Sessions

Having trouble, or afraid to hit the ‘update PHP’ option in your control panel?
Join us for this hands-on workshop to get your WordPress site running the best it can, using the latest version of PHP.

Abha Thakor, from Non Stop Business Support, will present a short overview of things to consider when working with images on the web. This will be followed by a Q&A panel on images and the web.

Speaker: Abha Thakor

The practice of branding can be traced back to 50.000 years ago. The concept of marketing branding to 4000 BC.

And with the (r)evolution brought forth by Internet and Social Media, today we are all brands‚ and as such, we all need to be aware of how a brand is best managed.

This talk is a primer on the origin and the evolution of the concept of branding, so to better understand and care for our brand(s), regardless of their being a company, a product or a personal one.

The talk will highlight key aspects of quality branding, and serve as a theoretical introduction for the workshop where I will teach the basics for building, tending and grooming a brand.

Speaker: Raffaella Isidori

Doing manual code reviews is boring. People keep on making the same mistakes.

Ulrich will be showing how you can improve your code by using automated tools and what the positive effects of it are.

We will be looking at a few different examples how automation has improved the code quality in a team, and also in open source projects.

Speaker: Ulrich Pogson

Lightning Talk

In January 2017, I set 5 big business goals for the year. By May, I accomplished 3 of them… And then everything ground to a halt.

I didn’t move forward for six months as I battled depression, doubt, jealousy, imposter syndrome, shiny object syndrome, not-invented-here syndrome, and so much more.

You’ll hear about how I was finally able to identify what was stopping me, move past it, and what I’ve done to prevent a lot of this ever happening again. I hope you can learn from my mistakes!

Speaker: Corey Maass
(Business / Development)

Lightning Talk

The good, bad and the ugly of contributing to open source.

Ulrich has been contributing to open source for the last 6 years in different ways, from support to documentation to bug fixes, and organising events.

He will talk about how this has helped him but also about the challenges involved to contributing to open source.

Speaker: Ulrich Pogson
(Community)

Lightning Talk

Heather will walk us through a basic overview of what the project is, what we’ve been working on, and what tools we’ve made. And what is in the planning to help make WordPress Compliant with the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations).

Speaker: Heather Burns

Lightning Talk

Open Source is an incredibly powerful concept that can be seen at the heart of progress and advancement in many spheres of life. The idea that people from every corner of the globe can come together to exchange ideas and build products that profoundly affect our lives is as crazy as it is exciting.

I’m fascinated by the fact that people who have never met can come together to form a community that produces software and/or hardware products like CMSs, cars, building equipment, AI appliances and apparel that help to enable whole swaths of people with limited financial, physical or other resources make meaningful contributions and improve their quality of life.

I talk briefly about the concept of Open source and specifically about how WordPress has played a significant part in taking this Nigerian university dropout around the world and exposing him to a community of the most incredible human beings at the forefront of democratising publishing and why Open Source should be near and dear to your heart.
Speaker: Luminus Olumide Alabi

Lightning Talk

Do you ask yourself “what kind of content I should write on my or my client’s site to attract more customers”? If yes, this presentation will show you a few ways of using the date to find relevant topics in any industry that these users are looking for. I will try to help you replace a feeling of uncertainty that you might have when you are deciding what pages or articles you need to write next. Instead, you will be confident that a large group of readers or potential customers are looking for them.

Speaker: Marcin Kilarski

See https://2018.belfast.wordcamp.org/about/contributor-event/ for full details

WordPress workshop, organised in conjunction with Young Enterprise Northern Ireland (www.yeni.co.uk)

An introductory talk for people who are newer to WordPress and making websites in it. I will be going over how to use the dashboard to create a new website.

Topics covered will include how to create posts, pages, menus and how they correspond to the content displayed on your site. How to create galleries, and search for themes and plugins.

I will also talk about how to use Yoast and add a contact form to your site.

Speaker: Kayleigh Thorpe

We’ve all been there at least once: all of the sudden you get a blank page, or worse, a 500-error.

In this talk we’ll go over the step anyone can take to interpret the error, find more information about it, find the culprit and get it resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.

We’ll look into the wp_debug function, error logging on the server, php settings and of course some common errors, their causes and the necessary fixes.

Speaker: Brecht Ryckaert

The web sites and apps we create, both for ourselves and for our clients, need to collect user analytics for a range of reasons ranging from workflow to user experience to security.

However, user tracking can cross the line from insightful anonymised data collection to intrusive personally identifiable monitoring. GDPR, Europe’s revamp of its data protection and privacy regime, becomes enforceable on 25 May – the day before WordCamp Belfast.

