WordPress TV has recordings of the sessions from our 2017 WordCamp Rhode Island.
Here are the links. Keep checking back for more videos!
Also, follow us on Twitter @WordCampRI to get details on #WCRI 2018 when they become available.
Friday September 22, 2017
9 a.m.
5 Steps to Personal and Website Security
Adam Warner
Mindfulness: “The quality or state of being conscious or aware of something.” Security can seem intimidating and complex for many, but we shouldn’t (can’t) let that stop us from doing everything possible to secure our WordPress sites and ourselves. After all, our websites are often part of our livelihood.
In this session Adam Warner addresses the “big picture” of personal and website security and breaks down the fundamental tasks needed for a strong security plan online. He provides an actionable checklist on what audience members can implement immediately to better secure themselves online in addition to their WordPress websites.
After attending this session, audience members will have a better understanding of personal security online and how it affects website security as a whole, as well as steps they can take to mitigate risk in the future.
Getting Started with WordPress.com
Lydia Rogers
WordPress.COM (as opposed to WordPress.ORG) is for those who want to concentrate on their blog or website and not worry about maintenance and security updates. This workshop is led by Lydia Rogers to get started on your website or blog.
Information from the session can also be found at:
MyHow2Web.WordPress.com
10 a.m.
Maintain Your Theme’s Styles, Future You Will Thank You
Maxwell Morgan
A problem that gets out of hand easily, and is hard to come back from once you’ve gone too far, is CSS bloat. Max shows the importance keeping CSS bloat to a minimum, the benefits of using a CSS preprocessor, and the best-practices to avoid bloat in the future. While all of this may cause small delays in the present, it will help you immensely in the future and inevitably you will thank past-you for keeping things tidy and clear.
Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: All (beginner, intermediate, advanced)
Presentation slides:
http://slides.com/maxinacube/wcri-2017
1 p.m.
Keynote – The Big Fail: Breaking Down the 4th Wall of Agency Life
Aaron Ware
In this interactive experience Aaron explores honesty in agency life. Too often in the agency world and society, we have an unwillingness to put ourselves in a state of vulnerability to our clients and our peers.
Adversity is what drives us to be better, to problem solve and to grow in all aspects of our lives. Nothing in life is perfect and even with extreme planning there are still curveballs thrown our way.
Aaron will be sharing his insights, missteps and lessons learned from nearly 20 years of agency experience, including his 10+ years running Linchpin: a WordPress focused digital agency. He will be encouraging interaction with attendees along the way, providing audience members with the ability to anonymously participate in sharing #fails and #wins on Twitter and/or the WordPress RI Website.
Presentation slides:
https://slides.com/aaronware/wcri
2 p.m.
Moving Beyond the Customizer
Ajay Coletta
So you made changes to your WordPress theme using the built-in Customizer, but you would like the ability to make more changes to the look & feel of your theme, well this session is for you.
I will discuss the benefits of creating & modifying Child themes and show you how you can easily inspect and modify the css styles that control the bulk of overall design.
And if you want to dig deeper into theme customization, I will discuss the benefits of starter/foundational themes like Genesis.
Presentation slides:
goo.gl/WY2XbH
Creating a Powerful Personal Brand for Connection, Communication & Success
Laura Willis
Are you ready to take your next step? Do you want to have a competitive edge? Do you want to do more work that you love and have more success while doing it?
Learn how uncovering your personal brand can have a direct impact on getting more of what you want; it’s a combination of art and science.
In this interactive, hands-on workshop with Laura Willis you’ll learn:
What a personal brand is and why it’s important
Why passion is critical and contagious
Who your “target audience” is and the value you bring to them
Identify how you “show up” and the perception you create
Understand the science and power of connection and how it works
Where it fits into all of your communications
When you uncover your authentic personal brand, you get clearer about the vision you have for your life, how you want to live it and achieve it.
3:00 p.m
Extending and Building Upon the WordPress REST API
Timothy Jacobs
WordPress 4.7 introduced the content endpoints for the REST API. This grants access to built in content like posts, pages and categories. However, the power in WordPress often lies in plugins and custom content.
