WordCamp Bournemouth UK 2014 content ideas

How to propose a session

WordCamp Bournemouth UK 2014 session ideas for the running order are listed below.

New ideas can be proposed using the WPUK contact form with the subject line ‘Bournemouth 2014 content idea’ – include the following:

• your website address
• session title
• a brief outline of the content
• tags (lower case) to indicate the areas to be covered along with the intended audience

It will be assumed that you’re proposing to present the session yourself unless indicated otherwise.

Note the following:

• sessions are normally 50 minutes long within a 1 hour period
• in rooms 2 and 3, as an option, shorter 25 minutes sessions can be scheduled
• to present a session you must have a ticket for the conference and, obviously, be present for the relevant session

Grid

Any blank sessions at the beginning of the WordCamp will be filled using a BarCamp style grid.

Idea: Tony Scott

Tags: Meta

Happiness Bar

This will be an area were a number of experienced WordPress users will attempt to resolve, on a one-to-one basis, any WordPress questions and problems.

• effectively genius bar, as previous years
• staffed throughout the two days (barring conference-wide session times)
• designed to be as accessible as possible to the more inexperienced users

Idea: Tony Scott

Tags: beginner, intermediate, advanced, support

Site doctors: Let the experts help you!

Does your site feel off-colour? We can help! An active group discussion on how to improve your site including some great tips and tricks for any WordPress user, designer or developer.

A call for sites to be submitted will be made nearer the conference – don’t be scared, we are here to give you constructive feedback to improve your site!

Idea: Tony Scott

Panel: TBA

Tags: beginner, intermediate, css, themes, plugins, seo

WPUK Coding Challenge 2014

Good code isn’t rewarded well enough. We want to fix that.

Do you code? In particular, how’s your JavaScript? WordPress is going to need more and more JS skills as it develops, and we want to see what you can do.

In this session we’re going to set a challenge for the weekend and we will be offering three prizes – a Google Nexus 7, an iPad Mini, and a Lenovo Miix 8 – representing the three biggest ecosystems. Ideally your solution will work on all of them!

Good luck!

Idea: David Coveney

Presenter: David Coveney

Tags: coding, competition

Lightning talks

A session of 5 minute timed talks on WordPress related issues.

If you wish to present a 5 minute talk, use the WPUK contact form to make your proposal by providing a title and a brief explanatory sentence with the subject line ‘Bournemouth Lightning Talk proposal’.

Idea: Tony Scott

Presenter: Tony Scott

Tags: presentations, talks, 5 minutes, against the clock, don’t panic mister mannering

Proposed 5 minute lightning talks:

• DRY theme development

  Matt Radford: Stop repeating the same code in your themes. Learn get_template_part() and consider using a wrapper.

• Top 10 questions to ask when something doesn’t work

  Herb Miller: Without going into any details this brief talk describes a general process involving 5 different types of question asker: the asker (you), the askee, a stupid question asker, the expert and a project manager. The questions are applicable to WordPress users, designers and developers performing problem determination, aka debugging. Designed to make you think, just a little, about your problem determination process.

• The non-profit sector needs your skills

  Jason King: WordPress is increasingly popular in the non-profit sector, and your skills are valuable to charities. Which organisation can match you with a charity that needs WordPress skills? How can you do quick but valuable online volunteering? And at what events could you collaborate to code a charity’s website, or share your knowledge and experiences with charity workers? What about paid work in the sector?

Stealth education with WordPress

Rockhaq.com and how this simple WordPress website engaged young people to write reviews 24/7, improve their writing skills and made learning fun during a school-run pilot in the East Midlands.

Idea: Michelle Dhillon

Presenter: Michelle Dhillon

Tags: education

How to secure your WordPress website

Learn about security best practices for WordPress and ways you can harden your website from hacking attempts. This includes ways to setup and configure your WordPress installation; using and setting-up recommended plugins; and tricks you can include in your hosting account’s htaccess file. The talk will also explore the pros and cons of various methods to protect from brute-force attacks.

