Two music communities take divergent paths towards presenting their offerings to the world. I've been the coordinator behind two large membership sites (thescl.com and scoringarts.com), both non-profit music organizations that cater to the film and television composing community.

We’ll explore how each site was conceptualized, and how we tackled problems such as launching effectively, member communications, event hosting, content access, membership growth, other business considerations, social integration, and more.

Page Experience (PX) is a new Search ranking signal capturing how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page. In this talk we will review what PX is, how to reason about it in practice, and how to go about building WordPress sites that bring great PX to our users.

I'm OBSESSED w/ optimizing my block development workflow for speed and scalability.

I've built a BUNCH of custom block plugins over the years. In this talk I'm going to share the framework I've been using for quickly building custom block plugins.

You'll learn how to:

• Go from 0 to building custom blocks in minutes
• Quickly spin up a development server for building block-based plugins, themes and websites
• Never write CSS again by using TailwindCSS
• Enable Hot Module Replacement ( HMR ) for block development so you get instantaneous page refreshes for JS & CSS
• Effortlessly publish plugins to the WordPress Plugin Directory using github actions

In this session, I will live code (gulp!) my way through creating a custom block… in about 2 minutes. I think you'll be amazed by how easy it can be! I'll then walk you through a few more complex custom blocks to show you how you can leverage the power of WordPress and even integrate with other plugins to deliver unique and powerful experiences for your website visitors.

Since the launch of Gutenberg, we have been enjoying the great experience of Gutenberg. So far we have been able to take advantage of the WYSIWYG – ‘What You See Is What You Get’, inside the post editor. What would it be like to use Gutenberg outside the editor? Would the traditional admin screens like customizer still exist?

In this talk, you will learn what is different about Block-based themes and how you would be able to use the features like Nav menus and widgets outside of the post-editing screen. This talk will demonstrate many new exciting features and give you a good taste of using the Block-Based Theme.

You will know how the power to decide what the front end of the site will look like will ultimately reside in the user’s hands.

What technology made the biggest difference to us this year? Tailwind CSS - undoubtedly.

We built beautiful UX/UI for our plugins with Tailwind. We migrated our sites to Tailwind. First it was only me who got excited about it, now our entire team is in love.

Why? Our sites look better and load faster. Our plugins feel like solid apps and get their job done in less steps. We even found a way to make Tailwind work with any theme on WordPress frontend - this indeed was a task! In latest news, we've started migrating to Tailwind in our React based product as well.

I'll answer the most pertinent Whys and Hows in this quick talk as we relive our highs and lows with Tailwind!

Sometimes, it's hard to look at your own work through the end user's eyes. However, it's not that difficult to make your product more usable, simply by applying 10 design principles to your work.

In this talk, I explain these 10 principles with great examples, both how it could and how it shouldn't be done. You can start applying the principles straight away. By doing this, you contribute to making the web a little less frustrating to use.

See how publishers are integrating this new visual storytelling into their content strategy and their websites. Gain insights about what Web Stories is, how specific publishers are growing engagement with Web Stories, awesome use cases (who it is for), and why it’s important to get familiar with Web Stories. This visual, mixed media, kinetic, short-format storytelling experience is very different from text based content on the open web!

In this talk we'll look at why there is growing interest in the Jamstack approach to web development, what it means in general, and how it is specifically being applied to WordPress. We'll also examine the pros and cons of going Jamstack, when to consider using it and when to avoid it, and the tooling that is available to help you on your way.

In this talk, we will focus on how to create and grow recurring revenue by building site maintenance plans for your clients. Recurring revenue can revitalize your business profit plan and create a recurring source of income. We will discuss different types of services you can offer on a recurring schedule and what tools you can use to build these plans with ease.

One of the major strengths of WordPress is the ability to develop small plugins to solve particular needs. Whether you want to re-arrange menus or add a new dashboard widget, WordPress gives you the tools to make small, focused plugins to customize nearly anything.

This paradigm changes when your code is running across tens of thousands of customer sites, however. Suddenly, you have to coordinate which features are active based on the site. Is this a WooCommerce site? Does this feature exist in this version of WordPress? Has the site owner already installed another plugin to handle this piece of functionality?

In this session, we'll be taking a deep dive into the architecture, development decisions, and release process behind the "Must-Use" (MU) plugin that runs on every WordPress site across the Nexcess Managed Applications platform. Attendees will learn about the practice and challenges of building a WordPress plugin at scale, as well as how to better handle conflicts in their own plugins of any size.

Extending WordPress to create individualized website can be done through builders, custom themes, child themes — it’s the beauty of WordPress. When WordPress changed to block-focused editing, it forced us to adjust how we thought about this platform we all call home.

