– How a WordCamp can change your life, twice
– How you could be lying to yourself
– From full time employment, to freelance, contractor, consultant and finally, agency – The beauty of the WordPress ecosystem + why WordPress
– WordPress naysayers and how to shut them up
– Starting Make Do, the mistakes we made
– More mistakes, damn we made so many
– How we work as a team
– The tools we use to work remotely
– Why you don’t need an office
– Working with clients/customers
– How you can do this
– How to go it alone, the options to choose from
– Friends, enemies & competition

There are some habits which big brands and enterprises are doing to make their WordPress sites innovative, effective, and to connect with audiences. We’ll examine seven different habits and a few related examples for each, which any WordPress site can aspire to.

More than a theoretical and subjective talk, Hugo Fernandes will provide us a close collaborative session where participants will perform creative exercises and learn about tools and mental processes to use in the search of best ideas.
Will also be addressed the several styles of creative processes and how each in different scenarios, such as its application to life.

How can we develop creative and imaginative solutions to business problems?
How can I do that if I’m a freelancer and work alone?
How can I generate ideas in a team environment?

In the end, all these questions will have an answer. And most importantly, attendees will see that sometimes 1 +1 equals 3.

Watch video from Matt Mullenweg and Om Malik Q&A Session at WordCamp Europe 2014

Good vs Bad code isn’t a subjective opinion. It can be measured, tested, quantified, and plotted on a chart.

I’m going to take the opinion out of code quality and provide tools to spot and prevent bad code from ever being written. I’ll go through tools you can install to check for errors, and catch accidental errors.

I’ve been working with Open Source, running an Open Source focused consultancy, and persuading big companies against Intellectual Property hoarding for years now. It’s not like other businesses, it’s waaaaaaay better. Sometimes it’s incredible to be standing on the shoulders of such giants, and sometimes I stand proselytising in a wilderness of blind procurement departments and ignorant requirements. Sometimes my team and I develop solutions for clients and compete with others in the same space, and sometimes we sit down with our “competitors” and collaborate on moving WordPress forward together.

I want to talk about the open source principles that unite many of us at WCEU, and how you can marry those with solid business principles to come up with a winning formula for your clients, your self and the wider world.

WordPress runs just about anywhere. Not all of these ways are equal. In this talk we’ll say goodbye to Apache cPanel hosting and investigate how to leverage a modern hosting stack and use clever caching tricks to make WordPress absurdly performant and scalable.

At what point answering questions about WordPress goes beyond the making conversation and becomes a driver for professional skills and reputation?

Our proficiency at answering questions spans over our work, our ability to learn, and how we are perceived in community. Yet we are rarely purposeful in learning how to benefit from this skill and improve at it.

We can do better than that — to evolve professionally and personally. Let’s talk about how.

The threats website owners face today range in scale and complexity – from large DDOS attacks leveraging WordPress core functionality, to vulnerabilities found in some of the largest plugins in the ecosystem. The Security dilemma is not shrinking, it’s getting bigger and more today, than ever, it’s important we take the time to educate and bring awareness to the things everyday website owners can do to improve their over security posture.
Security is not a turn of a knob, or click of an option, it’s about state of mind, it’s about good posture.

If you have recently searched for WordPress speed and performance optimization tips and techniques, you have definitely seen several things being recommended all the time: different caching mechanisms (full page caching plugins, memcached, reverse proxies), sprites, CSS & JS minification, to name a few. All of them are indeed viable and really effective ways to speed up your site performance. However, they may not be equally applicable for everyone and there are cases in which they can actually break your website. In this presentation I will cover what actually can go wrong with each of the most popular and widely accepted performance optimization techniques, how to implement them without breaking your site and how to fix the most common issues with different speed boosters.

The presentation is aimed at people who have a deeper understanding and experience with WordPress both playing with the codebase or setting up WordPress-friendly server environments.

Organising, running and analysing the usability tests for “all things WordPress”. Running usability tests helps to highlight problems early in the development and fix them at a much lower cost.
We will cover:
– When to do your first usability test
– What a good usability test looks like
– How to draw design decisions from testing sessions – What is a healthy routine for usability testing
– What tools you will need
This session is intended for developers, product managers, marketing people and management.

