Category Archives: Sessions

Learn to Build Mobile Applications using WordPress!

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The wait is finally over! This month we resume a regular schedule of amazing WordPress education. And that’s not all! This month I also get to reveal a new pricing structure and a new way to watch all of our sessions going forward.

 

New Session Structure!

The single biggest struggle of organizing the monthly sessions here at WPSessions has always been coordinating a window of time that works for all of our excellent presenters. This issue is compounded as they are rarely presenting from the same continent, let alone the same time zone.

To simplify everything, all of our sessions going forward will feature a single presenter who will be instructing on a single topic. We’ll balance this, too, with an increase in frequency of broadcasts. As our speakers are able, we will host more than one live event per month.

 

New Session Schedule!

Instead of hosting these uniformly on Saturday afternoons, we’re going to try something different. Because WPSessions has a world-wide audience, it’s impossible to pick a single day and time that works well for everyone. So, instead, we’re going to try a lot of different dates and times.

At this moment it is completely the speaker’s option on which day of the week and which time of day they present.

After we’ve gotten a few under our belt (or enough people sound-off in the comments about which days and times are best for their schedule) we’ll likely settle into a uniform and predictable schedule – possibly even ramping up to two live broadcasts at different times for the different hemispheres.

 

New Session Pricing!

Thanks to our amazing sponsors, LIVE broadcasts will be 100% free to everyone all spring and summer long. I’ve always wanted more people to be able to access this amazing content and be engaged during the live Q&A period during the event, so I reached out to some amazing folks and am finally able to do it.

The recorded content will remain a paid-only feature of the site, and VIP Members will still get the recordings included as part of their benefits.

 

This Month: Learn how to Build Mobile Applications Using WordPress

wpsession17_thumb Scott Bolinger is going to walk us through the easiest way forward with creating mobile apps using WordPress and JavaScript.

We’ll learn how to use the budding WP-API to make it easy to get data in and out of our WordPress site, how to build a lean front-end using AngularJS, and how to compile the whole site into a mobile application package that is ready to distribute via the various app stores.

You can attend this session having never used the WP REST API or any of the other technologies we’ll be discussing. No matter what, by the time the session is over you should have enough working knowledge to build a working mobile application using WordPress.

Learn More and Register Today

Join us for “Design for Developers” on Sept 20

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wpsession15_thumb How would you rate your design skills and sensibilities?

So often we hear about how designers should learn development. Very rarely do we hear anything about how developers should learn design. And yet, so much of the decision making for user interface and interaction – decisions often made by developers – are actually in the design domain.

This month we’d like to turn the tables and bring about awareness and better decision-making when it comes to building products that will surprise and delight their users. We’d like to underscore the importance of leveraging, at the very least, a basic understanding of design and interaction principles and the profound impact that can have at every level of project development.

Your Instructors

It is my pleasure to announce that Michelle Schulp, Natalie MacLees, and Chris Ford will be leading us through a wide gamut of design fundamentals. I cannot imagine a better team who is more adequately prepared to speak on this topic.  These three women are leading authorities on the matter, and they’re here to share from their vast depths of wisdom and experience.

Topics Covered

Michelle will be kicking off this month’s session with “How to Speak Unicorn”, a fun presentation that will bring you up to speed on common design language and terminology. This is especially useful to help bridge the communication gap between designers and developers, and clients as well.

Next, Natalie will teach us about all the ways in which “Your User is NOT a Robot.” This is an extremely important reminder to all of us who are completely entrenched in problem solving. There is this tremendous expanse separating us from the real humans who actually use the tools we’re building, and it’s so difficult for us to see things with fresh eyes from their perspective. Too often we fall into solving the wrong problems, or solving the right problems in the wrong way. Natalie will help you guard against that.

Finally, Chris Ford will walk us through five principles to “Write Better Code by Design”. Through this presentation she will help you to build products that your users and other professionals will absolutely love. They’ll help you sell hundreds of copies because they themselves will delight in using and working with the product. You’ll also learn the five simple ways you can improve your theme or plug-in’s code by leveraging the same thought process designers use.

