Sessions

Bedrock is not a WordPress theme, it’s a way to install, configure, and manage WordPress with security and modern development practices in mind. Bedrock is an open source project made by Roots that is used as a base for WordPress projects. For starters, it makes loading plugins easier, takes care of deployment and setups a better folder structure which attempts to mimic Laravel – which is great!

With ability to use tools like Composer and env file, Bedrock is a developers dream for WordPress based projects. The talk will be short and crisp and aimed at WordPress developers of all levels.

Presented in Main room.

Presented by Johanna Bennett in Main room.

Blogging for your business – this can stymie people but is very valuable. It subtly allows you to showcase your skills and values – and personality. You can extend customer service naturally by helping your customers with tips, information, comments and conversation.

Tips and information on how to do this with mainly girly examples – because I’m female and because WordPress can be a bit blokey but a lot of WordCamp attendees are female. Let’s be inclusive.

Presented by Bill Bennett in Main room.

There’s a technical side to blogging. Web design can be fun and
rewarding. Yet most of us blog because we have something to
say. Which means writing.

Good writing gets people to a site in the first place. It’ll
keep them there and get them coming back again and
again. That’s what blogging is all about.

In this workshop we’ll cover practical tips you can apply straight
away to lift your writing. It’s interactive, so bring your
questions and problems.

Presented by Matthew Knighton in Main room.

Plugin with Pimple CI is awesome and saves our team masses of time with a predictable pattern to our development.

It means we can make custom pot types, views and shortcodes all inside a nice container that allows us to easily extend and manage our plugins.

In the lightning talk we will like lighting make a simple plugin and post type and go over why these containers work so well and how you can quickly get started with this powerful design pattern.

Presented by Peter Wilson in Main room.

Imposter Syndrome. It’s not new and anyone can get it, be they royalty, an American founding father or – in modern times – web professionals of all stages in their career and of all disciplines.

Peter will talk objectively about his own experience and attempt to separate the real from the imagined.

Presented by Gavin Botica in Main room.

Do you have a WooCommerce website or thinking of setting one up? WooCommerce is the most popular CMS based e-commerce solution available today.

Starting with WooCommerce can be a little overwhelming, but Gavin will cover tried-and-tested methods for getting the best performance out of your WooCommerce site, from hosting, choosing a theme, caching, customising and tweaking the wp-config.php file and more.

Presented by Nik Cree in Main room.

One of the hardest ‘Good Intentions’ in business is to send a regular client email newsletter.

How many times has a business started a newsletter only to lose energy and stop after 2 – 3 times? Why? Because it can take 3 – 5 hours to create a newsletter, write the content, source images, and send it out…and business owners and their staff ‘don’t have the time’.

With WordPress’s inbuilt ‘Press This’ feature and the Newsletter Plugin any business can create a client newsletter in less than 17 minutes. No writing, no image sourcing, no formatting, no hitting the send button, no problem in no time at all.

This is one of the simplest, easiest ways to communicate regularly with clients, generate leads and sales in less time that a normal one-to-one business presentation takes. I have implemented this at PositiveBusinessOnline.com and a number of client websites.

The process is detailed in this post https://positivebusinessonline.com/easiest-way-to-create-a-weekly-newsletter-in-less-than-30-minutes/.

Presented in Main room.

We don’t currently have a sponsor for the after-party, but it will still go ahead!  If you’d like to sponsor, visit the sponsorship packages page here.

Light nibbles and a couple of drinks are included, but if you’d like something more substantial, please eat beforehand.

The venue for the after party will be held at La Zeppa and is a 5 minute walk, in Auckland’s iconic Victoria Park Markets.

Where: La Zeppa Kitchen and Bar
Address: 33 Drake street, Auckland City.
When: 6.30/7pm until 10pm
What to bring: WCAKL lanyards required for entry, smiles are appreciated
Anything included: A couple of drinks + nibbles

Entry is by #WCAKL badge only, make sure to bring your badge along on the night.

A great promo piece on La Zeppa can be found here: http://www.heartofthecity.co.nz/auckland-nightlife/bars/la-zeppa.

Event code of conduct applies at this venue also.

Presented in Main room.

Presented in Main room.

Presented in Main room.

Presented in Main room.

Join us for some fun lightning talks as well as karaoke lightning talks and a casual Panel discussion.

Don’t know that lightning talk karaoke is? Come along and find out.

• Johanna Bennett: Blogging for business
• Matthew Knighton: Create plugins with Pimple CI
• Karan Khanna: Bedrock – WordPress boilerplate with modern development tools.

Have some fun with us and give a light heartly, loosely related lightening talk – we will take submissions all weekend!

