Sessions

Presented by Nicola du Toit, Steve Barnett in Experience, Orange.

Topic Description: What can give us warm fuzzy feelings, more customers, more money, and easier development? Inclusive Design, that’s what! It helps us think about all the kinds of people that could access our websites, not just people that are like us. It helps us accept the web as it is (messy, slow, and broken), not the web as we want it to be (crispy, fast, and perfect).

In this accessibility-themed workshop, we’ll learn how we can make our sites work for more humans, on more devices and browsers, under more conditions. We’ll get hands-on with practical exercises and tutorials, and start digging at our own stuff to find the bits we can make more accessible. We’ll also look at ways of testing our sites, of having better conversations about them, and will be giving and receiving high fives. 

To attend this workshop, you should be familiar with HTML and CSS. A little knowledge of JavaScript will be useful, but isn’t required. You should bring your laptop, charger, and a pair of headphones (yes, really).

Presented by Jarryd Long in Experience, Orange.

The workshop would walk the audience through setting up their first support desk, as well as make use of a variety of add-ons that make the life of every support agent and developer easier, including Slack Notifications and improved email delivery.

It would also touch on basics of providing outstanding support to every client.

Presented by Noel Tock.

How do you design and make decisions for the WordPress websites you build? As competition increases, the process through which websites are produced will become increasingly important. In his talk, Noel will tackle this challenge from a product-focused approach – to help you build more successful websites, quicker.

Presented by Daine Mawer in Strategy, Zambezi.

Simplicity and automation is the new swag of the digital world. There are so many tools that can retrofitted to spin up solid, easy to maintain environments and code bases by typing a few simple commands into your terminal. Let me show you how to shave hours off of client work, increase your profit margin, and most importantly, receive peace of mind.

Presented by Chris Muller.

The term ‘Digital Nomad’ refers to people who are location independent (nomad) and can still perform their job through the use of technology (digital). That sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, today thousands of people agree and practice this modern lifestyle, and it is only trending upwards!

It’s not difficult to imagine why this has gained such popularity due to the many pros of traveling and working remotely, but it also comes with many challenges. Chris Muller, of Pango, recently experienced the digital nomad lifestyle first-hand while being located in Europe for 2.5 months.

He is now eager to share insights into this growing global trend, and his experiences/takeaways while being a digital nomad for the first time.

Presented by Trust Nhokovedzo in Experience, Tugela.

There are two main ranking factors used by search engines to determine the order of search results: content and links. The quality of content on a website determines the level of user engagement and search engine rankings position the website pages will get.

The question I want to answer is how can a business generate content that is good for search engine rankings while engaging the website visitors?

The purpose of this workshop is to give guidelines into how businesses/freelancers can generate website content to achieve both high search engine rankings and user engagement.

Presented by Mary Job.

I will be sharing my WordPress story and journey. How WordPress can be a source of happiness to ones life when one wakes up every morning. How one can make a living with WordPress if one is ready to put in the work. How one can fit into the WP community and be inspired to do more. Most importantly, how to fall in Love with WordPress, how I did and how you can too.

Presented by Seagyn Davis in Strategy, Tugela.

Composer has been around for a little while now and it has made the lives of thousands of PHP developers around the world just a little better (OK, quite a lot better).

So how do we get WordPress to be installed by Composer and all the themes nd plugins to be managed by Composer? Well thanks to our friends at Roots (amongst others), we have a solution. We’ll also be covering managing those premium plugins and themes as well!

Presented by Monehi Tuoane, Naledi Sinandile, Nonopha Mamba, Code4CT.

We spent out April and July school holidays learning how to use WordPress to create beautiful websites with e-commerce functionality. We’d like to share our experience!

Presented by Gareth Allison, Job Thomas in Engineering, Orange.

Sass (Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets) has been around for quite a while as a powered-up version CSS extension language. In this workshop, we’ll introduce you to some of the best Sass variables and mixins that we’ve encountered. We’ll help you to implement them to a basic website using Jetpack, WooCommerce, and the Storefront theme.

This is a workshop for intermediate users. You should have a good understanding of basic CSS.

Presented by Janet Hancock in Strategy, Zambezi.

