Talks

Talks

Each year WordCamp Montreal strives to offer a wide variety of talks and discussions about and around WordPress. Our speakers are passionate, expert volunteers who want to teach you about WordPress and publishing on the web.

Below are the full descriptions of talks confirmed for WordCamp Montreal 2012. A final hourly schedule will most likely be posted in the week before the event once all talks are finalized. Thanks for your patience.

DRY CSS – Theories, methods and tools for efficient and scalable Stylesheets

Jeremy ClarkeThe value of keeping all code D.R.Y (Don’t Repeat Yourself) is universally accepted and demanded in the world of programming, but when it comes to CSS we’ve all learned to compromise and live in a wet mess. We don’t have to! This talk will go over how you can use thematic and structural CSS definitions to cut down on wasted code, simplify maintenance and unify your site styles just by DRYing out your standard CSS. I’ll explain how tools like Firebug enable a whole new way of understanding complex style interrelationships and give examples of the particular patterns that let me cut one stylesheet from ~4200 to ~2400 lines without losing anything but wasted code! We’ll also cover how preprocessors like LESS and SASS can take your DRY CSS even farther by actually programming your styles as if they were made of PHP.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke is a PHP, HTML, CSS and WordPress hacker from Montreal. He loves his job working on the nonprofit citizen media site Global Voices, where he manages dozens of WordPress sites, blogs, plugins, themes and a couple of bitchy Linux servers. He has a communications degree from Concordia University, but is mostly a self-taught web developer. Jeremy has been an organizer of WordCamp Montreal since it started in 2009, and has spoken at many other WordCamps as well.

Responsive Design for WordPress

Shannon Smith
Responsive design: is it mobile, fluid, dynamic, or all of the above? A summary of all the ways you can get your WordPress site ready for the responsive Web. I’ll look at responsive images, typography, grids and video. I’ll cover online services that create a responsive version of your site, special WordPress plugins, responsive-ready WordPress themes, and more. I’ll talk about how to target specific devices, what to avoid and what’s best for SEO.

Requires familiarity with WordPress, HTML and CSS. This talk is intended for web designers and developers.

View slides on Speaker Deck »

About Shannon Smith

Shannon is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also foodie and mother of four. twitter | google+ | blog

Code Faster and Smarter PHP with IDEs Like NetBeans

Jeremy ClarkeSimple text editors are fast and easy to use, but they don’t understand the code you’re writing. This talk will show you how Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like NetBeans or Eclipse (both are Free Software and cross-platform), can handle the tedious parts of programming to let you focus on getting things done with your code. Stop having to memorize function arguments and type out PHPDoc by hand! If you haven’t tried working with an IDE, or even if you have and got scared, this talk will walk you through the why and the how of saving time and headaches by committing to one. I’ll also cover using PHPXref, a simple alternative to IDEs that offers a lot of the same utility without changing any of your code workflow.

This talk is targeted at people coding PHP. Though IDEs are also useful for HTML, CSS and Javascript authors, their value is relative to how serious your coding is. If you’re planning to attend consider installing NetBeans beforehand so you can follow along.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Jeremy Clarke

Jeremy Clarke is a PHP, HTML, CSS and WordPress hacker from Montreal. He loves his job working on the nonprofit citizen media site Global Voices, where he manages dozens of WordPress sites, blogs, plugins, themes and a couple of bitchy Linux servers. He has a communications degree from Concordia University, but is mostly a self-taught web developer. Jeremy has been an organizer of WordCamp Montreal since it started in 2009, and has spoken at many other WordCamps as well.

WordPress Workflows and Process for small teams

Whether you work alone or in a small team for your WordPress projects, it helps to get off on the right foot. This workshop-style talk will dig in to topics to help you including:

– tracking WordPress core and plugins through svn,
– theme and plugin starter templates and workflows,
– svn vs git,
– theme development best practices,
– custom post types and taxonomies,
– the best useful ways to accomplish common tasks.

We will basically share a ton of our extensive experience and toolkit to optimize and awesome-ify your WordPress development process.

This talk is developer-focused.

