting with Friends I haven’t seen in a year!

Stephane Boisvert

Stéphane works for Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com as a VIP Engineer helping sites stay secure and optimized.
He was formerly senior advisor for the Federal Liberal party for 4 years leading the party’s growth in online data acquisitions and donations.

Speaking Sessions

Everything you know about AB testing is wrong in the Advanced Developer track

About your presentation

Do you ever wonder if your AB testing and optimizations are working as intended?
Have you ever had incredible results in tests only to not have them follow thru long term?

All of these questions probabilistically answered and more in my talk!

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

That changing the color of a button won’t lead to 50% more conversions.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love to talk about AB testing and optimizations and the common pitfalls that most people encounter when they start testing.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The ease of use and the flexibility it provided

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I think Gravity Forms is one of the best plugins because it is incredibly easy to use by end users but can also be extended by developers.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Networking and helping people out at the happiness bar.

Kyle Unzicker

I spend my weekdays designing and developing with the great team at Modern Tribe. At work, I’m at my best with a coffee in my hand and death metal in my ears.

I live with my wife and daughter in central Illinois, where we pack our weekends with small town living.

Speaking session

Back To Square One: Building A WordPress Starter Development Kit in the Agency track.

Tell us more about yourself

I am a designer and developer who has an insatiable desire to build things worth putting my name on. Currently, I am an active member of a number of remote development teams, including Modern Tribe where I am learning how to help teams become helpful, happy, curious and accountable.

What’s your presentation all about?

Our team set out to create a WordPress starter development kit in order to speed up development and help keep uniformity among projects. So, how did we build it? Why didn’t we use “________” framework instead? What does the code look like? Is our universe real? What is true happiness? This session will attempt to answer at least 60% of these questions.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

How to work as a team to think ahead and give yourself a headstart on WordPress development projects.

Why did you decide to speak?

My topic is something that I would love to learn about from someone else, so I wanted to share my own experience.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Open source + plugins! As a newbie developer, the plugin repository was like a candy store that gave out free candy. If there was functionality I didn’t know how to build, I could almost always find a plugin that did the job AND be able to look under the hood and try to understand what was going on.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Admin Bar Toggle – it’s an extremely simple plugin that allows you to toggle the admin bar on/off on the front end. It really comes in handy when working with layouts with fixed headers.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people and learning from others!

Jacques Surveyer

Web Designer, Developer, Blogger and Mentor for the past 15 years. My loyalty shifted from HTML pages to CMS like WordPress and Joomla as I developed 5 of my own and more than 2 dozen WordPress primarily installations. With the intro of WordPress 3.0 I began to work exclusively with it for Web designs requiring a CMS.

Speaker Session

WP Front-End Editors in the User/Admin track.

Drag and drop Visual Designers have a checkered history in software development: too proprietary, too complex to learn, generate low-performance spam code, etc. Now in the past 3-5 years WordPress has seen the emergence of frontend Visual Theme Designers.

This presentation will examine 2 questions:

  1. Is there a rock solid WordPress Visual Designer?
  2. Can these tools replace the bulk of WordPress theme development using PHP and the WordPress Codex?

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

All attendees will benefit from the general review and demo of WordPress Visual Design tools. WordPress designers and developers will get specific insights on the features and methods used by the major tools for drag and drop Theme Design:

  • The top 4 WordPress Visual Design tools
  • The common features provided by all the tools.
  • The unique features and component/widgets provided by each tool.
  • Each tools support for mobile and responsive designs.
  • Each tools support of popular eCommerce plugins and server-side connections
  • An assessment of the costs and trade-offs of each tool
  • Futures including Automattic designating one tool as preferred interface creation tool.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Toronto?

First, as a mentor and presenter, I enjoy doing presentations very much. But also the topic of using drag and drop Visual Designers is quite relevant.

Can the performance of Visual Designers match the the features and speed of WP API developed themes? I will provide some insights.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was an early adopter of WordPress starting with my TheOpenSourcery.com site. Plugins and themes were the original attraction. But with the extension of automatic updates to the overall new-version WP installation, the die was cast in WordPress favor.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

Since I use well over 2 dozen plugins and themes, this is a very hard choice. Bavotsan’s Magazine Basic theme I use quite often because of its responsive, mobile ready features plus magazine magazine layout.

On the plugin side I will choose WPIDE and CSS & JavaScript Toolbox. These 2 plugins allow some nifty hacks plus WP API work.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Finding out more about how WordPress is being used on the Toronto Scene. Here in Eastern Ontario WP is used less often than expected with Single Page Designs using Bootstrap.JS and Foundation.JS appearing to dominate the new site scene.

 

David Colburn

David’s background in operations, agile production, and front-end development enables him to provide strong Scrum and Agile facilitation to a team.

David’s career in digital products began while he was a production and product manager at the Financial Post and then at Canada NewsWire where his work focused on the publication of financial information products for the professional investor markets.

More recently, he has focused on improving project results through the building of high-performance teams.

Speaker Session

Intro to Agile Practices in the Agency track.

The presentation intends to introduce participants to the Agile Manifesto and then through a hands-on team-based exercise demonstrate show these principles in action.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I hope that participants will leave the session able to begin applying basic Agile methods to the development practices.

Why did you decide to speak?

Since returning to Toronto in 2013 I’ve had first-hand experience working with agile producing large-scale projects. Its practices can help any project team produce better work and achieve more for their efforts.

Passing on Agile and Scrum concepts to other people seems the best way I can give back to the open-source community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress is a strong tool for the disintermediation of information.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, andy why?

That changes over time, but these days I rely on Clean Yeti Basic as a starter theme. I’m a fan of Zurb Foundation so this theme appeals to me.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people and new ideas.

Billy Gregory

Billy Gregory is a Sr. Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group. Having spent many years as a front-end developer, Billy can relate to many of the challenges and the apprehension faced by developers who are new to accessibility.

He enjoys working with developers of all levels of experience to strengthen their skills and understanding of accessibility. Billy is active in the Accessibility Community as Co-Organizer of “Accessibility Camp Toronto” and it’s monthly “Toronto Accessibility and Inclusive Design” meetup group.

Speaking Session

Use ARIA Now! in the Accessibility track.

In this session we will jump right in and use ARIA and HTML5 to create modern, accessible web applications. Starting with the basics, and working up to some more advanced examples, attendees will learn how to start using ARIA right away.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • Day one WAI-ARIA implementation tips
  • Intro to ARIA from a developers perspective
  • An introduction to keyboard design patterns

Why did you decide to speak?

Tom called me out on Twitter 😉

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Open source is all about inclusion.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

I’m a big fan of the Cities project.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Learning, meeting others, and talking accessibility.

 

 

Rick Radko

Rick Radko is the founder and lead developer/designer of R-Cubed Design Forge and co-founder of LumosTech Training. He began building web sites and applications in 1996, and has been creating websites with WordPress since 2008.

At R-Cubed Design Forge, Rick develops custom plugins, themes, applications and multilingual web sites. At Lumostech, he teaches people all about WordPress.

In 2011, he started the Ottawa WordPress Meetup and spoke at WordCamp Toronto for the first time. Since then he has been thrilled to present at WordCamp Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa. Rick is the lead organizer of WordCamp Ottawa.

Speaker Session

Multisite for Multilingual in the Beginner Developer track.

About your talk

This talk is about creating a multilingual WordPress site using WordPress multisite. The talk will cover: the basics of setting up multisite, some plugins to make it easier to create a multilingual site, pros & cons of using multisite for multilingual sites, and some tips and tricks to help with your sites.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The key thing to take away from this presentation is how to create a multilingual WordPress site using multisite.

Why did you decide to speak?

I enjoy teaching others about WordPress, and presenting at WordCamps, including Toronto, over the last few years has always been a lot of fun. It’s a great way to share knowledge and give back to the WordPress community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It’s ease of use. I’ve worked with several CMS’s over the years but none are as easy to use as WordPress. With WordPress: my clients get web sites that they can manage and update mostly on their own, and as a developer I get a framework that is easy to modify or extend with add-ons and plugins.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite theme is the new Bootstrap based framework I’m developing. I really like that using Bootstrap gives me a lot of tools for my theme that I don’t need to build from scratch.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Networking and connecting with other WordPress enthusiasts.

 

Chris Van Patten

I work with small and medium-sized businesses to create amazing web experiences, usually with WordPress. I’ve been working with WordPress for as long as I can remember and I absolutely love traveling to WordCamps around the US and Canada to share what I’ve learned!

Speaking Session

WordPress Project Management 101 in the Agency track.

I’ll be focusing on how you can manage a WordPress development project from start to finish: writing great proposals, working with project management software, learning to communicate with clients, and more.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I hope people learn from my mistakes! I’ve been working with clients for almost a decade, and I’ve got a lot of experience that I hope people can use to improve their businesses and projects.

Why did you decide to speak?

Speaking is one of my favourite things to do—I love creating presentations and sharing my knowledge with people. Also: I spoke at WordCamp Toronto Developers in 2012 and was under the influence of some intense cold meds (November’s my season for sickness), and I wanted to see what a WordCamp Toronto was like sober!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It was easy to use and easy to hack on.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

I don’t really have favourites, but I’ve been working with the JSON API and Edit Flow recently and they’re both amazing plugins. Really well built, thorough, and super useful for enterprise WordPress projects. Very excited to see the JSON API in core too!

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m excited to have an excuse to visit Toronto again! I haven’t been in years, and it’s one of my favourite cities. Of course, getting to learn from amazing people in the WordPress community will be pretty great too!