Ensure higher conversion rates by starting with Facebook ads which target existing customers or already-interested, potential customers. Develop multiple lookalike audiences in Facebook using existing customer data as custom or seed audiences. Track traffic and results carefully using both Analytics and Facebook advertising insights

Your WordPress website has a wealth of customer data stored – whether they have subscribed to the site, your newsletter or made a purchase. These are already engaged customers and you can use their information to find similar people, in conjunction with Facebook’s custom audience tools. These similar people could also become customers – and they should be easier to convert as they will share similar traits. Not only that – once targeted and attracted to your site, you can start using your WordPress site’s data to show how they behave once there.

Presented by Anchen le Roux in Strategy, Tugela.

Modern websites need to be so much more than just an online shopfront or brochure. It needs to replicate the journey that a client will take when visiting your physical store, getting to know you and your products. Taking them from visitors and converting them into loyal customers.

Luckily building this with WordPress can be easy and quick with the tools available. It this session I will demonstrate how to use Beaver Builder to create lightweight professional looking Marketing funnels with MailChimp or Active Campaign

Presented by Roy Scheeren, Ed O’Reilly in Engineering, Zambezi.

Our experience using Vue.js as a frontend for a WordPress CMS.

Where we went wrong. What went well. Why it’s good or bad.

What about SEO?

Do we recommend this?

Presented by Petya Raykovska.

There is a hype surrounding the WordPress REST API these days. People focus on how it will change the future of WordPress, allow developers to expand the range of projects they can build, make WordPress popular outside its own bubble.

What we rarely talk about are the challenges presented by the REST API

This talk focuses on the challenges. It’s a short guide to the WordPress REST API from a non-developer perspective – what is it, how it will change WordPress development, combined with some thoughts on the impact it will have on projects created with WordPress and the people creating them.

– cover some of the hype around the REST API
– look at what REST is
– look at APIs more generally and how they enable applications to interact with one another
– look at how the REST API will impact WordPress development. I’ll cover different ways that people are using it
– for example custom admins and as a headless CMS
– look at the impact that the REST API will have on WordPress businesses

Presented by Stephen Tredrea in Experience, Zambezi.

Themes are dead, long live the theme! Creating a ‘no-theme’, multi-page website using Elementor, a free 2nd generation page builder with a game-changing twist – for non-developers.

Presented by Chris Muller in Engineering, Orange.

WordPress is built on PHP, and this has its many benefits but also many downfalls. One of them being that PHP was never meant to be a templating language. Introducing Twig & Timber! Twig a flexible, fast, and secure template language for PHP. Timber brings both WordPress and Twig together, providing the perfect combination and functionality and flexibility. I will not do a WordPress project without them!

In this workshop, I will walk the attendees through some basic Twig/Timber templating using a real theme. I aim to showcase some of the great benefits of using Twig/Timber and how they still maintain what we love about WordPress.

I work through the templating with the audience providing a demo theme, and also share kickstarter themes/documentation so they can continue working beyond the workshop.

Disclaimer: Twig/Timber can be addictive!

Presented by Jason Coleman.

I’ll go over the past 6 years of our business as we developed Paid Memberships Pro, integrated it into our consulting, and then eventually transitioned to a 100% products business.

This talk will be helpful for any WordPress developers or consultants who are thinking of building products of their own. I’ll use our own story as one example of how to do this, with advice that should helpful for businesses and freelancers looking to increase the value of their consulting services, add revenue streams from products, or transition 100% into products like we did.

Presented by Dwain Maralack.

Going from hacking all the things to engineering solutions because I have open access to the WP Community and the WordPress source code.

I’ll touch on my journey, Software Engineering within the WP context and how one can become better by being part of the WordPress community.

Presented by Shannon McLaughlin.

Have product. Must sell. WordPress + WooCommerce make it easy enough to create your online shop in a matter of minutes. Facebook + promoted posts make it easy enough to market directly to your target audience and get them to your website. But how do you quickly gain their confidence and trust and get them to actually make the purchase?

Presented by Thierry Muller in Engineering, Tugela.

Lots of developers use some WP Core APIs without knowing it, by searching for functions when in need or copy-paste code snippets they may find. How many developers actually know all the WordPress Core APIs (I am not only referring to the REST API) and how many even know WordPress Core is categories into various APIs? This talk will go through the WordPress Core APIs and showcase some really cool examples (code and results) as well where to find the right documentation for it (in the Codex).