Although many times an afterthought, security should be built into a website from the beginning of the development process. From Logan’s research, a comprehensive discussion will be had about how to protect a website from its inception. Logan will take attendees through best practices of secure product development, including how to incorporate White box testing to ensure code security and real-life examples will be presented. Finally, Logan will share insight on post-deployment and how to monitor and patch websites—mitigating future attacks.

Whether we know it or not, most of the time that we open a website, see an advertisement on social media, television, or even in print, we are taking part in some sort of split test. If your business isn’t yet using some form of A/B testing or multi-variant testing, it’s time to start.

In this talk I will cover using testing to improve your services and increase the conversion on your eCommerce sites and lead generation forms. In addition I will cover when to test and where, as well as how to use split testing to validate or invalidate ideas about your business as early as possible.

In kindergarten you were taught how to share. WordPress is built on the idea of sharing. It’s what makes our community strong and supportive. However, for many of us, this is our business, our livelihood, and so our opinions about the “proper use” of GPL sometimes taints how we code or interact with “the competition.” I’ll share some stories and thoughts that may challenge you point of view – in a good way.

In the very core of my soul, I truly believe that every person, everyone, on the planet should have a WooCommerce site! Why?

After 7 years of WooCommerce sites, here’s what I want you to know that you know that you know in your mind and in your soul. WooCommerce CAN change your life! That’s not just some cutesy catch phrase ~ that’s a reality that I want you to see.

Through drop shipping, selling crafts, affiliate marketing, booking your time for others, creating virtual classes, & any number of other scenarios, here’s what you need to know:

You can, yes Y-O-U, can replace your normal paycheck from a WooCommerce site.
Yes, Y-O-U can spend more time with your family with a WooCommerce site.
Yes, your restaurant needs to have online ordering via WooCommerce.
Yes, your “”hobby”” CAN go from “”spare cash”” to a financially profitable income stream for yourself and others.
Yes, your retail store can quadruple (…or more) your revenue when you add online ordering.
Yes, there is something that you need WooCommerce to unleash inside of Y-O-U!
I see it everyday. In every company, every corporation, every independent plumber, every restaurant, every small business, every larger business, every mom, every dad, and even every kiddo!

In this session, we’re not just going to talk about WooCommerce, we’re going to talk about
YouCommerce!”

In this session will look at SEO best practices and how to apply these to your WordPress website or blog. We’ll discuss what search engines want and need, so you can apply this to driving traffic via organic search traffic.

This session will be for beginners as an introduction to WordPress plugin development. We will cover multiple things such as WordPress best coding practices, WordPress Hook Functions, Shortcodes, Admin Settings Page and lastly create a very simple plugin.

Click here to view the slides from this session.

The lessons learned with dealing with the constant growth and high traffic situations of ColourPop. We have seen extreme growth and extreme traffic, not only traffic, but traffic that is converting and placing orders on a site with an already massive (100GB) database and struggles to stay online with multiple orders per second being placed.

Success in emergency situations does not happen by accident, we’ve failed many times before we succeeded and still fail sometimes even with preparation. This talk will cover how to handle yourself, the site, and the overall situation of when your site is experiencing high traffic and is failing. As well as how to prepare in advance for these situations, and how to de-compress afterwards.

While the talk will be general on how to handle things, it will use a real world examples such as my WordCamp Chicago 2016 experience. ColourPop decides to do an unannounced, unplanned, more importantly un-hyped flash sale that weekend, when I am attending the conference. We experience more traffic in that sale than we have. From that moment the rest of my conference visit was spent ensuring we kept ColourPop online – which first failed, and then we found creative solutions to maintain stability.

“Everyone’s code has bugs. Luckily there are almost as many tools to help squash bugs as there are bugs to be squashed. In this talk, we’ll take a detailed look at how to debug and fix some common issues associated with WordPress sites.

We’ll explore how Chrome’s Developer Tools can help us pinpoint front end bugs.

Then, we’ll take a look under the hood with the Query Monitor plugin and see what’s going on behind the scenes with your WordPress site, including database queries, included template files, and more.

Finally, we’ll see how Debug Bar can help us keep an eye on any errors or irregularities that crop up in our code right from the WP Admin bar.

With all these tools in your toolbox, you can ensure that your code is in the best possible shape and ready to ship!”

Sumy Designs is primarily a two-person design and development team, and I suspect we aren’t the only WordPress designers out there who operate with less than a handful of employees. We’ve learned a lot over the past ten years and have come up with a discovery and design system that has been successful for us. This presentation is focused on how small businesses can professionally present their designs to their clients before the development stage of web design begins.

The presentation will include detailed discovery questions that are design focused and related to the client’s audience, competition, marketing, and end objective. As well as the best way to gather specific information relating to the aesthetics of web design like color, photos, graphics and branding, and how to present the gathered discovery to the client through a detailed style guide and draft page design.