Join Us Live, Septmber 20, from 1-4pm EST

If you’re a developer or a designer looking to improve your footing, this is the session for you. Learn to solve the right problems and forge stronger relationships with your peers.

Save 20% if you buy your ticket by September 12 by locking in the early-bird discount.

Get your ticket today!

Join us for back-to-back WordPress Security events in May!

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Do you sometimes worry about security vulnerabilities that affect your site, or sites you’re responsible for? How about hackers or spammers showing up in force trying to bring your site down?

Maybe you’re a developer, and you’re worried about the code you write, unwittingly putting other people at risk.

This month, with help from – and thanks to – iThemes Security, Sucuri Security, and Siteground, we’ll be diving head-first into understanding, preventing, and fixing security problems with your sites, themes, and plugins.

Our goal is to help you put your concerns to bed so that you can rest easy at night.

On May 17, we’re running “Security for Site Owners” where you can join Dre Armeda, Jason Cosper, and Daniel Kanchev and learn about the preventative measures you can take to protect against attacks and also what tools and resources are available to you in order to recover from attacks.

On May 31, we’re running “Security for Developers” where you can join Chris Wiegman, Brad Williams, and Tony Perez and learn about what types of vulnerabilities exist, how they can be exploited, how you can prevent them in the code you write, and, finally, how to actually clean an infected site from start-to-finish.

Here’s a video where I explain it all in limited detail:



You can save 20% on each session if you buy your ticket today. Click on the product banners below to get your ticket and learn more:

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Surprise! Watch *TWO* Sessions in April

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wpsession10_thumb For the first time ever, WPSessions will be hosting two live sessions in a single month. This isn’t a surprise to keen observers of the homepage, of course, because they have already seen the “Upcoming Schedule” section towards the bottom of the page. What you’ll notice now, if you hadn’t already, is that there are two sessions scheduled for every month going forward. I’ll be writing more about this soon.

The important takeaway for now is this: in addition to “eCommerce for Site Owners” on April 10 & 12 – featuring Mika Ipstenu, Patrick Rauland, and Benjamin Bradley – we are also exploring “eCommerce for Developers” on April 19 – featuring Andrew Munro, Daniel Espinoza, and Glenn Ansley.

To give you a taste of what to expect from these sessions, here’s a teaser video:

But wait, there’s more!

You can save 20% on your ticket to the Developers event if you buy it in the next 72 hours.

Not only that, if you buy an early-bird ticket to eCommerce for Developers, you will also be sent a 50% discount code for eCommerce for Site Owners. This means you could attend both sessions, all 6 presentations from all 6 experts, for only $40 – if you move quickly.

So, what are you waiting for? Get your ticket to eCommerce for Developers today!

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Join us for “eCommerce for Site Owners” on April 12

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wpsession9_thumb This month is actually a very special one at WPSessions. For the first time ever, we’ll be hosting two live sessions in a single month!

The first session is “eCommerce for Site Owners”, and that will be taking place on April 12th, starting at 1pm ET. You can save 20% if you register before Friday, April 4.

In this session, Mika Epstein, Patrick Rauland, and Benjamin Bradley will walk you through installation, configuration, and actual usage of Easy Digital Downloads, WooCommerce, and iThemes Exchange. By the time the event is done you should know precisely which plugin is right for you, and how to get up and running with no hassle.

I could write all about it here, but all the information you need to know is on the session’s product page.

I do, however, want to say thank you the sponsors for this event. Easy Digital Downloads, Exchange, and BackupBuddy are all stellar products built and supported by even-more-stellar people. You’ll get to hear all about two of those products during this month’s session and see first-hand why I like them so much.

Join us Nov 30 for “WordPress Unit Tests”

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wpsession5_thumbFor our fifth session, join Alison Barrett, John P. Bloch, and K.Adam White as they walk us through using and creating unit tests. These experts really know their stuff, and this session isn’t limited strictly to WordPress (even though the examples provided will be geared for WordPress projects).