About Colin Vernon

Founder of Stresslimit design, Colin has directed, architected and developed CMS platforms, intranets, applications and websites of all shapes & sizes for over a decade. His company and projects focus beautiful, useful, multi-platform communication, based mostly on WordPress as an extensible web platform. As well as being a long-time advocate of web standards, open source and the semantic web, he has lots of WordPress experience: his plugins have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and he has worked directly with Automattic on a number of projects. He is now also part of the WordPress-powered PressBooks project which aims to merge web, e-pub and print publishing for small and large authors and publishers. He also runs a record label.

Release Your Inner Project Manager and Make More Money

No matter what you’re doing with WordPress, no matter how few of you are doing it (even if it’s just you), chances are very good that you are already doing project management.

The reality of life in micro-enterprises is the wearing of multiple hats: accountant, designer, administrator, programmer, account manager. However, it’s the project manager hat that can give you more of what you need: money.

Project management skills help you to manage cost, schedule, risk, scope and customers: all the things you need to protect your margin so that at the end of your project, you will make the money you calculated that you would. Ironically enough, it’s the PM hat that is most neglected and most misunderstood.

In this talk, I’ll cover the basics of project management, with a particular emphasis on scope, cost and customer management.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Elisabeth Bucci

Elisabeth Bucci is a cubicle-dwelling Project Manager whose blog, The Passionate Project Manager, aims to make project management as fun as chocolate truffles. Which might explain those traffic numbers…

How to run a Newspaper with WordPress

A complete overview of creating a newspaper website using WordPress. This presentation will cover common newspaper, and magazine concepts, starter themes, advertising integration, helpful plugins and solutions for newspapers from startups to national publications.

This talk will be focused on bloggers with limited technical knowledge. In 45 minutes, users will be brought though the steps required to implement a fully functional, WordPress powered news website.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Christopher Ross

Christopher has spoken at WordCamp events in Toronto and Montreal in the past, taught community college courses in web design, and run a successful WordPress based consulting business since 2005.

For the past three years, he has been focussed on delivering network based WordPress communities using WordPress multisite and WordPress VIP based solutions for business and government organizations.

Most recently he developed the blogging solution for the Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Sun, and Calgary Herald for Postmedia, before that the blogging network for StockTwits (voted one of the most influential websites in finance by FastCompany) and the CNN Money bloggers network.

These days, I focus exclusively on developing newspaper based WordPress website for companies in Canada, the US, and Latin America.

WordPress dans les nuages

Votre idée de Startup ou votre produit repose sur votre site Web sous WordPress? Vous bloguez et trouvez qu’il est important que votre site réponde aux besoins de vos lecteurs? Vous avez donc besoin d’une solution solide comme le roc! Pourquoi ne pas aller vers les nuages, soit l’infonuagique (Cloud Computing)?

Dans cette présentation, je vous montrerais les avantages du Cloud, ainsi que comment déployez rapidement et aisément des sites sur un environnement de Cloud hautement évolutif vous permettant de commencer à petite échelle, puis d’évoluer à mesure que le trafic augmente.

Que vous soyez développeur, intégrateur ou simple utilisateur sans connaissance technique avancé, vous serez apte à bénéficier des avantages d’avoir votre site WordPress dans les nuages.

Visionner la présentation sur le site de Frédéric »

À propos de Frédéric Harper

Frédéric Harper est un évangéliste technique chez Microsoft Canada. Dans le monde des TI depuis plus de 10 ans, son expertise est principalement au niveau du développement Web avec différentes plateformes et technologies. Si vous voulez parler de Web, d’Open Source, de standards ouverts et d’interopérabilité, Fred est votre homme. N’hésitez pas à le contacter, car il est une bête sociable et un aficionado des médias sociaux. Pour en savoir plus sur lui ou sur divers sujets techniques et sujets du quotidien, allez lire son blogue.

Stop Writing for SEO And Start Writing for Your Audience

If content is king, then why are bloggers still bowing down in reverence to outdated SEO tactics? Google is doing all it can to strip away everything we used to believe about SEO copywriting — things like keyword density — and is implementing changes that have drastically altered search engine rankings for many, many websites. So, how do we write for SEO now? We don’t. It’s over. Now is the time for writers to write! Google is assessing the relevance of pages based more on a semantic algorithm that parses the content based on words it believes are relevant to each other. How do we target these algorithms most effectively? By writing good, solid, relevant content. And when we do that, especially on a blog platform, we increase our chances of having people share that content, which, in turn, increases the traffic. It’s time to throw SEO out the window, and start from scratch. The new strategy is simple: Write it right in WordPress and you open yourself up to new traffic sources, and higher search engine relevance.