Shawn Hooper

I’m a freelance web application developer, and have been building web applications for the federal government and private sector for almost 20 years now.

The past two years have had a very heavy focus on WordPress. This year I’ve decided to really get involved in the community, attending our local meetup group, speaking for the first time at WordCamp Ottawa, and attending my first Contributor Day in Boston.

Speaker Session

Save Time By Managing WordPress from the Command Line in the Developer track.

WP-CLI is a set of tools that allow you to manage your WordPress installation from the command line. Many of the features of WP-CLI are huge timesavers. I’ll demonstrate the installation of WP-CLI and explain many the features that come with it. I recommend this presentation for anyone designing or developing in WordPress.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I hope that people will learn at least a couple ways that the WP-CLI tools can help speed up certain tasks involved in developing or maintaining a WordPress installation.

Why did you decide to speak?

Having spoken with many people at other WordCamps and meet-ups about WP-CLI, I found not many people had heard of WP-CLI, but didn’t really know what it was for.

I think it’s an amazing tool for anyone working with WordPress, and want to encourage more people to use it.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Although it may seem obvious now, having some from the world of static HTML files, my original attraction to WordPress was the ability to manage content through a database and a web interface.

What has kept me attracted to WordPress is the flexibility of the platform, and the amazing community that supports it.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme?

At the moment, my favourite plug-in is Clef. It’s approach to two-factor authentication makes my WordPress sites more secure, and allows me to log in or out of all the sites I manage in one easy step.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Easy: meeting new people.

As I’ve said, the community that supports WordPress is amazing. This will be the fourth WordCamp I’ve attended this year. At each one, I meet new people who are using WordPress in new and interesting ways. I’m sure Toronto will be equally as impressive.

Brian Layman

Brian Layman has been hacking WordPress for fun and profit since 2004. In 2007 he left his programmer analyst position in the corporate world to work full time io join b5media, a Toronto based blogging network. The entrepreneurs working at b5media proved that you could make a living through WordPress, blogging and OpenSource technologies. feeding his family off of the fruits of WordPress.

He founded the North East Ohio WordPress meetup in 2009 and is on the committee of WordCamp North Canton. He’s a featured consultant in WordPress For Dummies and manages his own consulting company eHermits, Inc. LTD.

Speaker Session

It’s ALIVE!!! – Using AJAX to bring WordPress sites to life. in the Beginner Developer track.

About your session

Just as WordPress’s technology has advanced over the years, gaining new featured and abilities, so have the other tools used to create websites. AJAX is a combination of several technologies that integrated with WordPress can be used to bring your website to life. I will be discussing how to use AJAX in WordPress themes and plugins to create dynamic, interactive sites.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want this presentation to inspire developers and designers to use AJAX in new and creative ways on their WordPress sites. Attendees will have the tools at their fingertips to new add features and improve their site’s behavior.

Why did you decide to speak?

I take the opportunity to speak at WordCamps and meetups because I have benefited from the expertise of others who have done the same. The supportive nature of the WordPress community is a draw for many people. We help each other openly and eagerly and so all gain as the community grows.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

In 2004, I needed a tool that could create a dynamic website (not a blog), allow multiple non-technical people to edit the content of the site and that could be easily customized with new functionality. This combination of flexibility and power is why I chose WordPress and why WordPress has grown to be the most widely used CMS tool in the world.

What’s your favourite WordPress plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite plugin is Gravity Forms. I have used it for everything from Contact Forms, to powering small eCommerce sites, to populating legacy MS SQL database systems.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Reconnecting. I have many friends in the Toronto technological community that I haven’t seen face to face in many years. I can’t wait to reconnect and see what they have been doing in the last few years.

 

Alex Rascanu

Alex Rascanu is a digital strategist and speaker. He creates and executes digital marketing initiatives that help brands win.

Alex is the Director of Marketing at Wealthsimple, a startup that makes smart, simple, low-fee investing accessible to everyone, regardless of net worth or financial knowledge.

Alex is also the founder of Marketers Without Borders, a non-profit organization that connects marketers with powerful causes that have demonstrable socio-economic impact in disadvantaged communities around the world.

Alex is the organizer of the Marketers Unbound event series. He regularly speaks on digital marketing, business development, and living a life of purpose. Alex holds a Bachelor of Business Administration from University of Toronto.

Speaking Sessions

Demystifying SEO in the Content & Business track.

Topics covered:

  • How search engines work
  • How people interact with search engines
  • Why SEO is crucial
  • The basics of search engine-friendly design & development
  • Keyword research
  • How user experience & content affect search engine rankings
  • How to grow a site’s popularity & links
  • SEO tools & resources
  • How to measure & track success

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Need to polish up your knowledge on SEO for the next site development project? This presentation provides a comprehensive set of insights you need to get on the road to high quality SEO.

Why did you decide to speak?

To help marketers and developers better understand how to leverage SEO as part of their current or upcoming projects.

What’s your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast. It’s a brilliant resource for on-site SEO.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting the attendees and speakers, and learning from each one of them.

Lucas Cherkewski

Lucas Cherkewski designs and thinks in tea-serving establishments all over Waterloo. He’s presented at two WordCamps previously, in Toronto last year and in Ottawa last May, both on the subject of working with developers as a client.

Lucas is a full-time high school student, a job which is sometimes more demanding than the freelance gig he pulls during evenings and weekends. He believes that humans are people, too, and that we move so quickly we forget that nowadays. Public speaking is one of his favourite activities. You can follow Lucas on Twitter.

Speaking Session

Designing Creativity in the Designer track

About Your Presentation

We can (hopefully) all agree that design is a fundamental process of creating websites. We’ll talk about how design doesn’t have to be some scary “creative” thing, about how it’s a skill like any other. We’ll even practice it a bit.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to learn that design isn’t frightening, that it’s just problem solving with a different set of tools.

Why did you decide to speak?

Topically, I think it’s important to dispel myths surrounding creativity and its supposedly mystic nature. I also want to encourage people to try design who might not otherwise.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Its ease of use and its strong sense of community.

What’s your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Underscores can’t really be beat as a learn-by-example project. Not only is it a great starting point, but it’s well maintained and a good example of how an open source project can be run.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people and reacquainting myself with some familiar faces.

Matt Smith

“I am a creator; coding is my favorite way to make the world a better place.”

Matthew Smith completed his Ph.D. in 2012 on “Social Capital in Online Communities” while working as a researcher in the Data Mining Lab at BYU. He received his B.S. in Computer Science from BYU in December 2004 and defended his M.S. Thesis on “Implicit Affinity Networks” in December 2006. He is currently working at Lingotek as a Principal Engineer and the Director of Integrations.

Speaking session

Multilingual WordPress-How To Make Your WordPress Site Multilingual in the Beginner Developer track

Your Presentation

This presentation will give you a solid overview of multilingual capabilities in WordPress and teach you what you need to know to make your site content, plugins, and themes multilingual.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • Compare plugin options to install that enable multilingual functionality
  • Ensure your themes, plugins, and content are multilingual ready (internationalized)
  • Translate a theme or plugin into a new language
  • Send content to a translation services provider when needed
  • Use typical workflow for translating posts, pages, menus, and other types of content
  • Understand typical translation and editorial workflows
  • Leverage machine, professional, and community translation

Why did you decide to speak?

I wanted to share both the fundamentals and some neat tips and tricks about multilingual site setup in WordPress since I’ve seen lots of companies struggle with multilingual problems.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The WordPress core infrastructure was built in a way that others could easily build in their own functionality and appearance through plugins and themes. It is robust and usable for technical and non-technical people alike.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite plugin is the Ninja Forms plugin since it is ultra flexible, gives you easy access to export the collected data, and because it solves the important problem of form building and data collection — which, traditionally takes far longer than it should.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m excited to connect with the thriving community and create great things together.

David Hamilton

I’m a professional writer with a focus on technology and digital life. I am also the editor of LabTO, a site that covers Toronto’s tech culture. My work has appeared in publications such as The WHIR, TechVibes, Betakit, Biometric Update, and The National Post. I’ve also done commercial copywriting for HP and Intel, as well as local brands including Kobayashi Online.

Speaking session

A Quick Guide to Long-form Content on WordPress

Tell us more about yourself

Developing one’s skill as a writing is a lifelong pursuit, and throughout my career I’ve been working on becoming a better writer – and I’m happy to share writing advice when I can. I spend a lot of time thinking about how technology works, and how it changes how we live and work. In the past, I have presented at previous WordCamps on Information Architecture, and blogging like a journalist.

Can you shed more light on your presentation topic?

The conventional wisdom around online writing has been that readers have short attention spans and tiny, punchy articles are the best way to get them to read a blog post.

However, it turns out that some of the most popular websites that used to adhere to this old logic (such as Buzzfeed and The Huffington Post) are finding that well-written, long-form content is actually very popular with their audiences.

This presentation is about creating long-form content that is worth reading. It will cover some approaches to long-form writing and the tools available in WordPress to convey your stories compellingly and elegantly.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • Choosing topics and focus for long-form article or blog post.
  • Creating a “package” of multimedia content for your long-form piece.
  • Choosing themes and templates for long-form pieces, and using tools such as Aesop Story Engine to display things how you want.
  • Typography for long reads: Making sure people have a distraction free and comfortable experience.
  • Keeping things interesting in long-form articles

Why did you decide to speak?