“What is a unit test,” I hear you ask? Well, a unit test is a way for developers to validate that they code they’ve written is serving its intended purpose and producing the expected results. There are many ways to test code, and this way happens to be a very, very good one. Check out our blog for more information on the benefits of unit testing, and the role it might better play in your business.

Session Schedule

This session will be broadcast live on November 30, 2013 starting at 1pm ET.
All recordings will become available for replay at 4pm ET.

Topics Covered

  • Why is Unit Testing important?
  • Unit Testing: The Scary Parts
  • Lessons Learned from Unit Testing
  • Getting Started with PHP Unit Tests
  • How to write testable code
  • Identifying scenarios/code that are hard to test
  • Writing your first Unit Test
  • How to write a JavaScript Unit Test
  • How to run a JavaScript Unit Test
  • What does testable JavaScript look like?
  • Unit Testing for jQuery – Can it be done? If so, how?
  • And more!

A bit about your experts:

Each of our speakers brings with them several years experience working with WordPress.

Alison Barrett


Alison works for Automattic, the wonderful company behind WordPress.com (and many other good things). She works on the Janitorial team, a team that focuses on internal projects that help the company run better. Alison is a relative new-comer to unit testing, which makes the lessons she’s learned all the more relevant to anyone just beginning the trek into unit testing. She loves making WordPress plugins, and also learning more about the WordPress APIs, both of which are primary focuses on her blog, Aliso the Geek.
Follow Alison on Twitter

John P. Bloch


John has been working with WordPress for more than half its current life span. John currently works for 10up as a Senior Web Engineer where he helps build powerful and user-friendly solutions for our awesome clients. He is very passionate about building stable, tested solutions and wants to share this passion for excellence with you.
Follow John on Twitter

K.Adam White


K.Adam has a deep-seated love for Javascript. He has spoken at a number of WordCamps now on the topics of Javascript and themes, JS and Plugins, Backbone + WordPress. He’s also very out-spoken about working with Grunt.js and several other JavaScript-based tools. If you write JS in any capacity, K.Adam’s presentation on Unit Testing in JavaScript is one you really won’t want to miss.
Follow K.Adam on Twitter

Don’t Miss Out!

When you join us live you’ll have an opportunity to ask these experts whatever questions you like. This is an incredibly valuable and rare opportunity. If you cannot make it to the live event you can of course watch the recording immediately after it is finished airing and send your questions in ahead of time.

Get your ticket today! (20% early-bird discount if you purchase before Nov 15)

Get Theming with “WordPress Theme Bootcamp” in September

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WordPress Theme Bootamp Each of our sessions typically feature 3 separate presenters focusing on a specific aspect of some WordPress topic, but this month we’re pulling out ALL the stops! For this digitally-broadcast event, we have five speakers. Five!

This week, for our Fourth Session, you can join Sara Cannon, Chris Cochran, Paul Clark, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and Brad Parbs to learn about many of the different aspects of WordPress Themes. Each of these incredibly talented individuals brings with them a unique perspective and an exhaustive list of experiences with WordPress theme design and development.

Because we have such an action-packed lineup, this session is going to diverge from our traditional model. Rather than try to fit everything into a single awesome-filled day we’re breaking it up across several awesome-filled days.

Topics Covered

  • Designing for User Experience (UX)
  • Designing quickly with Sass
  • Integrating the Theme Customizer
  • Internationalization
  • Building for a broad audience
  • Creating a better theme development work low
  • Working with Genericons (and other icon fonts)
  • And more!

Session Schedule

In addition to watching each event live below, you can also re-watch (or catch later) the recording from each presentation.