Idea: Mike Pead

Presenter: Mike Pead

Tags: security, plugins, beginner, intermediate

WPUK Awards 2014

It is proposed to instigate annual awards for UK originated WordPress related activities involving nominations and voting by the WPUK Discuss community before the conference. The results of the voting will be announced and the awards will be made during conference. Categories for awards could include the following, all of which must be built on or for WordPress and originate in the UK:

• Best overall website
• Best website content
• Best web application
• Best plugin
• Most creative use of WordPress

Idea: Tony Scott

Presenter: TBA

Tags: awards, competition, wpuk discuss, community, uk

A beginners guide to web accessibility

A session for those who’ve never heard of web accessibility, or are unsure what it means.

Presentation will be structured around some fundamental questions:

• What is accessibility?
• Why is it important?
• Who is affected by poor accessibility?
• How can accessibility be improved?
• When to think about accessibility?

Idea: Graham Armfield

Presenter: Graham Armfield

Tags: developers, users, accessibility, beginners, experts

WOW plugins! 2014

It’s back for 2014! A showcase of really useful and excellent plugins people may have missed or are just unaware of. Come along, you’ll be surprised what’s out there.

Idea: Michael Kimb Jones

Presenter: Michael Kimb Jones

Tags: beginner, pro, plugins

WordPress and web accessibility 2014

Following up last year’s presentation, an update on progress (and frustrations) with accessibility within WordPress over the last year.

WordPress is such a big global force now, and much is made of its part in the ‘democratisation of content’. But should ensuring the future accessibility of WordPress just be left to the efforts of a small bunch of volunteers who try to spot problems after they’ve occurred? Or should there be more of a culture change that would see accessibility being considered during design and development?

Idea: Graham Armfield

Speaker: Graham Armfield

Tags: accessibility, design, development

From local to staging to live using version control and deployment tools

A walk through of a WordPress development environment work flow from building a site locally, hosting the site on a staging environment and then be able to push sites live all using Version Control (Git) and a Deployment tool.

Idea: Mark Wilkinson

Presenter: Mark Wilkinson

Tags: development environment, version control, deployment

Customising the WordPress dashboard

This session looks at the customised WordPress dashboard that Mark Wilkinson and I created for Edupress, our school website creation and management tool. Topics covered include:

• Identifying requirements – UX and functionality
• Rebranding the dashboard
• UX changes
• Customising the dashboard to fit Edupress functionality
• Improving UX on editing and listing screens
• Customising the admin menu
• What we did with CSS and what we did with PHP (overview)

The session will be complemented by Mark’s talk (yet to be proposed) which will look at the coding techniques used to create the Edupress interface and functionality in more detail. My talk will be more about the design and UX aspects.

Idea: Rachel McCollin

Presenter: Rachel McCollin

Tags: development, ux, wordpress admin, css, interface

Secure from the start: the changing landscape

Malicious hackers are always trying to (and in many cases succeeding at) finding new and innovative ways to attack our IT infrastructure, even those of us that just run a small personal WordPress blog.

In the wake of the HeartBleed bug and a number of other high profile security related failures, we revist the idea of making sure we’re ahead of the game, secure from the start.

Topics covered will include

• Brief analysis on recent high profile issues
• SSL, keys & certificates
• Two factor authentication
• One time passwords
• Password managers
• Plugins and other tools

Idea: Kieran O’Shea

Presenter: Kieran O’Shea

Tags: developer, intermediate, advanced, plugins, security, hacking

The why and how behind creating your own base theme

Designing and developing WordPress themes from scratch for every project allows your clients to get a completely unique piece of work, tailored just for them.

However, how often do you find yourself using the same bits of code and just rewriting them? Or working out the same responsive measurements? Or having a client come to you with a purchased theme wanting tweaks that you then have to figure out someone else’s coding style to be able to edit?