The incoming ePrivacy Directive revamp also renews rules on analytics. This double overhaul creates refreshed obligations for you to inform your site users about any counting, tracking, and monitoring you carry out on your web sites and apps, to provide users with options over your counting and tracking, and to ensure that your data collection respects your visitors privacy.

In our talk, we will help you to achieve a healthy balance between data collection and privacy which respects your business, your users, and your refreshed legal obligations.

Our talk will cover:

• How to understand your audience so that you can understand their data
• Why minimal data collection and retention makes sense from an ethical perspective
• What user tracking is and is not permitted under GDPR as well as the ePrivacy Directive revamp
• How to explain your use of analytics and tracking in your privacy notices
• How to provide your visitors with an opt-out of analytics and tracking
• How to collect analytics with the greatest respect for user privacy
• How to ensure information is not personally identifiable to an individual (Deaggregation/anonymisation/pseudonymisation)
• How to determine a data retention and deletion period
• Dealing with third party tools: Google Analytics as our example
• What other forms of tracking cross ethical and legal boundaries

Speakers: Heather Burns and Marissa Goldsmith

Taxonomies can give you product categories, or city tags, but did you know with the right tricks they can massively boost your sites performance?

Follow Tom down the rabbit hole of private taxonomies, learn the common data storage mistakes that cripple your sites performance nobody’s talking about

Speaker: Tom J Nowell

Simon will be sharing his experience of helping some of Europe’s largest
enterprises which have adopted WordPress, the oppotunities for
individuals and agencies in the WordPress ecosystems, and his own
WordPress story.

Interviewee: Simon Dickson

Hooks and filters are critical part of WordPress.

They are used by the core product and they are what theme and plugin developers use to provide the massive range of add-ons for WordPress.

They are easy to use and let you access the internals of WordPress.

Speaker: Damien Carbery

The session will introduce best practices of website security and how to implement them. The goal is to help webmasters effectively identify and reduce risks or website compromise.

Speaker: André Naumann

In my talk I will cover a wide range of interesting WordPress API features. We will start with the basics like pulling dynamic content from pages and posts, moving onto using featured images and custom fields to a build a reusable banner as a chunk of php to call into our theme templates.

If any of that sounded worrying please remember I am not a PHP developer, WordPress just makes life easy for all of us if you know to to use it. We will also cover topics to give your end user move control like custom shortcodes, widgets areas, menus and author bios.

We will then dig into creating custom post types and advanced custom fields, all made easy with Toolset Types plugin. Then we will focus on how to pull post types into templates using wp-query.

Finally we will look at WordPress Customize features giving your end user control over all the content we have built so far as well as the colours, logo image and style of the site. This will wrap up into a dynamic theme with a user friendly interface… and there might even be some free DLC resources I have been working on.

Please remember I’m going to keep this talk in a language and terminology that everyone can understand, I am not a backend PHP robot, I’m an experienced developer and trainer. Hope you see you there WP Devs!

Speaker: Bill Gilmore

HeX Productions are working on their way to become a fully accredited accessible agency with every project being tested internally and externally for accessibility issues, it’s not been an easy road and we would like to share our experiences with you.

By providing live demonstrations and real world experiences James will talk through quick wins to help make your sites accessibility and help you agency move forward to only producing accessible websites without interfering with workflow.

Speaker: James Hall

For years I held myself back thinking that because I couldn’t comprehend PHP there was a limit to how far I could go as a developer.

With WordPress and plugins like Toolset this is absolutely untrue. There is no data management problem I cannot solve with these two powerful platforms working together.

In this workshop , I want to demonstrate how quickly a front end form can be created and then how the data captured can be manipulated to create awesome solutions for our clients.

Any of the new form builders can be used, but Toolset is my go to as the support is unreal. To date I’ve built recruitment platforms, tourist portals, an entire HR Suite and much more using Toolset.

For WordPress users this knowledge could be very useful, for WordPress Developers this knowledge opens the door to lots of repeat business from their existing client base.

Speaker: David Hoy

Blogging was always about writing, but in 2018 our readers have less time to consume content and more content to consume.

If you want to continue to reach and grow your audience you’ll need to think beyond words alone. That’s a realisation I had in 2016, it’s one that made me change the way I blogged.

Since then I’ve built stronger relationships with readers, won multiple awards for my blog and added new income streams to my business.

I’m going to show you what I did and how you too can supercharge your blog with audio, video and visual content

Speaker: Amanda Webb

Progressive Web Apps (PWA) is a concept related to user experience especially for mobile users, where the focus is to deliver websites that are Reliable, Fast and Engaging.