I’ve previously presented at WordCamp Montreal and WordCamp Ottawa on Information Architecture and the journalistic approach to blogging.

WordCamp Toronto is special to me because it’s the city I live in, and I have tremendous respect for everyone in Toronto’s digital community. I hope I can provide something useful to the community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It was shortly after finishing journalism school in 2008. I had just finished hand-coding a magazine-style website when I found out that there was something called WordPress that managed content publishing, comments, and all the other things I had struggled with. Since then, I’ve been a huge supporter of WordPress as it’s grown and evolved to become essentially the best platform for content creators.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

While the Jetpack multi-plugin is probably my favourite plugin overall, Aesop Story Engine is my favourite for long-form writing in WordPress.

It allows writers to easily add story components such as screen-filling images, jump-out text, and parallax elements to posts without having to code these things from scratch. Of course, it doesn’t always work as intended, but it provides a starting point that you can tweak.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I always look forward to catching up with old friends, meeting new people, and hearing new ideas at presentations.

Luca Sartoni

Luca Sartoni is a media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background. Thanks to his extensive experience in different business environments, from SMEs to large corporate projects, Luca helps companies scale up their business adopting data driven strategies. He does not believe in Santa Claus, magical spells and everything that is not backed up by facts. Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic.

In addition to his consulting background, Luca is a well renowned blogger and a speaker in the online communications industry.

Speaking session

Powering Business Sites with WordPress in the Agency track

Your Presentation

How to apply elements of growth to local business sites based on WordPress.

How to raise awareness, drive acquisition, activate new customers, engage and retain loyal clients, and ultimately increase revenue leveraging the best WordPress superpowers.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

This presentation is for local business owners like restaurants, hair salons, gym clubs, bars, who want to better leverage their WordPress site to support their business.

It will also be useful to WordPress consultants who want to better support their local clients.

Why did you decide to speak?

It’s the best way to provide value to the event.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I needed a blog and it was GPL. Best decision ever!

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

WordPress SEO by Yoast because solves almost all the technical needs for local business WP sites.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting the local community.

Scott Kingsley Clark

I’m a Senior Web Engineer at 10up, the lead developer of the Pods Framework, a father/husband, a musicophile, and enjoy playing my Ukuele. I’m a developer who loves to make awesome things for people to do awesome things.

Speaking Session

The Ghost of Metadata Past, Present, and Future In the Developer track

Your Presentation

We’ll be going over the Metadata API / UI project and the affects it will have on the plugin / app landscape.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to think about how they structure their content and how they can add more context so that other plugins and apps can know more about their content for much tighter integrations.

Why did you decide to speak?

I was given the opportunity to speak by an organizer of WCTor and I was very excited to be able to present about what I believe is the next level for the WP API and metadata.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It was PHP, it used MySQL, and it was pretty easy to use. So I came for the PHP, but I stayed for the community and the mark I could make through developing plugins and helping people.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I love using Gravity Forms and the power you can wield with it. As the lead developer of Pods, I can’t say Pods though 🙂

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’ve never been to Toronto or to Canada, I’m excited to meet Canadian WordPressers and see another side of what matters most to this region of users and developers.

Dara Skolnick

Hi, I’m Dara, an independent web designer and front-end developer from Toronto. I’ve worked at a number of places from large organizations to small agencies, and now I run my own small (as in, one person) business. I’ve been creating websites professionally for many years, and well over 3/4 of them are in WordPress! When I’m not designing and coding client sites you can sometimes find me leading Ladies Learning Code workshops, mentoring at HackerYou, or showing up at various meetups around the city.

Aside from my day-to-day work, I’m sometimes also a instructor/mentor at HackerYou and Ladies Learning Code. I haven’t yet spoken at a conference but I’ve had practice talking in front of people by being a Ladies Learning Code lead instructor so I think I’d do just fine!

I’m @daraskolnick on pretty much every social media platform so feel free to stalk away.

Speaking session

Levelling up your development workflow in the Developer track

About Dara’s presentation

My presentation is all about helping WordPress theme developers make their development workflow faster, more efficient, and generally more awesome. I’ll be talking about tools like starter themes, version control, task runners, and CSS preprocessors.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to learn how to develop themes more efficiently. Simply put, time is everyone’s most valuable resource, and a more efficient development workflow can definitely help you save time!

Why did you decide to speak?

WordPress, both the software and the community, has helped me so much in my career that speaking about a topic that’ll help other developers is the least I can do to give back. I’ve learned so much from other people generously sharing their knowledge, and I’m happy to do the same!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I started developing for WordPress back in the mid-2000s when it was much more simple and blog-centric. Even though it was much more limited in functionality back then, I could see that static, CMS-less websites were becoming a thing of the past, and WordPress felt like the most user- and developer- friendly option. Once WordPress introduced custom post types and taxonomies a few years ago, I got really excited about its potential and knew that I’d be sticking with it for a long time to come!

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Advanced Custom Fields is by far my favourite plugin. It’s a total game changer because it makes creating beautiful, foolproof admin interfaces for clients a breeze. Before ACF I used to hand-code custom fields and meta boxes in the theme’s functions.php file, and I really don’t miss that process at all.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m really looking forward to attending some of the talks on accessibility – I’m glad that accessibility as a topic is finally receiving some long overdue attention! Aside from that, I’m mostly looking forward to meeting awesome people.

Renee Moore

My name is Renee Moore and I work with pharmacists who make custom medications. I train, coach and consult their sales staff, update their social media and design websites using WordPress for my clients.

I am the owner of Compound Pharmacy Marketing, a former nuclear chemist, award winning speaker, marketer and the best girlfriend in the world to my guy Jeff (that’s what what he said).

For the past 14 years I have been working with pharmacists who make custom medications and helping them to market their services to doctors and the public. I help them with social media marketing, offline marketing and website design using WordPress of course as their platform.

Speaking session

19 Plugins You Should Be Using

What’s your presentation about?

Learn about the 15 plugins that I think are essential to having a well functioning (and even fun) website!

What do you want people to get out of your presentation?

I want them to learn more about some plugins that give their website more functionality and help make client’s websites pop.

Why did you decide to speak?

Honestly, I don’t see a lot of women speaking (or attending) at WordCamp and even less black women. I figured I could share what I know and hopefully attract more women to this awesome platform.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Long story! I had a really bad website using iWeb ( remember that from Mac?) My business coach said it was terrible. I was new in business and had heard about WP. I called my friend who was also new in business and convinced her we should try this WordPress thing. I figured it couldn’t be that hard and we could have our sites done by the new year. It was November at the time. Well Easter rolled around and we still didn’t have a site. I was ready to start drinking when I found a savior on Elance who showed us what to do. I then started to learn all I could about WP and now I do sites for others.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite theme is StudioPress and my favorite plugin this week is CoSchedule. It’s one of the many plugins I’ll discuss at WordCamp. 🙂

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I love learning how I can use WP for my clients and get better SEO for them. I also love Toronto. I mean what’s not to love?

Tammie Lister

I am a theme wrangler at Automattic based in the UK. I am lucky enough to spend my days arm deep in themes. I am a themer at heart and passionate about everything theme. I am an admin for the WordPress theme review team and love working with new and old reviewers.

When I’m not themeing, I like to practice yoga, getting dog hugs from my two labradors and relaxing with my husband in our home near the sea.

Speaking Session and Workshop info

So You Want to Be a WordCamp Speaker: A practical workshop for beginners in the Community track.

Level up: review themes on WordPress.org In the Community track.

Your Presentation

From entering the newbie zone to beyond, this talk will guide you through how you can unlock the achievement of being a theme reviewer. Theme reviewing levels you up as a themer, allowing you to tackle. My own journey has taken me from a learner theme reviewer to working at Automattic. In this talk, I’ll show how by reviewing themes for WordPress.org you can become a better themer. I will show why it’s important to review themes.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

People will leave knowing what you need to do to become a theme reviewer. They will learn how important it is for themers and how you can grow by being a theme reviewer. I hope to also show contributions don’t just have to be core or for development. I will show how they can contribute and why they should.

Why did you decide to speak?

I saw the focus on community and wanted to bring this talk.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The fact it was open source and other people I knew were starting to use it to blog with. From there, I discovered how to create themes and the rest is history.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favourite theme is _s as it allows you to create any theme you want.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

It will be my first time in Canada – so that’s a big thing to look forward to along with my first WordCamp there. I’m also looking forward to the community focus of some of the talks. It’s a chance to meet a new WordPress community for me and that’s got me very excited.

Roy Sivan

I am a developer, I am a car fanatic, and I like long walks on the beach at sunset because I live in Southern California. JavaScript is my passion, and WordPress is where it all began. Nowadays I work with WordPress trying to build things that no one would think to, helping bridge the gap between the developers and designers who use it.

I consider myself one to try to push the boundaries of WordPress now, and always building new exciting things with it.

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/roy.s.sivan
Twitter – https://twitter.com/royboy789
GitHub – http://www.github.com/royboy789

Speaking session

WordPress and Client Side Web Applications in the Advanced Developer track

Your Presentation

I will talk about why Client Side vs. Server Side when it comes to developing a web application. Next I will go into how I see (with WP-API) WordPress can be a faux MVC, and how the view layer can be anything you want. I will focus on showing how AngularJS can make for a great theme or view layer. I will finalize my presentation with a case study of CodingOfficeHours, a web app built with a headless WordPress.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

That WordPress is and will be much more then people think today. The fundamentals of how to use WordPress to build out a client-side application and as a faux MVC.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love to speak, I speak consistently at meetups and just spoke at my first WordCamp (WCLAX). I am excited to speak at more and hopefully I can get better and think of newer and awesome things to talk about!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was just getting into web development having learned the basics. My friend showed me a link to a blog engine that I could use to build out a simple site of sorts.. that was version 0.7 or 1.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I don’t have a favorite, as a developer I tend to stick to coding most of the code myself, however I do use ACF (Advanced Custom Fields) a lot, as well as WooCommerce. I really like W3TC for cache’ing and my CDN connection as well.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I have been part of the Southern California community of WordPress for over a year now, and I love it. It will be nice to see what another community is like.