In this talk Timothy Jacobs explores how you can extend the WordPress REST API to access custom post types, custom taxonomies, metadata and custom fields. He’ll also touch on building completely custom endpoints using the built-in framework introduced in WordPress 4.7.
Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: Beginner developer with some experience with CPTs (custom post types) and meta boxes
Presentation slides:
https://timothybjacobs.com/wcri/
3:30 p.m.
WordPress into a Single Page Application (SPA)
Tyler Smith, Zack Cote, Jennifer Shaheen
Join the development team of Technology Therapy, along with President Jennifer Shaheen for an advanced workshop where participants will learn how to turn their WordPress site into a fast and user-friendly Single Page Application using modern tooling and principles.
Topics to be discussed:
- Integrating Vue.js
- Creating custom endpoints for the WordPress Rest API
- Live updating content: posts, comments, and notifications
Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: Advanced
4 p.m.
Woo for You: Customizing WooCommerce
Gary Thayer
WooCommerce now powers over 30% of all online stores, both big and small. While the basic WooCommerce package covers a lot of needs, business use cases often require special attention. This talk with Gary Thayer will look at the best practices for building and customizing themes and plugins for WooCommerce.
He’ll talk about:
- Building a streamline customer service experience for your business
- Keeping template files up to date
- Useful actions and filters
- Custom solutions for unique eCommerce situations
Information from the session can also be found at:
Saturday September 23, 2017
9 a.m.
So Many Plugins – So Little Time
Reiko Beach
For someone new to WordPress choosing the right plugin can be overwhelming and frustrating. In this session Reiko Beach will go over some simple tips to help make your selection process easier, highlighting popular plugins.
Information from the session can also be found at: https://www.slideshare.net/reiko659/so-manypluginsri2017
10 a.m.
Developing WordPress Plugins Using the MVC Methodology
Nate Allen
MVC, which stands for Model-View-Controller, is a popular methodology used by modern PHP frameworks to separate the presentation (HTML) from the data and logic of an application. In this talk you’ll learn how to write plugins “the MVC way” while still doing things “the WordPress way.”
Intended Audience Type: Developer
Intended Audience Experience: Advanced
Presentation slides:
What’s Your Data Story?
Jennifer Shaheen
Every time a visitor comes to your website or views your social media content, they’re telling you what they think about your business, products you’re selling and content you’re sharing. This information doesn’t show up in the comment section! Valuable insights are waiting for you in your website and social media analytics.
Key Takeaways:
- Data reveals what products and messaging attracts customer attention.
- Learn how to discern your visitors unique path to purchase, including any stumbling blocks that may be slowing your sales.
- Learn how to identify data duplication and other common system configuration errors that compromise the validity of analytic data.
Intended Audience Type: Marketers, Content Managers
Intended Audience Experience: Beginner to Intermediate
Attendees should know the basics of Google analytics and metrics.
11 a.m.
WordPress Transients: A Technical Guide to a Powerful API
Ryan Kanner
There’s a simple yet powerful API within WordPress to help developers cache all sorts of data, and in turn speed up load times. Transients are often misunderstood by developers and their powerful abilities can sometimes be misused.
In this session Ryan Kanner will uncover the inner workings of the Transient API, and learn how to properly leverage it’s abilities.
Information from the session can also be found at: http://slides.com/codeprokid/wcri17#/
Don’t Just Design and Build a Death Star, Maintain It Too
Matthew Clancy
So you have your WordPress site up and running and it’s awesome. But what’s next? Don’t let those pesky Rebels destroy your new site.
Come learn about what you can do to keep your WordPress site in good working order after it is completed with Matthew Clancy.
Presentation Slides:
1 p.m.