Akismet, Jetpack, Disqus, all of these big companies are utilizing the cloud to deliver services through a plugin. Can a small WordPress development shop even attempt this? Yes, you can, and it’s not that hard to do. Heavy volume processing, shared data across clients, AI and big data are just some of the services you can more easily deliver through the cloud. In this talk I will cover some of the key concepts that you need to know to get started including:
– Identifying processing best delivered through cloud services
– Architecting a cloud service plugin
– Building a cloud service on Amazon with PHP/Apache
– Communication between your plugin and the Cloud Service
– Tips, volume metrics and other lessons learned in 4 years of supporting Artificial Intelligence and volume processing through a cloud service plugin

Come learn how a large company with $90+ million in revenue approaches ways to build a hosting platform for a CMS that powers over 25% of the web, WordPress. We’ll deep dive into how we approached multiple iterations into building a Managed WordPress offering and how we are continuing to position against our rivals.

Pulling from my experiences developing leenk.me and iThemes Sync, I will discuss the most important aspects of integrating a SAAS app with WordPress. We will cover the basic ways of communicating data to and from WordPress, including creating a basic REST API in WordPress and using the WP-API. I will also briefly discuss the benefits of using WordPress as your SAAS framework.

Taking over a WordPress plugin is a big deal. You inherit support, ratings, users, and a codebase. Several case studies of personal plugin takeovers with recommended best practices will be demonstrated, as well as an overview of larger examples that have taken place over the years.

Numerous ways you can remove blockers from your website creation processes and reduce timelines while creating quality product and happy clients. Topics to discuss include:

1. Combining the design and development phase into one efficient process, starting with a discussion and a sketch.
2. Presenting ONE design to the client, and how to get it in front of the client quickly.
3. Which meetings you need, why you need to present your designs (actually, design) in person, and how to schedule them ahead of time and include those dates and times in your Scope of Work / contract.
4. Holding yourself accountable and not taking on too many projects at once.
5. How having a good, WordPress specific hosting company (we use WPEngine) can save you time and stress.
6. Picking a well supported, constantly updated, super-powered theme (we use Divi, I know many use Genesis) that you use as a base for all client sites to save time with a) a learning curve, and b) unexpected issues like incompatibility with WooCommerce or limitations in design.
7. Do what’s best for your client in all cases – for us this often means allowing them more time to gather their content and even work with a copywriter before we begin charging them. At the same time we do offer the option to help them with that process, but it will cost them money. It is entirely up to them. Another way we do this is to give them 100% ownership of their site including domain name and hosting, as opposed to reselling that to them. This is something we’re considering changing but only for clients that opt into the service as part of a payment plan.

Other advice to be inserted throughout the talk includes: Holding your clients accountable just like you do yourself, never starting ‘immediately’ even if you technically can, and thoughts on billing (not to underprice, to consider weekly billing to avoid the damaging effects of scope creep to your income, and the idea of a long term payment plan which we are ourselves toying with).

Podcasting was created 12 years ago, and is considered one of the fastest growing medias available. You do not have to be a seasoned audio pro to take advantage of what podcasting can add to your media mix. Find out what Podcasting is all about, and if you should consider using it to grow your business.

Podcasting Hall of Famer, Gary Leland, gives you a behind the scenes look at the benefits and gives you information about using podcasting in your content strategy.

You use WordPress on a regular basis, maybe even to make a living, and you want to get involved in the community. How can you step into the community and be a good citizen? How can you be helpful? How can you disagree in a constructive way? Find out how you can help make WordPress better by being a good citizen in the community.

In the summer of 2014, I was starting a new chapter in my life: I had decided to become a freelance writer! There was just one problem: I had no experience, no money, and no clue what I was doing. While it wasn’t easy, I figured it out and now have a 6-figure company. I’d like to share what I learned so others can have a shortcut to doing the same thing.

Figuring out how to be more efficient at what you do increases your value and is something you can begin right away. We’ll look at some tools and methods you can use to do this and how it can lower your costs, thereby increasing your value.

This is the story of my journey from WordCamp attendee to contributor. I was inspired to volunteer with subtitles after attending a WordCamp in 2014 and have increased my involvement with the project since that time. I’ve been able to subtitle several videos, attend our local Meetup, and most recently volunteer with the team organizing OKC’s first WordCamp. There really is a place for everyone in the WordPress community and this session will highlight my journey and hopefully encourage you to get involved as well.

Is your blog feeling tired and looking outdated? Don’t have time for a total redesign? In this talk, we’ll cover 12 ideas for freshening up your blog with design elements, plugins, and code snippets.

How to present and maintain a secure E-Commerce site. We will go over some details on PCI compliance, as well as privacy policy, and general web security.