Victor Granic

I’ve been building and hosting WordPress websites for over 5 years. During the 15 years I’ve worked in technology I’ve designed high performance networks and specialized in network security. Currently I’m a co-founder of easyPress.ca, a fast, secure and reliable WordPress hosting service operating in Canada.

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/boreal321
Business Twitter: @easypresswp
Personal Twitter: @boreal321

Speaking session

About Victor’s presentation

This session will present clear instructions on how to make a website load faster. There are 3 main areas that affect a website’s performance: server side stack, application code and frontend components. The same is true for WordPress. I’ll begin by providing an overview of why speed is so important for every website. Next, the tools required for analysis are introduced and their use is demonstrated. Then, I’ll spend the bulk of the talk focusing on specific frontend best practices that every designer and developer can apply to help speed up the websites they build.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • why faster websites are better for business, visitor happiness and generally important to help reach your goals for your website.
  • how to use browser developer tools for performance analysis.
  • how to use free third party performance analysis tools.
  • about a comprehensive list of performance improvements that web developers and designers can apply themselves including software tools and WordPress plugins to help with the process.
  • how to implement some of the performance improvements using the WordPress API.

Why did you decide to speak?

My company hosts WordPress websites so for me this is THE industry conference. WordCamps are the place to learn and share everything related to using and building with WordPress. It’s a really great opportunity to speak publicly which is both exciting and challenging.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress is a powerful open source content management system that has a low barrier to entry with respect to both using and developing. It quickly became my go to tool for building websites for both individuals and organizations.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Genesis is a great developer theme that does much of the responsive and SEO heavy lifting right out of the box.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Seeing some familiar faces and meeting new WordPress enthusiasts.

Janis Yee

Janis has over 10 years of professional experience as a multi-disciplinary Digital Designer. She has worked at Rogers Digital Media and Metroland Media advocating web and usability standards. In the latter, she had a key role as a self-made accessibility specialist. She currently works at Influitive as a User Experience Designer.

Linkedin: http://ca.linkedin.com/in/janisyee

Speaking Sessions

How to Perform an Accessibility Audit in the A11y track

Your Presentation

When asked to perform an Accessibility Audit, do you know where to start? How do you break down the steps into actionable items? Where to start? This talk will focus on the tools and methods used to perform accessibility audits on existing sites and how to communicate these changes to cross-functional teams.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Participants will:

  • Gain a high level understanding of WCAG 2.0 guidelines
  • Be able to apply them to auditing existing sites or be cognizant of them when designing/developing for new websites.
  • Have an understanding of the Process required to perform an audit independently.

Why did you decide to speak?

I felt there is not enough definitive information around on the audit and project management aspect of Accessibility. There was no step by step process when I did it. I want to be able to convey practical knowledge to others that I wish I had when I started.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I have always loved WordPress having worked with it for a long time. I enjoy it as a great community supported tool that is flexible enough for my needs. Also, it allows me to focus on what I want to do, which is just write great content.

I have watched it grow over the years and am proud to be an early adopter.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Right now i’m using Longwave. This is a fairly flexible theme and it’s great for displaying content.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting all the great people at the event as well as attend the presentations of some of the other great Speakers at the event..

Brian Hoke

I run a small web consultancy in Syracuse, NY, USA, with core areas of expertise including WordPress, Ruby on Rails development, and web design, marketing, and project management.

I delivered presentations in 2013 at WordCamps in Montreal and in Toronto. I’ve recently authored online courses on Ruby on Rails, SASS, CSS, and other topics.

Speaking session

Sass and WordPress in the Designer track

About your presentation

Sass is a CSS preprocessor library that adds “power and elegance to the basic language.” Sass features (like variables, nesting, mixins) make CSS much easier to write; thoughtful use of Sass makes CSS much easier to maintain.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

In particular, how to use Sass as an organizational tool for writing, maintaining, and updating CSS. The variables, mixins, and other features are great, but using Sass to organize CSS is what grabs me. I’ll also share some ways not to use Sass – some bad habits to avoid.

Why did you decide to speak?

Presenting forces me to take time to think through the work I do: does Sass really make sense as a tool for me? What are the benefits? And presenting to a smart, engaged audience means that I get to hear feedback on how I might do things better.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress’s community – thriving online support, WordCamps!, open-source improvement to the core framework year after year – first attracted me to it, and keeps me coming back.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Gravity Forms is a favorite plugin: the ease of use and power of it – and how well it is written – just blows me away.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m most looking forward to mingling with a knowledgeable, friendly community and hearing from some great speakers.

Kate Newbill

I built my first website, in very basic HTML, about 1999. My first exposure to WordPress (and my first, very basic blog) was in 2004, just a few months after it was first released. In 2010, after working with a number of other content management systems, I began to concentrate exclusively on WordPress for building websites.

In 2011 I began offering managed WordPress hosting, creating a protected place for website owners. In 2013, I expanded my services to include prevention and recovery for those who had been hacked.

I do what I do because I care. I love taking care of the business you love so you can stay focused on the work that delights you.

Speaking Session

Disaster-Proof Your WordPress Site In the Beginner Developer track

Your Presentation

WordPress now runs about 1 out of every 4 websites on the Web and has become a big target for hackers to attack. If something happened to your site, would you be able to recover? Would you know who to call or what to do to get it back?

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

If you’re in business and your site is important, you need to have a plan — just in case Hurricane Hacker does head your way. I’ve got some great insight for you and I want to help so you can sleep at night. I want you to be prepared.

Why did you decide to speak?

I have a wealth of knowledge about WordPress. I’m a great teacher and a good speaker. I can sit in my office and just do what I know very quietly, or I can get out and use these attributes to give back to the WordPress community.

I make my living from WordPress. It’s high time to give back.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress, even in its very earliest form, was much easier for people to set up, change, and maintain than any other content management system out there. My clients needed that ability along with the flexibility built into the WordPress system.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Ooh. I don’t know to choose just *one.*

If I had to narrow it down, I’d nominate the iThemes universe, especially iThemes Security, Backup Buddy, and Sync. These three are on all of the many WordPress sites I manage. They make my security and backup configurations incredibly easy to manage.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m looking forward to meeting WordPress users and other presenters. Swapping information. (And seeing a small part I’ve never visited of a lovely country.)

Elida Arrizza

Elida is slightly obsessed with creating delightful user experiences and determining the best way to do just about anything. She has 15 years’ experience spanning commercial photography, digital media, design, fine arts and teaching. By day, Elida is a UX Designer at Sid Lee, an acclaimed creative agency based in Montreal. By night, she enjoys sampling fine liquids such as new world wines, craft beers and gourmet balsamics.

Speaking session

About Elida’s presentation

My talk is about a simple technique that adds great efficiency to website planning: wireframes! Many people just dive in and start building a WordPress site on the fly. This all-in technique is great for learning, but can actually become inefficient as you go along. Using wireframes is smart planning – it can save loads of time and energy. It’s important to start out with the right tools in your toolbox.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

People who come to my talk will come away with a solid grasp on how and when to use wireframes.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’m kind of new at this speaking thing, but so far whenever I do a talk the feedback is enthusiastic. Many seem to resonate with the content and way the ideas are communicated, so why not keep sharing? Toronto, you’re next!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

In comparison with other options available at the time, the famous “5 minute install” really broke down the learning barrier. It was rewarding to bypass the tricky manual install. Getting get that far with less effort or technical knowledge meant more immediacy in getting to the “good stuff”. The documentation and strong community support and simpler user interface is what encouraging my continued interest.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Still loving the Backup Buddy. Can’t live without it.
Migration, backups and basic security scans, all simplified.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Sharing and discovering among familiar and new faces. Common, let’s face it, we love geeking out with fellow NerdPressers, in a way that other friends don’t understand.

Tom Sommerville

I have been designing, building and running intranets and other web stuff since 1997. Currently I head the team responsible for OPSpedia, the Government of Ontario’s WordPress-based, employee-facing professional networking platform and intranet hosting solution.

Speaking Sessions

1000 sites: MultiSite as an intranet hosting platform in the Beginner Developer track

Your Presentation

Case study of OPSpedia, which uses WordPress MultiSite as a hosting platform for numerous Ministry and enterprise intranets, as well as a blogging platform and professional networking site for Government of Ontario employees.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • How a large enterprise can use WordPress as a hosting platform for multiple intranets
  • Techniques used to juggle the demands of multiple stakeholders in a complex enterprise environment
  • Integrating open source and custom plug-ins into the WordPress MultiSite platform
  • How our Scrum-based (agile) development methodology supports numerous theme developers across the enterprise
  • Supporting multiple content contribution models among multiple stakeholder groups

Why did you decide to speak?