The focus will be on rapid prototyping, user experience and interaction design. You’ll get introduced to Karin’s workflow and prototyping setup and learn about her on site work with clients and their UX and front-end teams.

Get curious – how digging into core and following along in some capacity with what core is doing can help you get things done in more efficient ways, start thinking about how to learn more, as well as write continuously better code.

In the last few years everybody has started talking about functional programming. On one end we have “mainstream languages” adopting “functional style” and on the other we have the ivory tower-like Haskell and it’s passionate community. It’s seems that functional programming is here to stay. This talk will explain what it’s all about, how it looks like in different languages and what we can learn from it. It’ll show a bunch of weird code, a few strange languages and a couple of take-aways you can apply everywhere – even in C.

Content creation is at the heart of the web and yet we fail to deliver experiences that match todays needs. This talk aims at rethinking the way web publishing works and see how we can create experiences that allow people to express themselves in richer ways.

I’m colourblind and would like to share my user experiences with you, users and designers, where and why the colours or contrasts give me headache.
I want to give you the tricks to improve your designs, I am not a designer, help me to see better!

Andrew Nacin, one of the lead developers of WordPress, on WordPress dev philosophy, complexity, and consistency.

Title “borrowed” from a book by the same name, and talk inspired by a tweet yesterday from Brianna Norcross in which she asked, “Plugin devs/sellers… What’s the dickiest thing a customer has done? I just have a morbid curiosity about this.”

https://twitter.com/sarcasmically/status/484367403166736384

The talk will look at a few of these horror stories to see how things went terribly wrong and what I might have done to prevent them. Essentially looking at the pitfalls in managing client relationships, taking responsibility for our own actions and working to improve our communication skills.

Underscores has become the go to tool for many theme developers, as their starting point when creating a new theme. It’s the semi-standard for the WordPress.org Theme Repository, and the origin for all themes launched on WordPress.com in the past three years. In this presentation we’re taking a look back at its origins, its successes, and most importantly, its most recent improvements. Including a feature update that supercharges Underscores.me, and will change how developers will interact with WordPress starter themes for years to come.

Technical look, from a front ender perspective at the process of tweaking the admin styles or building a completely different look for it.
Showcasing a real-world example of the process and application of styles.

It’s said that ideas have power, but an idea’s power lies in its capacity to have an impact on our lives. Some ideas flicker and disappear, others have such force that they underpin everything that we do. This presentation will explore the philosophical underpinnings of WordPress, ideas like freedom, simplicity, and democracy. It will look at these ideas in their most abstract, tracing how they become concrete in the software and the community.

Yana Petrova will talk about depression in IT, a problem that seems to be widespread in the industry and still something that people prefer not to talk about. How depression can be recognised, how to find the actual reasons for it and why nobody should be afraid or ashamed to ask for help are some of the main points in her talk. She believes that speaking freely (and also listening) about depression and mental health is an important step for making the environment around us better.

Growth is the main goal for any online project but only large companies can invest in growth teams and professional planning. My presentation explores the frontiers of Growth Engineering, giving practical advice on how to apply the best growth strategies to any WordPress site, from the personal blog to the large publishing site. How to acquire new traffic in an ethical way, how to engage the visitors and turn them into regular readers, how to drive a successful campaign on WordPress.

In theory transferring a WordPress website should be a straightforward process that involves few well-defined steps like: exporting your database from the old place, importing it on the new one, moving your files, reconfiguring WordPress and changing the DNS records. In reality the migration process of an active website has some challenges that, if not addressed properly, may result in downtime and data loss. Needless to say this could affect your business badly – revenue stream loss and bad reputation being just some of the implications.

I plan to walk the audience of the presentation through the different steps in the migration process with examples how each step can be optimised so that the risks of data loss and downtime are minimised.

The following will be covered in details:

1. How to plan the migration, especially when you have to move a complex enterprise site.
2. How to perform each step of the real website move. I will stress on the need and will explain how to test if everything is ok, before changing the DNS settings.
3. How to handle the domain propagation issues as part of the migration.
4. What to do if you noticed missing data after the process.

“Beyond the Code” is a practical guide to doing more with WordPress; developing yourself to work on things that matter, getting in the habit of shipping and finally contributing back to this great open source project. I chose this area because I’d like to see freelancers/agencies in Europe do more with WP.