This talk would be valuable to beginning blog writers, and to those who have a higher level of competence.

About Mark John Hiemstra

Mark John Hiemstra is a Staff Writer and Editor at Acquisio. He has been writing for the Web for more than 7 years, and has found WordPress to be his preferred platform for publishing content for as long as he has known of its existence. He has been active in SEO, SEM, and in many areas of marketing via the Internet, and is excited that the content we consume, along those who create it, are finally getting the recognition they deserve.

Enhanced Social Media Marketing with WordPress

Rapidly expanding social media platform options and increased smartphone/mobile device adoption have enabled marketers to reach out in ways that were literally impossible just a few years ago. As these communication networks continue their expansion into the daily lives of consumers, both businesses and bloggers are struggling to keep up with ways to reach their target market. WordPress combined with social media platforms can be used creatively to interact with existing clients, connect with prospective customers, and attract fresh audiences.

This session will introduce some important concepts and explore various WordPress features and plugins that take advantage of social media and mobile technology.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Brian Rotsztein

With 15 years of Internet marketing experience, Brian Rotsztein brings a seasoned approach to working with clients. As the head of multiple web design/Internet marketing companies and brands (RedstoneX.com, Uniseo.com, MailPrince.com,…), he helps businesses gain a competitive advantage. He holds two Master’s degrees, has taught university courses, and provides training services for topics such as SEO and social media. He’s been a WordPress fan since he started using version 1.6 (in 2005!).

SEO for WordPress

So most people who use blogs rely on WordPress, and WordPress has a lot of SEO potential, but out of the box, it just doesn’t cut it. In this session we’ll explore how to use WordPress to maximize your chances of ranking for the terms that are most relevant to your content. Specifically, we’ll look at:

  • Building a Keyword Targeted Category Taxonomy
  • Key SEO Plugins
  • Addressing Duplicate Content

After this session, audience members should (1) have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of onsite SEO, and (2) know what themes and plugins can help them implement these SEO and social features.

View slides on CT’s site »

About CT Moore

A recovering agency hack, CT Moore (@gypsybandito) is a strategist, blogger, and speaker who specializes in SEO and social content strategy.

Becoming a better WordPress developer

With a very low barrier to entry, developing with WordPress has become particularly popular in the past few years. However, this sometimes means that standards and best practices aren’t well respected.

This talk will cover WordPress coding standards, best practices, and technical tools to become a better developer. This will be a resourceful presentation for anyone beginning, interested in, and those who have been developing with WordPress for a long time. Some of the topics covered will be proper usage of hooks and filters, creating your own plugins (instead of always using that functions.php), making use of the mu-plugins folder, how to properly escape and sanitize user-generated content, security gotchas and more.

The talk is geared at beginning developers as much as it is for advanced developers. Basic php knowledge is strongly recommended, though not required.

View slides on Joey’s site »

About Joey Kudish

Joey Kudish is a Code Wrangler at Automattic. Previously, he was a freelancing web developer building high-scale WordPress sites and private WordPress plugins. He is the author and contributor to several WordPress plugins as well as contributor to WordPress core. Joey’s an avid coffee drinker, dog lover & enthusiastic traveler.

Follow @jkudish on twitter.

WordPress Plugin Development 201

After covering WordPress Plugin Development basics at last year’s conference, this presentation will continue its exploration of plugin development by covering topics such as the creation of an efficient development environment, efficiently loading and using jQuery, making plugins ready for internationalization and enhancing your plugin page on the official repository.

Some knowledge of PHP preferable. This talk is targeted to advanced users and up-and-coming coders. Watching my presentation from last year would also provide good background information.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Yannick Lefebvre

Yannick Lefebvre is a tech enthusiast and the author of the WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook, published by Packt Publishing. He has been blogging since 2003, started using WordPress in 2004 and published his first plugin, Link Library, in March 2005. Since then, he released six other plugins, all hosted on the official WordPress.org site. He absolutely loves using WordPress to develop web sites and find PHP to be a most liberating language compared to more traditional languages such as C/C++. Follow @ylefebvre on Twitter.