Speaking at a conference jump-starts networking opportunities. Also, I like to share my knowledge and experience.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

  • It’s open source
  • It’s the platform used by ~20% of all web sites
  • It has an immense ecosystem of themes and plug-ins

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

We have built a plug-in that integrates the Lucene/Solr serch platform with WordPress, providing a search management console, real-time indexing of all published content, and a growing number of search functions that our community uses to solve a host of business challenges.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Networking with other WordPress users and fans.

Paul Bearne

Paul is a Senior WordPress Full Stack Developer from Toronto he works on variety of WordPress for simple plug-in and themes to large scale WordPress VIP projects.

He had small core commits in both 3.9 (27794) and 4.0 (29099).

Speaking session

Setting up Vagrant for Unit Testing in the Sunday Developer track

What’s your session about?

We will walk through the practical side of setting on Unit Testing for plug-in and core using a Vagrant server.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

When you leave this talk you’ll be able to setup and run unit tests for you code.

Why did you decide to speak?

I like to speak because it helps me to learn the subject I talk about that little bit better.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I needed a blog platform for an internal blog (it wasn’t a difficult call) and I stayed for the community.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Shameless plug for my plug-in: https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/author-avatars
If you need to list Author / Users then this is the plug-in you need

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I am looking forward to the a11y talks and meeting fellow coders.

James Archer

James Archer is the Chief Creative Officer at Crowd Favorite. He’s a future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

James Archer is founder of Forty, a creative firm that’s been designing rich, emotional, and effective experiences for over a decade (using primarily WordPress). I’m future-focused optimist who loves identifying problems and designing solutions for companies that make a difference.

Over the years he’s worked for clients like Microsoft, Motorola, Walmart, and Yahoo, and has spoken at many conferences and workshops.

Speaking session

The Human Side of UX Design in the A11y track

Your Presentation

Empathy is the core of design, and an empathy-centered approach to user experience design can create truly transformative results for clients. I’ll show you the results of real projects that followed an empathy-driven design approach, and explain how to make empathy a consistent and repeatable part of everyday projects (even with seemingly oppressive constraints and budgets).

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • Why empathy is the thing that separates design from decoration
  • How to implement an empathetic approach in the real world
  • What to do when your client has no budget for user research
  • How to apply empathy in your client relationships
  • How to translate all this touchy-feely stuff into tangible design decisions

Why did you decide to speak?

Because this approach to design has been remarkably successful for us, and I want to others to be able to benefit from it as well.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

We’ve built a metric crap-ton of websites over the past almost 12 years, and after having tried almost every CMS on the market, we kept coming back to WordPress for its simplicity and extensibility.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I like the “Smart Quotes” plugin, which changes straight quotes to curly/pretty quotes in content. Delicious.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting people who want to create truly great experiences for users.

Karl Groves

An unstoppable force for change and thought-leader in an industry regarded for saying “No”, I’d rather lead by example in saying “Yes, and here’s how…”. I seek to offer solutions to complex problems relating to universal usability. Together we can meet both our goals: your business goals and my goals to lead the way in accessible user experience.

I have over a decade experience in doing IT consulting for the biggest companies in the world and biggest agencies in the US Government. Widely regarded as a pragmatic solution-finder, my work is cited in nearly a dozen books and used on curricula in Human-Computer Interaction across the globe. I lead by doing, I teach from experience, and I succeed by facilitating others’ success. When others say “That can’t be done” I show them how.

With a wide array of experiences involving the development and management of web sites & web based applications, I’ve done it all – from design, production & programming to consulting, management of development teams & projects to managing the e-commerce efforts of a site which handled $4,000,000 in volume per month.

I’ve done accessibility and usability evaluation, consulting, and remediation work for everyone from Fortune 50 companies to some of the largest federal government agencies and private sector software vendors in the world.

It is my goal to continue to provide my expertise and guidance to my clients – with an end goal of making the IT landscape more usable and accessible for all.

Speaking session

Next-gen A11y TestingTools In the A11y track

Your presentation

Since the invention of the Web, we’ve never experienced the kind of explosion in new techniques for developers to ensure efficiency and quality of their work – from JavaScript task runners to unit testing & acceptance testing, to continuous integration and automated build & deploy systems. Modern web developers can and should leverage these toolsets to make their work better. This talk will discuss how Tenon.io uses many of these tools to create our product – an automated web accessibility testing API.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Attendees will learn ways to integrate software development best practices to manage quality and accessibility.

Why did you decided to speak?

As above, I’m a big fan of sharing knowledge between others. Although I’m widely regarded as an expert, I appreciate not only sharing my knowledge with others but also learning new things.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I settled on WordPress because of the flexibility of theming and extension development. I’ve been a PHP developer for a long time. When I first got started, Mambo was what everyone loved. Over the years, Mambo/ Joomla and even Drupal have all proven themselves to be disappointments when compared to the flexibility of WordPress and the ecosystem that surrounds it.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I really like Joe Dolson’s WP to Twitter. It is by far the most robust WP to Twitter plugin I’ve ever used.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

The knowledge exchange.

Nicole Arnold

Nicole is a software developer at Alley Interactive, a leading WordPress.com VIP service partner. She develops WordPress sites for Alley Interactive’s high profile media clients, such as Fortune and The New York Post. She also contributes to WordPress as part of the Documentation Team, and has spoken at Detroit area meetups and WordCamps.

Speaking session

Core Functions You (Maybe) Don’t Know Exist in the Developer track

Your Presentation

With thousands of functions in the WordPress codebase, it’s virtually impossible to remember all of them. We’ll cover some overlooked WordPress core functions that you may not know exist. We’ll walk through some practical examples for their use, and give you a variety of new gems you can use every day.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to walk away with some new functions they can add to their dev toolkit.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love to share my knowledge and experience with others just as much as I love to learn from the knowledge and experience of other WordPress folks. The topic is fun and I’ve prepared a bunch of new functions to explore.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was attracted to WordPress because of its simplicity for users, its ability to be highly customized and its large community of developers.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite plugin is Fieldmanager –– Alley’s custom plugin. It’s a staple in my plugin library because it is very robust, easily allowing me to add advanced fields, such as media, dynamic selects, and repeating fields, to not only posts, but taxonomies, options, users and more.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I am most looking forward to meeting new people as well as chatting with some familiar faces. The conversations are always lively and I enjoy the time spent with the WordPress community face-to-face.

Jordan Quintal

Jordan Quintal is a successful Online Multipreneur, a seasoned Web Developer, as well as a WordPress Contributor and Community Member. Jordan is the current President at The Genius Web Media Inc. that was founded in 2007, and he has over 15 years of web development experience.

His skill, intelligence, and ambition have allowed him and his company to flourish in a very competitive Media market. Jordan is also an active advocate and educator towards Web and WordPress accessibility.

Jordan is also on the WordCamp 2014 organizing committee, in charge of accessibility for the event.

Speaker sessions

WordPress Theme Accessibility in the A11y track

About your Accessible Themes presentation

My presentation will focus on the technical end of WordPress Theme Accessibility. I will showcase the various components to “accessibility-ready” WordPress themes, like keyboard navigation, alt tags, skip links, link text, forms, etc. I will also showcase and demonstrate some awesome WordPress plugins and web accessibility evaluation tools for an even better understanding on how to make your WordPress Theme more accessible.

What do you want people to learn?

I want the people who attend my presentation to understand the importance of Web and WordPress Accessibility. I want the people who attend my presentation to know enough of the fundamentals that they go home, learn the ins and outs, and effectively develop more accessible themes and websites.

Tell us about your community talk

It is pretty well documented that WordPress has been making significant strides towards making WordPress as a tool, as well as WordPress website more accessible to those with challenges; but what about the WordPress Community? My talk on Community Accessibility will focus on the several ways the WordPress Community itself can become more accessible. We will discuss things like making WordPress meetups and WordCamp events more accessible, we will also discuss different ways we can make community driven information and communications more accessible overall.

Why did you decide to speak?

As a person born with a physical disability who has seen growing success, I feel it is my duty to give back, and educate others in the hopes to invoke some sort of social change.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The flexibility and versatility of WordPress first attracted me. After I found out how easy it was to build a website with it, I was hooked for life.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

By far the one plugin I am most excited about is sidekick.pro. I think it will certainly be a game changer for WordPress tutoring.

Why did you want to be part of the WCTO 2014 organizing committee?

Ontario as a province has been leading Canada in Accessibility efforts across the board, and so I think WCTO can be a leader in Accessibility as well. I was eager to join this organizing committee so that I can share my passion and knowledge on accessibility in the hopes that we can set the bar for WordCamp accessibility across the globe.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

In all honesty, I look forward to meeting new people. Networking is one of the key aspects that drive me to WordCamps across North America.

David Bird

A content marketer at heart, David understands that good content starts with knowing the audience. He blends what people say (customer conversations) with what customers do (website data) to help WordPress site owners build smart more attractive content.

David has spent 15 years in content marketing where he has learned to use Google Analytics to guide marketing and sales strategy decisions. Now he is the owner of Bird’s Eye Marketing; a consulting company that helps small and medium businesses use Google Analytics to improve their websites and their marketing efforts. He has recently been upgrading several organizations to Google’s new Universal Analytics and Google Tag Manager.

David has contagious passion for helping others use website data to guide their content development, their marketing programs and to make better decisions.

Follow David on Twitter: @d8vidbird

Speaking session

About David’s presentation

Google Analytics produces thousands of different numbers, metrics and statistics. There’s so many numbers it can be more confusing than enlightening trying to figure out which ratios should be taken into account, which stats are the most important.