PWA became so popular the past year but how can we apply it to our WordPress projects?

On this technical presentation, We are going to apply step-by-step features as home screen button, service worker, cache API and accessing native features as a native APP in a real project.

Speaker: Fellyph Cintra

If you have an idea for a blog or a website, don’t hesitate and start it.

WordPress has the features to make it an easy task for you.

Hear from a person with no web experience who has been running their own website for the past 6 months.

Speaker: Matt Boyd

Sure you think you’re going to be around forever, but one day, somehow, you will not be working on that website.

How do you make life easier for your clients, your colleagues, your replacements, and yourself?

Discover the power of documentation!

Speaker: Kate Bolin

When looking at how small WordPress plugins and themes businesses operate, only a small handful of them takes advantage of SEO to grow their business.

It’s tricky though because when you’ve got other things to worry about in your business, it’s not a surprise that SEO is not a major priority. In fact, it can be overwhelming to find out what you need to do…even for me, and I do it for a living.

But can you really grow your business with zero or little traffic? Especially if you are providing plugins and themes, which requires online engagements?

Whether you are new and scaling your business, or you are looking to boost your existing business, it’s time to look at how SEO can be a major investment in your business.

In this talk, we will look at the essential ways you can do that with the help of some actionable tips and strategy which you can apply today.

Speaker: Ahmed Khalifa

WordPress is known to be a powerful and versatile tool for rapid proof-of-concept web app development.

During this WordCamp presentation, we will investigate why WordPress may be the best tool to help create your next web app. We will look at different examples of business cases where WordPress is the best option, and also where it falls short. I will illustrate how I have solved the most common UI patterns required by web apps using plugins, web resources and occasionally code.

We will walk through one of the apps I’ve built from idea to development to production to see the patterns in action. Finally, I share other considerations from my experience like deployment, syncing dev environments, AJAX, the REST API and iterating on feedback.

After the presentation, the audience will have a better understanding of WordPress for web app development. They will be ready to build a minimum viable product (MVP) web app on top of WordPress even if they have limited coding experience.

Speaker: Corey Maass

We use the term edge cases, it’s time to stop using that and switch to saying stress cases.

It’s time to stop dismissing and make sure those stress cases are exactly what we do focus on creating the experiences for.

By building for the stress cases, we create a better experience for everyone.

Speaker: Tammie Lister

Tips and techniques that can dramatically increase your site performance:

• Why speed matters.
• How you can measure it – Tools to measure your page speed.
• Ways to improve it – Best practices for optimisation.
• I’ll also discuss Google – Mobile Page Speed Update 2018 and if you should AMP-lify your web site.

Speaker: Mike Rynart

Have a WordPress related issue? Or worried about upgrading to the latest version of PHP on your hosting environment?
Drop by this open session to chat about your sessions.

WordPress has become a valuable tool for community media outlets such as VIEWdigital.

We believe that Word Press can help save the media by becoming the number one tech tool for community media outlets.

Speaker: Una Murphy

Today’s WordPress environment generally results in numerous organisations managing either our data or the hardware and software that it relies upon.

Although we subcontract out parts of our WordPress infrastructure we are still accountable for the data processed by our Websites.

This talk takes a look at a typical WordPress set up and follows the journey that a user’s data might take and some potential threats at each point on its journey.

It looks at what we can do to minimise our exposure to risk of outsourcing management of our infrastructure, the considerations we should make and what questions we should be asking of our hosts.

Speaker: Dave Potter

I had my first brush with accessibility in 2002. My boss was in a panic that our web application was not accessible, and that we would lose government funding.

Since that experience, I’ve found myself arguing for more accessibility in web design and development. More often than not, I lose that argument.

My professional activism on the topic has caused others to label me an expert on the topic. But I don’t consider myself a practitioner. I am a vocal and heartfelt advocate.

This talk will intertwine the history of web accessibility with my own personal story of how I evolved in my views on accessibility.

I will also discuss the role the open source community has to play, for an accessible web.

Speaker: Marissa Goldsmith

Measurable outcomes: Key tools the you can employ to create a successful inbound marketing strategy combining WordPress and 3rd party applications.

Discussed Sections:

• WordPress – website
• Tawk – Site chatbot or similar
• GetResponse / Mailchimp / SendinBlue – Email marketing system and WordPress integration
• GetResponse / Thrive leads – Landing pages to attract leads to give their email in exchange for information and how it can integrate into WordPress
• CRM system – manage leads with WordPress integration

Speaker: Peter Meehan