Three copies of the WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook will be raffled off during Yannick’s presentation. To order your own copy of this title in e-book format, buy the book from Packt and enter code wcmontreal12 in the promotional box field at checkout to get 40% off until December 31st, 2012.

Debugging for WordPress Developers

Techniques, tools, and examples on how to debug WordPress development issues.

Beginning or Advanced Coders. Must understand concepts of WordPress development.

About Mo Jangda

Mo wrangles code and VIPs at WordPress.com / Automattic. Mo enjoys ice cream and other sugary things.

Utilisation de WordPress comme CMS dans un contexte académique

La Faculté de médecine de l’Université de Montréal utilise WordPress depuis 2010 pour son blogazine (blogue et magazine) facultaire et, depuis 2011, comme système de gestion de contenu pour ses sites départementaux et de programmes (près d’une trentaine). L’étude de cas présentera, dans un contexte académique, les différentes étapes de migration du contenu existant et de la gestion quotidienne du contenu des différents sites. Nous examinerons les avantages et les inconvénients à utiliser WordPress et les rôles des différents intervenants dans l’ensemble du processus.

Cette étude de cas s’adresse aux communicateurs de niveau intermédiaire à avancé qui souhaitent utiliser WordPress comme système de gestion de contenu dans un contexte académique.

À propos de Benoit Beaudoin

Benoit Beaudoin travaille depuis plus de 25 ans dans la communication imprimée et depuis 15 ans dans la communication Web. Tour à tour enseignant, graphiste et maintenant rédacteur et communicateur Web, il s’intéresse particulièrement au développement de pratiques de communication Web dans un contexte académique.

Solutions Web « prêtes-à-porter » avec WordPress

Aux prises avec un gestionnaire de contenus désuet, coûteux et peu flexible, la Ville de Montréal s’est récemment tournée vers des solutions libres pour gérer ses contenus Internet et Intranet. Elle a notamment retenu WordPress principalement pour des projets intranet, mais également pour quelques besoins Internet.

Nous avons surnommé ce projet Prêt-à-porter puisque l’on souhaitait déployer des solutions rapidement, à faible coût, sans faire de développement et en utilisant un maximum de composantes réutilisables entre les projets.

Lors de cette conférence, nous exposerons ce qui nous à mené au choix de WordPress et comment nous avons procédé afin de pouvoir déployer sur demande des instances WordPress normalisées. Nous aborderons également les défis que nous avons eu à relever dans ce projet dont il reste encore quelques étapes à franchir.

Cette présentation non technique s’adresse à tous, mais intéressera particulièrement quiconque souhaite introduire WordPress en tant que gestionnaire de contenus au sein de son organisation.

Visionner la présentation sur Slideshare »

À propos de Stéphane Plante

Je suis tombé dans le Web quand il était petit et j’ai maintenant près de 20 ans d’expérience dans ce domaine. À la Ville de Montréal depuis 12 ans, j’y ai joué à peu près tous les rôles associés au Web, intégrateur, Web designer, Webmestre. Je suis actuellement conseiller au service des technologies de l’information en matière de Web et d’innovation technologique. Au cours des quatre dernières années, j’y ai mené plusieurs projets avec WordPress.

Votre site WordPress est-il bien protégé?

Vous devez avoir un plan de sauvegarde et de protection pour votre site. C’est ce que je vous propose avec la présentation, un plan d’entretien mensuel qui vous donnera la tranquillité d’esprit de savoir que votre contenu est protégé et, qu’advenant une catastrophe comme le piratage de votre site, vous pourrez rapidement le récupérer.

Sujets couverts :

  • Quelques modifications toutes simples à faire (admin, salt keys)
  • L’importance des mises à jour régulières
  • Quelles extensions installer pour protéger et sauvegarder son site WordPress
  • (BackupBuddy, malware scanners, WordFence ou Better WP Security) etc.

Pour le propriétaire de site WordPress régulier, le blogueur régulier. Pas besoin d’être expert, je vise à simplifier tout en apportant la tranquillité d’esprit à l’utilisateur.