The astute observers may have noticed the inclusion of the Panel discussion here – if you wanna know why, just ask Tarei 🙂

Presented by Kristen Symonds in Main room.

Well, maybe this is just another REST API talk, but it’s well worth talking about now that the REST API is included in WordPress!

This talk will include some background on the REST API, helping you understand what’s so great about it. You’ll also hear about ways to use the REST API both within your WordPress projects and without.

If you’ve been wondering what the fuss about the REST API is, what it’s good for, or how to get started using it, this talk is for you.

Presented by Maria Skatova in Main room.

Considering freelancing with WordPress? Worrying that your technical skills are not high enough yet? Want to know what are the most common issues the beginner freelancer developer meets with? Surprisingly, tech problems can be googled, asked about and fixed. Real pains are mostly people related. 

Maria Skatova, public relations and media professional since 1997, WordPress fan since 2009 and a new freelance developer will share how she uses email writing, mind reading, and Game of Thrones knowledge when dealing with clients.  

Let’s discuss the following topics:

• How to find a first client without a portfolio. 
• How to deal with ‘difficult’ clients, people with non-tech background, those who don’t know what they want.
• Is it worth taking projects that other developers abandoned, or every project you see (for the portfolio, you know), or someone’s broken site.
• How much time do you need for a project, and what is your main deliverable as a freelance developer.
• And finally – if you could do only one extra thing with that client’s site – what would you choose?

Presented by Ngaire Ackerley in Main room.

How often do we create websites for the client and their goals, rather than the end user? We want our sites to look good and present the necessary information that the client desires.

But what if we considered taking a different angle to our projects?

The more we consider designing and developing websites for the user rather than just the client, the more success we can expect from the user reaching their own goals and in turn a more successful website for the client too.

In this presentation I’ll cover various ways we can produce a more successful website by considering the user from the beginning of the project, through planning and design.

Presented by Dee Teal in Main room.

Whether you work alone as a freelancer or solopreneur, as a product maker, a developer, content writer, home maker, blogger, or business owner, there will be times you have to deliver things. It may be a product, it may be a renovation, it may be a website, a bunch of cakes for the PTA cake stall, heck, it could even be a tiny human… but you have made a commitment and now have to deliver…

There are some great principles in Project Management than can be applied not only in the workplace for any scale of product/project development but in ordinary life to make delivery of the things you or need to do a much smoother process.

This talk will deliver some easy to implement principles you can use in across the board facilitating more efficient, transparent, delivery of your ‘projects’ whatever they may be.

Presented by Matthew Knighton in Main room.

In this session we cover a real world cross platform native mobile application that we created to deliver WordPress content for a private school in country NSW Australia.

We cover the reasons why a mobile app made sense and how we got the REST API to work with Ionic and Angular to make our native apps. It takes in considerations as a business to make before jumping in and some of the issues we found using emerging technology.

Presented by Robert Wilde in Main room.

Building custom WordPress Themes is rewarding and can ensure your code is clean and easy to understand, by you.

Once you start building custom themes regularly, you need to start implementing processes to not only speed things up but make them easy to share with fellow developers.

I have some awesome tools and process to share to make things simple and create a process you can repeat, saving you time, creating less headaches and making more $$$.

Presented by Jack Skinner in Main room.

In this fun and playful session Jack will take you on a journey from HTTP/1.1 to HTTP/2 enjoying the sights and delights of its new features along the way.

With features like multiplexing, yesterdays best practices are now tomorrow’s anti-patterns – so what does this mean your app or API?

His talk explores the best and worst practices of the way the web worked and how HTTP/2 is changing the game for performance. More importantly, how does this apply to your next big WordPress project?

It’s all explained of course, using jelly snakes and raspberry twizzlers.

Presented by Craig Martin in Main room.

Craig Martin runs the award-winning Indie Travel Podcast, established one of NZ’s biggest gaming retailers, and is managing director of the fast-growing WordPress agency, Performance Foundry.

Craig has seen WordPress businesses as a publisher and an e-commerce user, and also helped hundreds of business grow their online businesses. Craig will outline some of the pitfalls and power plays of small & medium businesses that have helped him grow his business and will help you grow yours.

Presented by Gavin Botica in Main room.

In this session Gavin will be covering tried-and-tested methods for getting the best performance out of your WooCommerce site, from hosting, choosing a theme, caching, customising and tweaking the wp-config.php file and more.

He’ll also cover some basics for ensuring your WooCommerce site is as secure as it can be.

Presented by Pam Kocke, Deborah Beckett in Main room.

So you’ve created a plugin or a theme for WordPress? Awesome! It doesn’t stop there. We will discuss why great support matters and give you simple ways to get a reputation for excellent support without increasing your time or effort.