But it also created a huge opportunity to extend WordPress in new ways, to make it easier to put just enough control on the content side. It gives us a chance to shift the way we think about creating solutions for clients and how we create processes around building websites.

We’ll focus on embracing blocks with custom sites so we can speak about the general functional and time-saving advantages, and we’ll touch on some ways various builders incorporate native blocks as well. Because when you’re not spending time dealing with each page’s content, you get to spend more time on other fun stuff.

Throughout our workflows, no matter our hosting provider, we often have to reconfigure items such as General Settings or Active Plugins - and even items such as our Autoptimize settings, or FacetWP facets - per environment.

Fear not! That is where WP-CFM comes in. It allows you to push your configuration from your local development, include it in your version control, and pull it in your higher environments. You can even take it one step further, and include some post-deploy hooks in your CircleCI, or via Pantheon Quicksilver.

We'll touch on what WP-CFM is, why it's awesome, and showcase some examples of how it will save you time, and sanity.

If you provide people with WordPress products or services, you should also be thinking about how to teach WordPress itself. The WordPress learning curve is large, but more and more people are willing to learn every day. Teaching WordPress in conjunction with your product or service means your clients or customers are more educated, empowered, and enthusiastic than they would be otherwise. In this talk, Allie looks at the possible ways to teach people how to use WordPress - from blog posts to videos to ebooks. By the end, you'll walk away knowing how to build your own WordPress educational resources or how to improve the ones you already have.

Are you curious how hackers exploit vulnerabilities to backdoor their way into WordPress sites? And do you want to know what you can do to protect your site from them? As a security researcher, I spend day in and day out looking for vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes to responsibly disclose them to their developers so that the vulnerabilities can get patched before malicious threat actors discover them.

In this presentation, I want to show you what it's like to be an ethical hacker trying to find vulnerabilities before malicious threat actors do. I'll show you how hackers find vulnerabilities in WordPress code and provide you with some advice on what you can do to protect your site against malicious threat actors looking to exploit these vulnerabilities. When you leave this session, I hope you have a better understanding about why your WordPress site may be targeted by malicious threat actors, how hackers actually find and exploit these vulnerabilities, and what you can do to further secure your WordPress site.

As more countries and states pass their own privacy laws, websites are increasingly subject to privacy design requirements. Unfortunately, these requirements are not frequently discussed with website designers, leaving websites non-compliant and businesses at risk of fines and lawsuits. In this talk, I will discuss how to build privacy-focused websites, from designing ways to obtain proper consent, to avoiding dark patterns, and to ensuring that the design stands up to the test of changing privacy legislation.

Headless WordPress is all the rage. The JAMStack seems to be everywhere, you can't stop hearing about GraphQL, and you're exploring setting up a Gatsby front-end for your own blog.

For many folks, the standard "backend CMS + front-end UI" headless approach is great. But in larger businesses and enterprises, the Sandwich Stack — a three piece stack that adds a content API middle tier between your CMS and front-end — will give you greater flexibility, a clearer division of work, and better scaling and performance.

In this talk, you'll learn all about the Sandwich Stack: the practical benefits, how to avoid the pitfalls, and key tips to successfully implement it in your organization.

In this session, I'll be sharing viral gaming tips & actionable strategies that are really easy-to-implement, allow you to stand out from the crowd and increase your website traffic and engagement like never before!

You’ll learn how to integrate game elements into your WordPress site, service, community, content or campaign, in order to drive participation, increase engagement and grow your traffic and sales.

I'll also share examples from other successful online businesses so you can see how they are using game dynamics to challenge and reward their users, increase engagement, and also the tools you can use to implement these strategies in your business.

You'll learn how to apply gaming elements to incentivize people to make an extra effort to do things that they otherwise would not, reward your listeners and members incrementally as they move through your course, your training or your membership content.

The goal of this session is to show you different ways in which you can get your audience to engage with you, and with each other, in a fun and exciting way, helping them accomplish their goals, and also help you grow your business by recommending you to their friends and followers, thus creating a snowball effect

We will look at the Newspack project as both an open-source project and a service from Automattic. We will discuss what it is, the needs it fills, its challenges, and its successes, and how developers can learn and benefit from the project.

We often 'niche down' or position ourselves as experts as a value proposition for our clients or colleagues, setting us apart as Developers or Designers. This confidence can create blind spots or arrogant assumptions in our solutions to the detriment of customers. In this presentation, we'll look at how to remove the blinders, consider several real-world examples, and learn how a user-centric approach (combined with a generous dose of testing) can create a more accessible, useable WordPress solution.

People will say that content production is work. And it's true. But it can be a lot of fun - especially if you don't make it harder for yourself. We'll look at the common mistakes people make that only make everything harder. And I'll show you some tricks that I used (as I wrote daily over 3 years) and am still using today (as I've written every day of 2021).