Visionner la présentation sur le site de Danielle »

À propos de Danielle Guérin

Danielle Guérin, adjointe virtuelle depuis 2002, passionnée de WordPress et du Marketing Web, est tombée dans la potion Internet en 1999. C’était à l’époque où il fallait faire les sites Web avec du code HTML ou un WYSYWYG de Geocities. Les plus anciens s’en souviendront…

C’est en 2008 qu’elle apprend qu’il existe un système de gestion de contenu qui s’appelle WordPress, qui est gratuit et qui lui permet d’offrir à ses clients une solution encore plus simple et conviviale.

Danielle a eu à récupérer plusieurs sites WordPress qui ont été piratés, souvent parce qu’ils étaient vulnérables et que les clients n’avaient pas actualisé leur WordPress. Suite à cette expérience, elle s’est informée des différentes ressources disponibles et des procédures à suivre pour protéger les sites de ses clients à qui elle offre son forfait de sécurité WordPress.

Commerce électronique + WordPress = À l’aide!

L’éventail de solutions de commerce électronique sur WordPress a beaucoup évolué depuis quelques années. Il devient crucial de choisir la bonne plate-forme e-commerce, étant donné la difficulté de changer plus tard.

Cette présentation offrira un aperçu des principales extensions de commerce électronique, leur coûts, leurs caractéristiques, leurs forces et faiblesses ainsi que la viabilité de leurs développeurs.

Nous regarderons également la vitalité de l’écosystème entourant chaque extension: support (payant ou non), forums de discussion, extensions et thèmes additionnels.

Après cette présentation, vous serez mieux outillé pour choisir la plate-forme de commerce électronique la plus appropriée à votre entreprise ou aux projets WordPress de vos clients.

Cette présentation s’adresse à la fois à une clientèle de gens d’affaire et d’intégrateurs webs, mais le jargon technique sera gardé à un minimum 🙂

Visionner la présentation sur Slideshare »

À propos de Jean-Francois Arseneault

Je suis informaticien avec plus de 20 ans d’expérience en TI, dont près de 10 à aider les professionnels et PMEs à utiliser les technologies du web.

Depuis 2007, mon entreprise utilise WordPress afin d’offrir à nos clients une plate-forme web performante et évolutive. Nous sommes spécialisés dans l’intégration de sites multilingues complexes.

Don’t be Afraid of the HTML Tab

Does the HTML tab on your WordPress dashboard beckon to you, but the thought of tags, divs and stylesheets keeps you from clicking over? All good sites start with a good foundation — semantic and valid HTML and CSS. Once you have that foundation, you have all the power in the world to control the look of your site.

This workshop will look at the box model and the most commonly used HTML tags and how to use them to lay out your text without breaking your theme. We’ll also take a look at CSS — what it is and how to use it to style your content.

This talk is aimed for beginner coders who don’t know their <a> from their <span> class.

About Laurie M. Rauch

Laurie M. Rauch believes that great user experiences start at the first line of code. Laurie is the owner and chief code nerd of Code Diva, where she provides WordPress customizations and coaching, and specializes in developing sites for WordPress using standards-compliant HTML and CSS.

She is also part of the support team for Graph Paper Press, an associate designer for E.Webscapes, and has taught web page design at Seneca College.

In her free time Laurie is slowly redoing her house, blogs, tweets, and pins.

Great User Experiences Start Here: an Approach to Information Architecture for WordPress

Before you start coding there’s an important step for every website project: this is, of course, Information Architecture. Often poorly understood and seldom given the attention it deserves, IA is, in fact the foundation of every great website. WordPress comes with a built-in Information Architecture that includes basic building blocks with which most users are familiar: pages and posts, categories and tags. But it also features custom content types (or post types), drag and drop menus, and custom taxonomies, which all help categorize information and make it easier for end-users to find.

This presentation will offer a foundation for understanding how IA can help meet site goals through practical examples of how to resolve site architecture problems.

The presentation is largely high-level, and will be understandable to attendees with only a basic knowledge of WordPress.

View slides on Slideshare »

About David Hamilton

I’m a blogger, content strategist, and journalist. My work has appeared in Canadian publications including the National Post, and trade magazines like the Web Host Industry Review. I recently began working for Toronto digital marketing agency Kobayashi Online, where my day revolves around the creation of exciting content for organizations.