This session is a beginner’s guide to setting up of Google Analytics, navigating the user interface and the ABCs of reporting to make real business decisions. We’ll also talk about how Google Analytics WordPress plugins simplify your set-up and analysis.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Key things you will learn by attending this session include how to:

  • Identify which website traffic sources are most likely to trigger conversions.
  • Discover the pages mostly likely to trigger conversions.
  • Interpret your Google Analytics by understanding key concepts and terms
  • How to get more from your Google Analytics plug-ins.

Why did you decide to speak?

I want people to stop guessing what content, navigation, marketing program will work. Guessing on these important things can cause us to make expensive mistakes. With a little effort Google Analytics reduces the decision making guess work with objective information and confidence and a better chance of being right.

Speaking at educational forums like WordCamps is payback for all the people who have helped me learn Google Analytics. My goal is to help businesses make better marketing decisions by learning to use the data in Google Analytics.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

For a non technical person like me, I needed something easy to use but with lots of functionality. WordPress can do just about anything and it is so easy to use. Even better is the great support community behind the platform.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Google Analytics by Yoast is my favourite plug-in because it makes set-up so easy and lessens the time we have to spend in the Google Analytics Administrative interface. I just wish Yoast would hurry up and come out with his Universal Analytics plug-in.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

WordPress people are fun; Toronto is fun, so mixing the two just has to be fun!

Kathryn Presner

Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012 and is a member with the Theme Team, where she help folks with all types of theme-related issues on both WordPress.com and self-hosted sites.

Speaking sessions and workshops

So You Want to Be a WordCamp Speaker: A practical workshop for beginners in the Community track.

Getting Comfortable With Child Themes in the Beginner Developer track

Tell us about yourself

I thrive on helping people get the most out of WordPress. As a Happiness Engineer on the Automattic theme team, I help WordPress users, designers, and developers around the world configure, customize, and troubleshoot themes. I enjoy speaking and mentoring at WordCamps, Ladies Learning Code, and other grassroots events. Spare time is spent baking delicious things, collecting vintage Pyrex mixing bowls, growing organic garlic, and getting cozy with my three cats. Connect with me on Twitter at @zoonini.

What’s your presentation about?

My solo talk will introduce the audience to child themes: what they are and when you should use them, their benefits and pitfalls, and how to set them up.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to realize how easy it is to make child themes, how powerful they can be, and how fun they are to experiment with.

Tell us more about the community workshop you’re co-faciliating

The public-speaking workshop I’m co-facilitating with Tammie Lister is aimed at anyone who’d like to start public speaking, especially at local WordPress meetups or WordCamps. This includes people who may feel shy, maybe not “expert” enough, or who aren’t sure what they would talk about. I’d encourage anyone who might like to try public-speaking to come to the workshop and get more comfortable with the idea of submitting a proposal!

The speaking workshop will guide folks through the whole process – from choosing a topic, through submitting a proposal, to structuring the talk and creating slides, avoiding common newbie-speaker mistakes, and overcoming stage fright. Check out the public-speaking resources site we put together for a sneak peek.

Why did you decide to speak?

I feel strongly about giving back to the WordPress community, and I love sharing what I know with others who are also passionate about WordPress.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

In 2008 a web-design client wanted to set up a blog and said they’d heard good things about WordPress. I’d been using another (now obscure) CMS at the time but had also heard good things about WordPress, so I took the opportunity to learn how to create a custom theme for my client’s site. The rest is WordPress history!

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Some themes from my talented colleagues at Automattic are current favourites, including Tammie Lister’s Adaption, Writr and Illustratr by Thomas Guillot, and Sorbet and Sketch by Caroline Moore.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Reconnecting with the Toronto WordPress community – especially since I missed last year’s edition.

Jasmine Vesque

I am a WordPress evangelist who enjoys helping people share their most important stories and ideas. I love teaching and regularly contribute as both an instructor and a mentor to the Ottawa WordPress Group and Ladies Learning Code. I’m also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Ottawa.

I am a web specialist, digital marketer, and graphic designer, as well as the co-founder of LumosTech Training, an Ottawa based technology training company. In addition, I volunteer for the charity, The Forget for a Moment Foundation, as the VP of Communications and Webmaster.

I am passionate about digital communications, social media and web design.

https://twitter.com/jasmineVesque
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasminevesque

Speaking Sessions

Typography in Web Design in the Designer track

Your Presentation

Typography is an integral part of web design. No matter how complex or minimalist your website’s design, the text on your site needs to get your message across. How the text is displayed is just as important as the words themselves. This talk will cover the basics and best practices of typography in web design, typography trends for 2015, and an introduction to Google Fonts.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to have a better understanding of typography basics as well as how type affects both the readability and personality of a website. I also want people to learn how to select and add interesting fonts to their WordPress website.

Why did you decide to speak?

I am passionate about teaching – I just love sharing what I know with others! I’m also a big believer in giving back to the WordPress community. Speaking at WordCamp allows me to accomplish both these things.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I was attracted to WordPress because of its flexibility and ease of use. Whether you’re a blogger, a small business, or a large organization, WordPress can be scaled to suit your needs. Anyone can use it, and it can help create an online presence for anyone’s ideas no matter how big or small

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favourite plugin is BackupBuddy. It makes backing-up, migrating, and restoring websites a simple and relatively pain-free experience.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I’m most looking forward to great sessions and catching up with friends in the WordPress community – and making new ones!

Joe Rozsa

I’m a print designer at heart, but quickly came to the conclusion that I needed to also be able to design for the web. I’ve been a designer for 25 years and now own and operate my own design studio Trailer Trash Design.

I’ve have been using WordPress for 7 years. I provided creative services for my client from logo design to website development. I always recommend WordPress to my clients for their sites so that they can interact with their site and not just “have” a site.

I love to interact with people and build new and lasting relationships with clients. I love WP and the community it creates. It never ceases to amaze me the amount of knowledge and willingness to share that knowledge that comes from within the community.

Speaking session

Congratulations! You’re having a WordPress site! In the User/Admin track

Your Presentation

My presentation parallels first starting to use WordPress with have a new baby. No one knows how to be a new parent. It’s learning process, just like getting started with WordPress. Things need to be shown and explained in both cases to keep the level of frustration low. I parallel many thing with having a newborn to WordPress in my presentation.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I want people to come out of my presentation feeling more confident than they did walking in about using their WordPress site and not being afraid or frustrated with it.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love coming to Canada and I love WordPress. I’ve made a lot of great friends at previous WordCamp Torontos (is that even a word?) so it’s a great opportunity to see many of them again.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The ease of use. Being able to control my own website was a huge draw.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I think right now my favorite theme is Divi from Elegant Themes. Not sure that I have a favorite plugin.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people and learning some cool new things to do with WordPress. Oh and visiting one of my favorite cities again.

Adam Silverstein

I started programming by learning assembly code on my Radio Shack color computer (with 4k!), and started a software company from my college dorm room. After years building custom solutions he embraced WordPress as my platform of choice, building sites for clients large and small.

I am a contributing developer to WordPress and was recognized as a “Rockstar” for my role in the revisions rewrite for WordPress 3.6. I am currently the revisions component maintainer. I work as a Senior Web Engineer at 10up. I love long rafting trips, playing mbira, travel, taking walks and tending my over sized garden.

Speaker session

Put a little Backbone in your WordPress! in the Advanced Developer track

Presentation abstract

Backbone (and Underscore!) are bundled with WordPress – leverage their power to deliver complex front or back end or experiences while keeping your code organized and maintainable. I will also touch on accessibility in JS apps and using the JSON REST API to connect to WordPress.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Backbone fundamentals, why use Backbone, whats possible with Backbone, and how WordPress makes building with Backbone easier.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’m enthusiastic about Backbone in WordPress core and want to inspire others to tap into its power. I got my own motivation for getting involved in core by attending a WordCamp and want to give back!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The ease with which my clients could edit their own content, and the ease with which I could extend core functionality.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

I’m a fan of Gravity forms – the core plugin does one thing most blogs need really well, and the ecosystem of extensions and extensive hooks in the plugin make it flexible enough to make it do just what you want in most cases.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting in person with other WordPress fanatics. Meeting new people and hopefully inspiring them to try Backbone in their projects & contribute to WordPress core.

Brian Rotsztein

As an experienced Internet marketing entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and author, Brian has spent much of the last 17 years helping companies excel online. He’s the head of well-established brands such as Uniseo (a boutique Internet marketing agency) and RedstoneX.com (a web design and online marketing company), where he brings a hype-free, seasoned approach to working with clients.

Speaking session

Grow Your Audience with Savvy Content Marketing Tactics in the User/Admin track

More about Brian

He frequently appears on CTV News, WordPress TV, and radio shows. He writes about SEO, content marketing, social media, business, and entrepreneurship, among other topics. His work has been used by ABC News, USA Today, Search Engine Journal, Social Media Today, Search Engine Watch, Yahoo! Small Business Advisor, and other prominent sources.

Brian holds two Master’s degrees, has taught university courses, and provides consulting and training services on topics such as SEO and content marketing.

His book Content Marketing Ideas teaches businesses and bloggers how to leverage content marketing, SEO, and social media to increase sales and exposure. His love affair with WordPress began in 2005 when he started with version 1.6! Visit www.rotsztein.com and connect with him on Twitter: @brianrotsztein and LinkedIn.

Your Presentation

Find out how to combine content marketing, SEO, and social media to expand your audience.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

After attending my introductory session, people will be able to implement specific tactics to grow an audience and use tools and specific WordPress plugins to promote their blog posts and other content in new ways. They will learn how to get website visitors to share their work and help distribute it.

