Our goal as website owners is to give our users the best possible experience. This talk explores how to configure your site for the reader’s experience using WordPress settings and plugins.

The stated mission of the WordPress project is to “democratise publishing”, but with all the people involved, the project has achieved so much more than that over the past 13 years. In fact, with the number of people involved in building the WordPress project and community on a daily basis, its no wonder that the community is so powerful and the whole project has had such an impact on the world. That begs the question of how you can get involved and how you can make a difference – how can you, as an individual, continue the mission of the WordPress project beyond WordCamp?

The journey of how we leveraged WordPress to build our online learning startup, AdvantageLearn.com.

In this session I’ll chat about how a non-developer (me!) is using WordPress to run our click to pay to learn online education company. We manage this through a best of breed compilation of WordPress plugins (most notably Sensei and WooCommerce).

I’ll outline our journey with WordPress thus far through the lens of AdvantageLearn.com noting the challenges, trade-offs, failures and victories to date. It will be an honest account of my learnings as a Non-Dev building and running an online learning business.

Rob Hope
Why all you need is One Page for your next project with WordPress
In this talk, I will look at how it’s often better to tell your story in One Page opposed to a multiple-page website. Focus on simplicity, declutter the interface and get results. We need to understand in this day and age attention spans are depleting online. We need to get straight to the point. I’ll throw in some stats about One Page trends, popular WordPress themes and plugins. I’m also going to throw in a coupon for a free (usually $20) private website video review by me, exclusive to WordCamp attendees.

Jonathan Bossenger
The ball is in your court: how you can contribute to open source projects.
More often than not the average WordPress user doesn’t understand the core principles behind the idea of open source software like WordPress. This often leads to misdirected frustration by users at what is seen as a lack of product support. The talk will look at the realities of an open source project and how you can get involved and help make a difference.

Nathaniel will be sharing how The Power of Exposure to the Internet and WordPress has impacted and changed his life since 2011. He will be speaking about how WordPress as a tool has triggered a passion for solving problems, building and designing web solutions that led him to his latest venture. He’ll encourage the local WordPress community to contribute to changing lives in the bigger Cape Town area.

The WordPress.org platform is the project’s secret sauce of success. It powers the plugin and theme directories, hosts all WordPress versions, is home to the developer tools needed to create WordPress, and protects millions of WordPress sites with automatic updates. In this session I will shine a little light on a largely unknown part of WordPress, explain the impact it has, and answer all questions about it.

Our own mental wellness, and that of those around us, is probably the least understood and most neglected part of our daily lives. It is time we all started understanding what it truly means to have mental wellness and what it means to us and those around us when we do not have it – especially what we can do to help those around us and ourselves.

The WordPress community is both the perfect place for Mental Health issues to go undetected as well as the perfect place for so many people to live a higher quality of life simply by increasing our awareness to it.

Jeff Pearce
WordPress Futures
Whats coming next in core, cool projects, and future innovations for the industry.

Jemima Baumann
Do’s and Don’ts For Improving Client/Developer Relations
This lightning talk is going to highlight a few useful tips and suggestions to a)avoid some common mistakes developers make with clients, and b)set better standards to improve client/developer relationships.

This workshop is for WordPress Theme developers who are interested in improving the User Experience of their Themes.

We’ll start by reviewing why the Front-end performance of Themes (or any web site) is important, and what special considerations we have for a South African market. Then we’ll look at what indicators of good performance are, what tools we can use to help us, and make a checklist that we can use for reviewing sites.

We’ll use these ideas to look at a few off-the-shelf Themes as examples, and see where they might be able to improve on their Front-end performance. We’ll spend the second half of the workshop working on our own projects making them lighter, faster, and better for our users.

A breakdown of what the difference is between a WordPress theme and a framework, and practical benefits of using a framework for a Developer/Freelancer, with a particular focus on the Genesis theme framework from StudioPress.

During this workshop, all attendees will have access to the Genesis framework and the Sample child theme to use. Then, after the workshop, you will be given access to purchase any of the Genesis products at a huge 75% discount.

We will be looking at continuous integration and how it can help you write better code, faster, for your WordPress plugins and themes. We’ll look things like coding standards, unit testing, integration testing and, of course, doing all of that automatically.

This workshop will start by introducing the types of bugs one can find in a plugin and later move to how to identify, report them and how to fix them. For the rest of the workshop participants will work on a modified version of a well known plugin to apply the principals discussed. The identified bugs will then be reported to a repo on GitHub and there will also be time for users to submit pull requests to fix these bugs.

Many of the core WordPress projects today start out onGitHub before they are eventually merged in. Making users aware of these and also helping them to contribute here will aid them in getting involved int he WP community.

In this workshop we’ll learn how to use WordPress’ Settings API to create forward compatible custom option pages in wp-admin that integrate seamlessly with the rest of WordPress. If you’ve never heard of the Settings API, or you consider it complex and working with it daunting, this is the workshop for you. Once you understand the basics, creating and updating WordPress settings pages become a breeze.

A lot of beginners encounter all sort of tutorials on how to add some custom code to the functions.php file or even more basic: change the layout beyond what the customiser allows.

In this session, I want to introduce WordPress beginners to some good standards in terms of customisation:

• Setting up a child theme (through a plugin)
• Adding custom CSS to that child theme (and showing how to do it through Jetpack)
• Adding custom PHP to the child theme

Oro is a CRM created for eCommerce platforms. All the usual features of a good CRM can be expected such as marketing campaigns, lead generation, opportunities, invoicing and quoting. The power of Oro is in the eCommerce features such as Abandoned Cart, Multichannel (especially the multi shopping cart support), 360° view of the client (helps sales teams) and Reports (A large force in the segmentation of customers to get the best marketing plan).

In this workshop we will…

1. Introduce Oro and who is behind Oro
2. Community verses enterprise versions
3. Install Oro
4. Connect the WooCommerce connector
5. Discuss the interface
6. Show the basics of the sales process
7. Show the eCommerce features
8. Discuss Q&A

This workshop intends to provide designers and content managers with a graphical, contextual understanding of how developers work. The workshop will focus on explaining web development concepts and standards like HTML, CSS, Servers and programming conventions, both holistically and specifically, in an easy to understand way, in order to provide a concrete understanding of development without getting too technical. A must for those who interact with developers everyday!

Running a business is hard. Running a Web Development business is harder. In my time working with various development companies, both WordPress and non-WordPress, I have seen a few simple truths that remain viable for any development house. These simple truths are what I would like to share with you. Tools, techniques, and methodologies that will make running your WordPress business easier to run and smoother to manage. No, I will not get you rich quick.

Chris gives insight into his journey of building a comprehensive online learning application leveraging the power of WordPress. The Workshop will focus on how to launch a mobile application for a WordPress solution using AppPresser.

This workshop is aimed at the prospective WordPress developer. Either you use already use WordPress but you want to start developing your own custom WordPress plugin or you are an experienced PHP developer who wants to get involved in WordPress plugin development. We’ll look at the the basics of building a WordPress plugin, understanding important terminology like hooks and filters and I’ll share some common resources that a prospective plugin developer can use to ramp up their skills while at the same time building a small plugin of our own.

Have you ever wanted to sell something online? Have you heard about digital entrepreneurs who are “making money while they sleep”? Together, we’ll learn about how to start selling online with WooCommerce, and how to apply the tips and tricks used by major online retailers, to automate your online store. Bring your notebook, a pen, and a great idea.