Passionate About Plugins

Kathryn PresnerThe huge range of community-contributed plugins (nearly 20,000) is one of the most valuable features of WordPress.org. But how do you determine what’s a safe and effective plugin without being overwhelmed by choice? In this session we’ll discuss how to make an informed decision about which plugin to use – and look at how to troubleshoot any conflicts that may crop up. I’ll also present a few recommended plugins, including security tools that help protect your site against malicious intruders. From simple plugins to the more complex, we’ll look at how to set them up, what they do, and pitfalls to watch out for. Feel free to bring your favourite plugin to share with the group during the Q&A period.

No technical knowledge needed. Geared to beginner-level users and designers.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Kathryn Presner

Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services takes a holistic approach to web design and development, building unique sites that work well, look great, and are easily found in search-engine results by the target market. Kathryn is passionate about helping people avoid common website pitfalls and as an enthusiastic WordPress user, gives back to the open-source community by answering questions as a volunteer WordPress support-forum moderator and presenting at events like WordCamp, Podcamp, and Girl Geek Dinners. Non-web pastimes include cooking healthy and delicious food, pondering which of her three cats is the most human-like, and eagerly awaiting her first crop of homegrown organic garlic. Follow @zoonini on Twitter.

WordPress Happiness Bar

The Happiness Bar is not a presentation, it’s a part of the event where volunteer experts hang around and help attendees with any questions they have. Get your WordPress questions answered, one-on-one, by some of the best experts around. Tricky configuration question? Plugins issues? Wanting to bring WordPress in your enterprise but wondering if it’ll fit in? Whatever the question, our friendly volunteers will make sure you leave the chat with solutions.

WordPress Experts: The Happiness Bar needs you! If you’re better at answering questions than asking please come to the bar and help out! You can sign up to be an official happiness barista on the volunteering page.

Getting Started With Theme Development

Kirk WightIt can start as simply as, “I just want this thing over there”. Maybe the themes you’ve found just don’t match what you have in your head, or the idea of creating themes piques your DIY attitude, or desire for a new career. Getting into theme development may be just what you need to scratch that itch.

This presentation will concentrate on the tools, techniques and skills necessary for starting out in theme development, while providing some advice to minimize the growing pains. As we go along, we’ll pair our fundamentals with a quick look at more advanced techniques, giving some context for our journey into theme development.

A basic understanding of HTML and CSS will be beneficial. This presentation is targeted to beginning coders and designers, and those with some web design experience looking to work with WordPress.

View slides on Kirk’s site »

About Kirk Wight

Kirk Wight builds WordPress websites for fun and a living in Montreal, Quebec. He is a former IT Manager, and also volunteers for the WordPress Theme Review Team. Follow @kwightca on Twitter.

Getting WordPress to Speak Your Language

Rick RadkoAn in-depth look at creating WordPress sites in a language other than English, and/or with multiple languages. We will: set up a WordPress site that is not English, see what is needed in themes and plugins to use them in other languages, and learn how to create translations for themes and plugins. We will then review the different strategies and options for creating multilingual sites, from simple sites with custom themes, to multilingual plugins and multisite installs, and the issues related to each approach.

This talk should be informative for WordPress users of any skill level. To get the most from the talk, experience with changing settings, installing plugins, FTP/uploading files to your WordPress install, and editing configuration files would be an asset, but is not required.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Rick Radko

Rick Radko is a creative, artistic, and entrepreneurial engineer with a passion for finding solutions to difficult design problems. He is the owner of R-Cubed Design Forge, where he develops custom web applications, social networking and team collaboration solutions for businesses. Rick specializes in custom application development and multilingual WordPress sites. He is co-leader, and a frequent presenter at the Ottawa WordPress Group. Follow @r3designforge on Twitter.

Choisir un thème WordPress : plus qu’une question de goût

Élise DesaulniersAlexandre SimardChoisir un thème WordPress, c’est comme choisir un manteau d’hiver. On veut le garder longtemps et on a peur de se tromper. Pour compliquer les choses, WordPress.org répertorie plus de 1500 thèmes gratuits et 60 studios offrant des thèmes commerciaux. Ça en fait, du manteau!

Bien sûr, il faut trouver un beau thème. Mais il faut aussi s’assurer de trouver un bon thème. Nous vous expliquerons la différence entre les deux et vous outillerons pour repérer le thème répondant à vos besoins et à ces deux critères. Parmi les sujets abordés:

  • Comment identifier ses besoins ?
  • Où trouver des thèmes ?
  • Comment reconnaître les bons ?
  • Faut-il payer ou pas ?
  • Pourquoi et comment modifier son thème une fois qu’on l’a choisi ?