I also want them to understand the importance of content marketing in an online marketing strategy and differentiate between content strategy and tactics.

Why did you decide to speak?

My company is a major “WordPress house” so-to-speak. We design custom themes for clients, build responsive websites with WordPress, host WordPress websites, program plugins, and teach everything related to WordPress in our workshops.

I give talks to give back to the community that has helped my company achieve the success it has had and to do my part to keep the momentum going. It also helps that I come from an academic background where sharing knowledge is very important.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I started using WordPress in 2005 when it was on version 1.6. It was the best CMS option at the time and remains so to this day.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

You would think that I’d discuss a marketing-related plugin but I really love Advanced Custom Fields. It gives us a lot of the flexibility we need to make our clients’ websites great.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I enjoy meeting new people and connecting with colleagues. I’ve spoken at WordCamp Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa which all have such a great sense of community. They are such amazing events and the attendees tend to be equally great.

I’ve spoken at conferences that charge thousands of dollars to attend which didn’t even come close to the quality of the many WordCamps I’ve been to over the years.

Patrick Dunphy

Hello, I’m Patrick Dunphy. I’m a Senior UI Architect & Accessibility Specialist at CBC. I’m also co-lead for Accessibility Camp Toronto as well as the Toronto Accessibility & Inclusive Design meetup group (the largest of it’s kind globally with almost 450 members).

Though I’d consider myself a WordPress newbie, Accessibility is not unique to any one platform.

I remember well the many questions I had when I first started working with accessibility. As a developer since 1999 & working specifically with digital accessibility since 2007, I’ve learned firsthand that with proper awareness & planning, accessibility does not have to be complicated.

Speaking session

The 5 W’s of Accessibility Testing in the A11y track

Your Presentation

Accessibility testing is subjective by nature. In the context of right & wrong the reality is only 25 to 30% of content that can be confidently tested without conscious decision making.

Intended as an intro & general overview on testing, I’ll dive into reasons it’s necessary & the multiple factors that need to be considered. Participants will learn why some tools that are more suitable than others for certain tasks, walk thru a simple test plan & learn of resources to further their own learning after WordCamp Toronto 2014.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The goal of this session is for people to leave equipped with a suite of free accessibility testing tools and the knowledge to apply them while performing their own accessibility testing reviews.

Why did you decide to speak?

Given that this years WordCamp theme is about accessibility, wanting to speak about the importance of digital accessibility to a new audience was a natural reaction.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I’m a WordPress rookie.

That said, I’m very excited by the presence of the WordPress Accessibility Team. These individuals are dedicated to continually making the WP platform better & it being a more inclusive experience for everyone. That is a beautiful thing.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

BotSmasher for WordPress by Joe Dolson.

Captchas are an unnecessary burden that create barriers for users of all types. IMO, they need to be eradicated with extreme prejudice.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Any opportunity to spread awareness about digital accessibility excites me, but I’m really looking forward to meeting new people & soaking up as much knowledge as possible about WordPress. I’ve put it off for far too long.

Sean Yo

Sean builds websites and communities, often at the same time. He spent more than a decade in Higher Education Enterprise IT, co-founded Resonant Studios, a web development company in 2005 and in 2012 was Chief Architect at InGamer, a technology startup building a second-screen companion fantasy game for live broadcast Sports. Most recently, Sean is a Technical Product Manager at Desire2Learn, a Waterloo-based technology company that enable teaching and learning online.

Speaking session

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Learn about common web accessibility problems and be introduced to the WCAG 2.0 Sufficient and Advisory Techniques for resolving these problems.

Learn to identify common web accessibility problems and develop an understanding of the authoritative code solutions published by the W3C for these problems and be familiar with the How To Meet WCAG 2.0 resources.

Why did you decide to speak?

Tom is very persistent. (ed: It’s true!)

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Pure, Unfettered Awesomeness.

I was part of the Movable Type exodus to the best open-source CMS platform which has just gotten better and better.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Hello Dolly – such very fond memories

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting people and being more awesome together. (ed: Awesome!)

David Newton

I am a full-stack web developer, currently working in a research program at St. Michael’s Hospital, who strongly believes in making web content accessible and usable. This goal has made me passionate about web standards, responsive design, progressive enhancement, accessibility guidelines, and web performance. Since October 2012 I have been a member of the W3C’s Responsive Images Community Group, and I am a co-editor of their Use Cases and Requirements for Standardizing Responsive Images.

Speaking session

Improving Performance with Responsive Images in the Advanced Developer track

About your presentation

I will be speaking about the web’s hunger for more, bigger, and higher-resolution images, and the performance problem this creates. I’ll give a brief history of the new (and occasionally controversial) `picture` element, and discuss some other exciting new standards and techniques that are on the horizon. Attendees can expect concrete examples of how `picture` works, and to learn how they can use responsive (and responsible!) images right now to improve performance and deliver the best possible experience to their users.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

  • That performance is an important part of design
  • How responsive images can make your site more performant
  • How to implement responsive images

Why did you decide to speak?

I think responsive images, and web performance in general, are important topics that are relatively poorly understood, and I am in a position to help others learn about them. Sharing our knowledge and experience is the best way to make the web better.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The ease with which custom plugins and themes could be written, and I could get from doing this.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Akismet, because who wants to deal with spam?

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Sharing my knowledge and learning from others!

Mo Jangda

I tinker with code at Automattic on a team called “Tinker”. I like ice cream and other sugary things. I wrangle WordPress-related code at Automattic.

I like web stuff including working with open source software such as WordPress, API integration, and other cool things.

Speaking session

The Database Schema in the Advanced Developer track

What is your presentation about?

An overview of the database schema, how things are laid out, and what it means for developers.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

A better understanding or just reinforcement of how data is structured under-the-hood and the cool use cases and not-so-cool challenges it presents.

Why did you want to speak?

Because WordCamp Toronto rocks 🙂

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Ease of use for users and developers.

What is your favourite plugin?

Jetpack: a ton of awesome features stuffed into one incredible package with a great team behind it.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Chatting with others working on cool WordPress-related projects.

David Hickox

I’m a web designer from Birmingham, AL with 15 years of agency experience building websites big and small for a wide variety of clients. I’m passionate about usability, obsessive about typography, and addicted to the mobile web. When I’m not designing, I also make music and grow a beard. I’m a freelance designer and also a contractor for Modern Tribe, which is a name that I’m sure is recognized in the WordPress community.

I’m a huge typography nerd and am passionate about creating great content presentation and reading experiences on the web.

Speaking Session

Designing for Content in the Designer track

About your presentation

In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

My hope is that all attendees will come away with some basic guidelines for laying out great-looking text on the web. Those at a more advanced level will also gain some specific implementation details that ought to help them write clean and reusable CSS to build a base typography stylesheet.

Why did you decide to speak?

I’ve done this talk before and was very surprised by the the feedback and enthusiasm I got from the attendees. I wanted another venue for giving the talk and I’ve heard Toronto is a beautiful city, so it was an easy choice.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

As a designer who has always coded, there was a missing piece that kept me from being able to be self-sufficient and build out websites from start to finish. WordPress fill in that piece in a very easy to learn and approachable way. And the community around it is fantastic.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Advanced Custom Fields – it’s super easy to use and allows me to customize pages and templates in an effortless way.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting new people, seeing a city I’ve never been to.

Mendel Kurland

As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, gourmet coffee, and prototyping new web apps. From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. As a GoDaddy Evangelist, he spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard.

Speaking Session

Pump up your search visibility with structured data in the Content and Business track

About your presentation

An engaging and interactive presentation where you’ll learn the value of structured data, how it impacts the appearance of search results, and how to easily implement it on your WordPress site.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

You’ll learn the fundamentals of structured data, multiple use-cases for its use, and you’ll be left with clear actions you can take to implement structured data on your WordPress site.

Why did you decide to speak?

I deeply enjoy helping other people. My hope is that speaking will help others to learn about a topic that isn’t commonly given a lot of attention at WordCamps.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

The incredible community and simplicity of WordPress were the biggest initial draws for me.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

My favorite plugin is ‘List Pages Shortcode’. This plugin has helped me to create customized galleries on my site mendel.me. It’s simple and practical. I love it.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Really excited to meet new WordPress enthusiasts and see some old friends. I’m also excited for the Maple Whiskey. 🙂

Alan Lok

Alan Lok is the principal owner of WirelessLinx Inc., providing consultant services to business small and large including Trader Corporation, University of Toronto, Toronto Region and Conservation Authority, Grassriots and many others. Previously he was the YellowAPI Developer Advocate at Yellow Pages Group, and have worked almost every job in a software development shop. In his spare time he cycles, dabbles in DevOps work and teaches piano. Alan is obsessed with gadgets and always try to find the latest tech ‘toy.’

Speaking session

Pick the right CMS for your job in the Agency track

About Alan’s session

Have you ever need to justify to a client or your boss about your CMS choice? Over the past 6 years, Alan has tackled content management system projects for small and large companies and have worked with many of the popular CMS platforms out there. In this talk, Alan will share his insights on the various projects and how to defend your choices in front of your client.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

This talk is to really get people thinking about how to best position a CMS solution in front of your boss or client. It’s never pretty to be blindsided by a question about its capabilities or how another CMS platform stack up against it. All developers can benefit from knowing what other solutions are out there, and how WordPress stack up against it (or be able to talk about its differences).

Why did you decide to speak?

