With Rick Radko in the Beginner Developer track

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.

Learning Outcomes

• Create a multilingual WordPress site using WP Multisite.
• Understand the advantages and disadvantages of this approach to multilingual.
• Use some tricks/shortcuts that I’ve picked up through the school of hard knocks.

With Brian Layman in the Beginner Developer track.

There was a time when every action taken on a website involved staring at a white screen for 5 seconds as the entire page was reloaded. If, for your clients, that time was last week, you should attend this session.

We will learn the basics of using AJAX to improve the speed, performance and presentation of your website. This session will involve writing source code. A basic understanding of editing plugins, themes, hooks and filters will be helpful, but may not be required.

Learning Outcomes

• Eliminate unneeded page refreshes
• Improve usability of plugins
• Increase perceived responsiveness of themes
• Maximize bragging rights by proclaiming “I KNOW AJAX”

With Matt Smith in the track

This session will provide a detailed overview on how to get your WordPress site multilingual ready. We will discuss the types of multilingual plugins and how they compare, auditing your site for multilingual readiness, preparing for multilingual content, considerations for plugins and themes, and finally options on how to leverage service providers for additional multilingual automation.

The intended audience includes people that needs to know what to do to make Worpress sites multilingual OR plugin developers and themers that need to learn how to make their plugins or themes multilingual ready.

Learning Outcomes

• 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

With Kate Newbill In the Beginner Developer track

Description: How much money and credibility would you lose if your website went down for a week? A day? An hour? Let’s take a look at some of the most common things that can go wrong with a WordPress site and discuss plans and processes to prevent disaster.

Intended audience: Business owners who use WordPress for their websites; beginning/intermediate WP site managers.

Learning Outcomes

• create an action plan covering most common issues that could befall their site(s)
• know how to increase security by making it more difficult for hackers to break in
• have an independent backup plan not dependent on their webhost, so that they can move or restore the site at any time
• have resources available to help in case the site faces problems too big for a backup to fix ( i.e., hacked with no clean backup; host goes out of business and takes site down.

Note: This is not a sales pitch for anyone’s services. There will be a legitimate list of resources (no affiliate links) to help business owners prevent disaster and, in worst cases, recover from it. I’ll cover both free and premium solutions and discuss why I suggest each.

With Tom Sommerville in the Beginner Developer track

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.

Intended audience: MultiSite users or wannabes; people using WordPress to host intranets and/or employee networking tools.

Learning Outcomes

• Use WordPress as a hosting platform for multiple intranets in a large organization
• Juggle the demands of multiple stakeholders in a complex enterprise environment
• Integrate open source and custom plug-ins into the WordPress MultiSite platform
• Structure a Scrum-based (agile) development methodology to support numerous theme developers across the enterprise
• Support multiple content contribution models among multiple stakeholder groups

With Kathryn Presner in the Beginner Developer track

Child themes are a simple but powerful way to customize a pre-made theme. Learning how to use them properly means you’ll never risk losing all your modifications when the developer releases a new version and you update the theme. Using easy-to-follow language, I’ll walk you through the steps to set up a child theme and we’ll get started making some tweaks – from CSS look-and-feel adjustments to more substantial changes in functionality.

Learning outcomes

• set up a child theme
• make simple child-theme modifications using basic PHP, HTML, and CSS
• understand the difference between functions and other types of child-theme files

Commercial WordPress themes have to be ready to handle thousands of use-cases, but your custom theme doesn’t. Reducing a theme to its essential components – index.php, style.css, and functions.php – gets your design into the browser as quickly as possible and allows for rapid prototyping based on client feedback. It’s also an easy way for beginners to start developing with WordPress, without getting lost in dozens of files.

With Linn Øyen Farley

Learning Outcomes

1. Convert a HTML & CSS-based design into a WordPress theme
2. Understand the bare minimum of PHP functions needed to build a WordPress theme