Aucun. Accessible à tous. Les débutants vont tout comprendre, les personnes avancées devraient apprendre quelques trucs.

Visionner la présentation sur Slideshare »

À propos de Élise et Alexandre

Élise Desaulniers a redécouvert le plaisir d’écrire avec WordPress en 2009 et blogue maintenant sur voir.ca et penseravantdouvrirlabouche.com. Elle essaie aussi de contrôler son besoin compulsif de changer de thème dès qu’on annonce une nouveauté. Elle donne des cours d’introduction à WordPress aux non-geeks et achève un deuxième livre sur l’éthique alimentaire. Suivez @edesaulniers sur Twitter.

Depuis 3 ans, Alexandre Simard gagne (modestement) sa vie comme consultant indépendant spécialisé en WordPress. Il a été conférencier aux deux premières éditions de WordCamp Montréal, puis barman du bonheur l’année dernière. Il est aussi le scénariste de la bande dessinée « Yves, le roi de la cruise ». Suivez @qbert72 sur Twitter.

Creating Custom Child Themes for WordPress

Tracy LevesqueEveryone wants a unique site, but altering a WordPress theme directly can cause all kinds of problems. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to safely change the look-and-feel of your site using Child Themes, without modifying the core code of your theme. Attendees will be led through the steps of creating a child theme via slides and live demo. CSS modification, template modification, include tags, conditional tags, creating your own page templates and modifying functions.php are all covered. The end of class will include time for questions, links to helpful resources and links to the slides on Slideshare and files used on Github.

Attendees should have basic general knowledge of WordPress and be comfortable with HTML and CSS.

View slides on Slideshare »

About Tracy Levesque

Tracy Levesque is a co-owner of YIKES, Inc., a Philadelphia web design and development shop. She has been designing websites since 1996 and working with WordPress since 2007. She spends her days building custom themes for WordPress and seeing how much functionality she can add without knowing PHP. When not wrangling HTML and CSS, Tracy rides bikes, eats sushi, chases her 5 year old daughter and takes pictures of abandoned buildings. Follow @liljimmi on Twitter.

Advanced Post Queries: Best Practices for Accessing your Data

Whether you’re maintaining a personal blog, or leveraging WordPress as your CMS backbone, you will eventually want to modify what content WordPress sends to your pages from the database. WordPress itself provides a rich set of tools and methods for interacting with the database, most of which don’t even require database expertise. Each method is appropriate in certain circumstances, and should be avoided in others. This talk discusses each method of generating or modifying the database query when and how each should be used. While this discussion focuses on coding, even those just starting out will be sure to learn best practices around how and when to use “query_posts()” vs. “get_posts()” vs. “new WP_Query()” to build custom lists of posts. Seasoned developers will appreciate discovering the right way to use hooks like “pre_get_posts”, “request” and “posts_clauses” to access the query at the lowest levels.

Although this talk deals exclusively with PHP coding and the WordPress API, it is targeted at a very broad audience from WordPress coding beginners through to experts. If code makes you break out in a rash, this might not be the right talk for you.

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About Tom

Tom Auger is a designer, developer and educator and a core contributor to WordPress. His passion is to gain a deep understanding of the inner workings of WordPress internals and he leverages this knowledge in client-facing projects with digital agency Zeitguys, inc, as well as by giving back to the WordPress community through support forums, the WordPress Codex, and talking at WordCamps. Follow @tomauger on Twitter.

A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress

Shannon SmithKathryn Presner This introductory session is geared for bloggers, web designers and programmers who are new to WordPress. Even those who don’t know a Codex from a Cadillac will feel comfortable here. Delving into WordPress from a beginner’s point of view, we use unintimidating plain language to explain the fundamental concepts of WordPress, from themes, to widgets, to plug-ins. We go spelunking in the admin panel and show real-world examples of what WordPress can do. Questions are welcome, and no query is too basic, so don’t be shy!

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For beginners to WordPress, no knowledge of HTML required.

About Kathryn and Shannon

Read Kathryn’s bio on her solo talk.
Read Shannon’s bio on her solo talk.

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