Being able to share my experiences and learn from the audience is very rewarding. Ever since I spoke at WordCamp Ottawa, I am just hooked and hope to contribute more to the WordPress community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I love WordPress for its simplicity and elegance. It never pretends to be the swiss army knife, but the creative development community have built so many plugins that can fill the need of most use cases easily.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Being a DevOps guy at heart, my favourite plugin remains to be W3TC. When configured correctly it really helps me scale a WordPress site nicely.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Having been with the WordPress community in Ontario in the past year, I find this community to be very friendly and helpful. I have an amazing time in WordCamp Ottawa and hope to have a better time in my home city’s WordCamp!

James Hipkin

James is an accomplished, forward-thinking marketing professional with 25+ years of multi-disciplinary experience in marketing and marketing communications companies serving high-profile, global brands and B2C clients in consumer packaged goods, durables, transportation, telecommunications and financial services. He has been involved in digital for more than ten years, first as President of a direct marketing agency in San Francisco, where he led the evolution of the agency from traditional direct marketing to digital. Clients included Apple and Wells Fargo online bank. And then as the head of a mid sized agency’s interactive group, with Toyota as the main client. He joined Red8 Interactive (http://red8interactive.com), a long term vendor, as an owner and managing director, four years ago.

Tell us about yourself

I was born in Ottawa, Ontario, and grew up in Manotick. After a 30 year career in marketing and advertising that’s taken me to South American, Europe, Chicago and now San Francisco, I bought a vendor, Red8 Interactive, 4 years ago and find myself a small business owner.

Red8 Interactive, is a development studio designed from the ground up to support advertising and digital agencies, and web design firms with high quality digital production. We specialize in building custom WordPress themes and native mobile apps.

Speaking session

WordPress for Designers in the Designer track

What are you presenting?

WordPress for Designers provides an overview of what sits under a WordPress site, so that designs won’t be in conflict with WordPress’ inherent capabilities, and can efficiently design effective WordPress themes that are equally efficient to build. It draws on our experience working with designers, and highlights the mistakes they’ve made so you don’t have to repeat them.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The presentation is broken into four sections: how web sites are built, how WordPress functions, implications for designers and tips, tricks and pitfalls.

Why did you decide to speak?

WordPress is key to our success, so speaking is how we can give back to the community.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

It’s open source, has a strong and growing community, and it’s easy for marketing folks, the usual end user for the custom themes we build, to use the CMS.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

We build custom themes and love all our children equally. We use Advanced Custom Fields extensively. Gravity Forms for, well, forms, and WooCommerce for shopping carts and other things, like catalogue sites.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Sharing what I know and learning from all the other smart people who are part of and contribute to the WordPress eco system.

David Herrera

I’m a software developer at Alley Interactive with a background in digital media and journalism. I’ve built sites with WordPress since 2009, and prior to Alley, I was a web developer for Religion News Service, a nonprofit news organization.

Speaking session

Writing Cleaner, Sturdier Code With Unit Testing in the Developer track.

About your presentation

My presentation will introduce what unit testing is, why developers should write tests, and how they can start. We’ll write our first tests with PHPUnit and learn more about unit testing with the WordPress core test suite.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I hope people learn more about the “why” of unit testing: Why tests are so good at helping you catch bugs and how they can encourage you to write cleaner code.

Practically speaking, the presentation will show how to write unit tests using PHPUnit assertions, what happens when a test runs, and where to look in the WordPress core test suite for some patterns and guidance.

More generally, I hope the presentation suggests that unit testing isn’t as daunting as it might look. Once you get the hang of it, writing tests can be pretty satisfying.

Why did you decide to speak?

Unit tests have saved me more times than I can count by flagging a problem with new code — before I deploy it — that I would have otherwise missed. I wanted to speak at WordCamp Toronto to try to help others enjoy the same thing.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Even before I wrote any code, WordPress was my choice because it let me publish quickly and simply. When I started building websites, I stuck with WordPress because of the supportive community and because it let me easily create flexible, user-friendly publishing experiences for others.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

You can’t go wrong with Fieldmanager, Alley Interactive’s plugin for metaboxes, custom fields, and settings pages.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Websites that aren’t accessible are broken, so I’m excited about the attention WordCamp is giving to accessibility this year.

Aaron Campbell

Bio

I have more than fourteen years of web development experience, have been a regular contributor to WordPress for the last seven years, and even co-lead the WordPress 3.6 release. I have experience writing quality code that is both fast and scalable, and have a knack for translating ideas and goals into functional sites. I’ve worked with clients ranging from small local businesses to Google, Yahoo, Disney, and Harvard. I’ve been called both a coffee snob and a beer snob, but I consider both to be strong complements. When not buried in code, I enjoy spending time with my wife and son, attending or hosting beer tastings, and reading sci-fi/fantasy books.

What are you speaking on this year?

I have two talks this year: One in the Community track and one in the Advanced Development track:

Community talk

Community: Getting Involved

You love WordPress? Want to pitch in and help out? Not sure how? It doesn’t matter if you’re a designer, a developer, a translator, or just someone that uses WordPress on your own site, you can help make WordPress better and I’ll show you how. From helping answer people’s simple questions to landing your first patch in core (c’mon, who doesn’t want that!?!).

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Everyone can help make WordPress better, I want everyone to see a niche they can help in.

Advanced Development

Integrating WordPress with External APIs

Learn to use WordPress’s built in functionality (especially the HTTP library) to integrate with external APIs. We’ll touch on properly caching results to keep your site fast, fault tolerance, and even how to handle those strange APIs that send you data when you didn’t send a request for it (PayPal IPNs anyone?). We’ll talk theory, but mostly we’ll look at plenty of code and walk through examples from plugins that you can constantly refer back to for example code.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The right way to interact with other systems by leveraging the tools WordPress already supplies.

Why did you decide to speak?

One of the things that sets the WordPress ecosystem apart from other web development is the community. We share. It makes working in this arena better, which is important to me, so I like to put my mouth where my mouth is so to speak.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

Back in early 2005 I had a client that needed something simple that they could manage themselves. Today that sounds totally normal, but a non-tech person managing their own website was far from normal at the time. Anyway, I looked all around and decided on WordPress (1.5 at the time) because of it’s ease of use, and I’ve been using it ever since.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

This tends to change pretty regularly depending on what I’m using. Right now I’d have to say Debug Bar and the Debug Bar Console.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I always look forward to the people. Seeing the people that I only get to see at these event and meeting new ones.

Linn Øyen Farley

I’m a designer and developer based in Toronto, working primarily with WordPress. I have a degree in technical theatre, I teach with Camp Tech and Ladies Learning Code, and I share my office with a very rambunctious cat.

Speaking Sessions

Don’t Fear the Custom Theme: How to build a custom WordPress theme with only four files

What is your talk about?

This talk is a file-by-file guide to creating a fully-functional WordPress theme, based on an existing HTML/CSS design. No PHP experience necessary! I’ll give an overview of the bare minimum of PHP functions you’ll need to build a WordPress theme (plus some extra stuff), and I’ll also demonstrate how I use custom WordPress themes in my client work as a tool for rapid prototyping and designing in the browser.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

I’ve found a lot of developers are hesitant to make the jump from child themes into custom theme development, in part because commercial themes can be overwhelming with their hundreds of files and complex-looking PHP functions. I want people to walk away from this talk with an easy-to-follow guide to creating a custom WordPress theme with just a few files, and hopefully with the confidence to try it out right away!

Why did you decide to speak?

I taught myself how to code, and I will forever be indebted to the people that took the time to write and speak about everything from nitty-gritty code how-to’s to freelance best practices. In an attempt to pay it forward, I’ve been teaching with organizations like Camp Tech (http://camptech.ca) and Ladies Learning Code (http://ladieslearningcode.com) for the last few years. This felt like the right time to take on the challenge of a conference talk!

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I’m a one-person studio, so I prefer to build sites and then hand them off to clients post-launch. Before I started using WordPress, clients would have to contact me to make any updates to their site, but now I just need to spend a bit of time showing them where everything lives in the dashboard and they’re good to go.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

It’s a close tie between Advanced Custom Fields (http://advancedcustomfields.com) and WP Remote (http://wpremote.com) – I couldn’t run my business without either of them.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

WordPress nerds are the friendliest nerds. Every year I look forward to a weekend of geeking out, totally judgement-free. Plus, my highly scientific research shows that t-shirts with geeky references are far more likely to be recognized and appreciated at a WordCamp than at any other conference.

Brian Hogg

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The basics of backbone terminology, and an example plugin that utilizes it.

Why did you decide to speak?

I love speaking and sharing knowledge about topics I’m interested in.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I had a project where I had to develop a WordPress plugin for a client and didn’t look back.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

Meeting the other speakers and attendees and hearing some great talks.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Akismet keeps the evil spammers away

Adrian Roselli

Adrian is a founder and partner at Algonquin Studios, responsible for bridging the gap between the worlds of design and technology. With experience in both, he brings a unique perspective to projects, allowing both design and implementation to merge seamlessly.

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Marc Benzakein

Bio

Marc Benzakein has been working online since the mid 90s, starting as a Network Administrator for a small, independent ISP in Southern California and has been involved in almost all aspects of technology. In 2009, he started developing in WordPress, first for his own purposes and then for clients. In early 2013, he got involved with ServerPress, LLC, makers of DesktopServer, a local development tool created for WordPress designers and developers.

Marc lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife, Jessica and two children, Eli (8) and Brenna (4).

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