In this talk Ngaire will discuss why she recently created a base/starter theme and how she went about it. It will include processes, planning, design aspects and development thoughts. This will help any designer or developer who may want to streamline their process with a base/starter theme or just pick up tips to help improve their theme development.

This won’t be too code-heavy or design-heavy, but hopefully there will be something in there for everyone.

Idea: Ngaire Ackerley

Presenter: Ngaire Ackerley

Tags: designer, developers, business, beginner, intermediate

Extensible plugins – a case study of Edupress

Whilst building the Edupress project extensive customisations were made to integrate with a number of other plugins. This talk looks at how you can build plugins which other developers, plugins and themes can add to, remove things from and build upon.

This talk is related to the talk proposed by Rachel McCollin on the new Edupress project and looks more at the development.

Idea: Mark Wilkinson

Presenter: Mark Wilkinson

Tags: plugins, developer, customisation

Designing with data

Go beyond standard theme template design by harnessing data in various ways to customise how your content and site looks, also including concepts around data organisation and relationships.

Idea: Jonny Allbut

Presenter: Jonny Allbut

Tags: developer, themes, customisation

Tips and tricks for using WordPress as an application platform

Dan looks at what’s involved in using WordPress as an application plaform, including the use of plugins and application architecture.

Idea: Dan Westall

Presenter: Dan Westall

Tags: developer, applications, plugins

Comparing Frameworks, and why they’re important

When looking for a robust, responsive framework, we wanted and needed to make sure it could handle any project that came our way, plus it needed to be extendable.

I’d like to compare some popular frameworks, from a non-developer usability point of view, and explain and why as a result we’re developing own framework.

Theme Frameworks are well coded tools that make the process of creating functions you see in a WordPress theme a lot easier, which ultimately speeds up the process of creating better layouts and designs.

During the talk I’ll be explaining how we found ourselves using many of the same plugins and options during our development and why we were looking for a way of saving time by creating a solid foundation, with ultimately easy-to-build child themes.

This will definitely be a non-tech talk! I don’t do tech – this will be from a user and new user point of view to develop their own WordPress website using frameworks.

Idea: Alison Boyle

Presenter: Alison Boyle

How not to launch a startup

Based on my own experience of launching a startup over the last year, this talk looks at my mistakes (and a very small number of successes) and identifies what I did wrong. Learn from my mistakes so you don’t have to make them too!

Idea: Rachel McCollin

Presenter: Rachel McCollin

Tags: beginner, startups, business

Underscores – one theme to rule them all…

Brief content outline:

• An introduction to the Underscores starter theme
• Getting started with Underscores
• The open source project: Underscores needs you

Idea: Jack Lenox

Presenter: Jack Lenox

Tags: theme, development, underscores

Learning to sell your services as a web designer when you come from designer/developer background

Before you can do the work, you have to win the work. If you are coming from a designer/developer background rather than sales, this can seem like an impossible task.

The learning curve for sales can be the steepest and most daunting of all. Having learnt a lot through trial and error, Kirsty will attempt to give some useful tips on how to convince potential clients that you are the best person for the job without resorting to bribery and corruption. Its all about remembering to smile!

Of course there are some meetings that no amount of smiling can save, and so, for your learning pleasure (or amusement depending on how you look at it) she will also share some of those moments that just can’t happen to anyone else!

Oh, and there will be kittens. Possibly even kittens and Star Wars! ~ grin!

Idea: Kirsty Burgoine

Presenter: Kirsty Burgoine

Tags: business, design, clients, kittens

Finding better quality clients with WordPress

Aimed at WordPress developers/designers etc this talk shows them how they can start finding better quality customers and how to justify charging higher fees.

Idea: Michael Killen

Presenter: Michael Killen

Tags: marketing, clients

Common room

A room where attendees can hack, rest, chat, etc away from the main conference sessions.

Idea: Tony Scott

Presenter: None

Tags: hacking, email, rest,