Doubling Your WordPress Site Conversions
Tom Shapiro
After investing so much time, effort, and resources in developing your WordPress website and marketing your brand, it can be frustrating if you are not achieving a high number of conversions on your website. Tom Shapiro will walk you through effective techniques to get more of your site visitors converting. Some of the techniques will focus on behavior-based data gleaned from heat maps, scroll maps, and A/B testing, while others will focus on messaging, neuromarketing, and human psychology, while yet others will focus on color, design, and UX (user experience) elements. Whether you are looking to sell more on your website, increase leads, promote an upcoming event, build your email list, or drive site visitors to another type of conversion event, you’ll walk away from this session with highly specific methods for increasing your website’s conversion rates.
Intended Audience Type: Designer, Marketer
Intended Audience Experience: Intermediate to Advanced
Presentation slides:
Presentation
A More Humanized Web Design Process for the Client
Cara Nelson
Is your initial client discovery meeting generating bad ideas around your client’s organizational want and needs? Not focusing on the end user? Wouldn’t it be great to have more enthusiasm, more positive energy, more expertise, and more magic during your first client meeting?
My approach builds human-centered design and user experience into your design process. You’ll know your client before your first session, understand their industry and know who their customers are. I teach human-centered design as a creative approach to problem solving that unleashes creativity to put people at the center of the design process. Treating your client like a human refuels your web design process with better relationships and you emerge as a team from the beginning.
Presentation Slides:
Presentation
2:30 p.m.
Beyond the Blog: WordPress as a Comprehensive CMS for Media Organizations
Stephen Tiszenkel
Fourteen years after WordPress’ initial release, the platform is widely adopted and well-respected by major media organizations. Yet many industry leaders still view it exclusively as blogging software.
In this talk, Stephen Tiszenkel explores why this idea persists and how to overcome it. He’ll take a comprehensive look at some of the tools you can use to meet all the needs of a progressive, digitally savvy, growth-minded multimedia publisher.
Intended Audience Type: Developers, Content Managers, Executives
Intended Audience Experience: All levels of experience
Presentation slides:
Beyond the Blog (4 MB PDF)
Little Things Make a Big Difference
Michelle Ames
So you can build a technically wonderful website, but does it appeal to your audience? Does it have finesse?
Who is it designed for: the owner, the designer/developer, or the customer/user? Are forms user-friendly?
This talk will show you the things that make a website more complete, user-friendly, and user-appealing. Topics will include favicons, custom 404 pages, form buttons, footers, colors, SSL certificates, and more.
Intended Audience Type: Beginner and Up (it’s marketing-oriented)
Intended Audience Experience: Any Level
Information from the session can also be found at: Presentation
3:30 p.m.
Marketing Experts Panel with Live Questions & Website Reviews Laura Willis, Jennifer Shaheen, Michelle Ames, Tom Shapiro
This marketing panel isn’t your ordinary Q&A session. We extended the time of this panel so our panel of expert marketers had the opportunity to share some of their greatest success stories, experiences and strategies. We also took a deep dive into those times when things go wrong, and how to recover from them.
We did a live website analysis on the screen, giving detailed feedback from some of the top WordPress marketers in the area.
This year we had the largest amount of speaker applications. That’s because everyone wants to get in on the speaker action in RI, am I right? Pair that with the new blind submission process and it was a task to fill our schedule. From the feedback at the event and the small amount of survey responses thus far, I am pleased to say that the speakers this year really hit it out of the park!
Here’s a talk at WordCamp RI for advanced developers wanting to add something new to their skill set. The development team from Technology Therapy will be hold a workshop on turning your WordPress website into a single page application.
You’re getting ready for WordCamp RI. How can you get the most out of your two days? Here’s a round-up of advice from WordCamp experts.
In just a few days, this Friday and Saturday, we’ll hold WordCampRI at the East Greenwich campus of New England Tech for the third year. This year is an exceptionally exciting year for NEIT. They are expanding and improving campus life. A first-ever for NEIT, a dorm has been built and even more spaces for learning and relaxing have been added to the campus. You can watch a 
So you made changes to your WordPress theme using the built-in Customizer, but you would like the ability to make more changes to the look and feel of your theme? Well this session is for you.