Sept 16 (Monday)
7pm ET: Sara Cannon: Working with Icon Fonts

Sept 18 (Wednesday)
7pm ET: Paul Clark: Integrating the Theme Customizer
8pm ET: Chris Cochran: A Better Theme Process

Sept 19 (Thursday)
7pm ET: Lisa Sabin-Wilson: Preparing Your Theme For The Rest of the World (internationalization)
8pm ET: Brad Parbs: Getting Sassy: Fun with CSS Pre-processors

About the Speakers

Brad Parbs

Brad Parbs is a core contributor, plugin author, theme designer, open source fanatic, and startup lover. Brad has created open source WordPress tools, themes, and plugins. Brad currently runs Snow Day Group, a Milwaukee-based web development, a WordPress development agency. When not making things with WordPress, Brad drinks Chai Tea, plays with his cats, and listens to loud music in his car.
Follow Brad on Twitter

Chris Cochran

For the last 5 years Chris has been working to merge his love of design and his love for development together with WordPress. Not satisfied to stop there, Chris also spends his free time exploring cooking and music. He’s a very creative guy, working to make the internet a better place one site at a time. He’s a pretty popular guy in the Genesis theme community, and has done some pretty remarkable things with the theme.
Follow Chris on Twitter

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is the co-owner of WebDevStudios, a design and development company specializing in customized WordPress themes and plugins, and the author of WordPress For Dummies. As the “For Dummies” brand franchise author on all things WordPress she’s also written several other WordPress-related books. She’s worked with WordPress since 2003, and is also a regular public speaker on topics such as WordPress, blogging, design, and social media.
Follow Lisa on Twitter

Paul Clark

Paul is a seasoned developer with 17 years experience in creative applications and 10 years experience in web programming and team management. He has built a lot of really cool websites with WordPress, and is a pretty prolific speaker. Recently, he released a plugin named Styles that extends the capability of the WordPress Theme Cusomizer.
Follow Paul on Twitter

Sara Cannon

Sara has a passion for art, design, and typography. She is Partner and Creative Director for Range – A design and development shop specializing in WordPress.
Follow Sara on Twitter

Don’t Miss Out!

When you join us live you’ll have an opportunity to ask these experts whatever questions you like. This is incredibly valuable, given how vast and deep each of these expert’s knowledge is. If you cannot make it to the live event you can of course watch the recording immediately after it is finished airing, and ask your questions ahead of time.

Get your ticket today!

Learn about Performance Driven Development on August 4, 2013

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wpsession3_thumb For our 3rd session you can join Aaron Jorbin, Daniel Bachhuber & Zack Tollman and learn how to dramatically improve your development prowess. These three experts will teach you how to write better code, improve site and network performance, and how to improve your development workflow, too.

In this session we are going to delve deep into code performance. We’ll look at the tools you should use (Xdebug, JSPerf, curl-loader, etc), and why/when they’re beneficial. We’ll talk about transients, object caching, page caching, and other caching patterns that are quite successful when paired with WordPress. Finally, we’ll dive into the intricacies of navigating between local and remote development. We’ll also touch on WP-CLI, and other tools, systems and strategies for sanely taking your fine-tooled code into production.

Topics Covered:

  • Basic caching concepts of object and page caching
  • Implementing object and page caching in WordPress
  • Patterns for caching in WordPress
  • Several development tools, and why you would use each of them:
    • Xdebug’s Profiler and a front end viewer for it’s output
    • Curl-loader
    • Chrome dev tools
    • JSPerf
    • WP-CLI
  • And more!

A bit about your experts:

Each of our speakers brings with them several years experience working with WordPress.

Aaron Jorbin

Aaron Jorbin is working to make the web more usable and accessible. Born and raised in suburban Chicagoland, Aaron and has been taking things apart and figuring out how things work since he was a young child. He is a big believer in open source technology and building extremely usable and highly efficient web applications.
Follow Aaron on Twitter

Daniel Bachhuber

Daniel is currently Senior Engineer at Human Made, one of the United Kingdom’s leading agencies. Most previously Daniel was a Code Wranger for Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP. On days he’s feeling particularly ambitious, Daniel enjoys photographing, adventure travel, and conspiring on ways to make a better world.
Follow Daniel on Twitter

Zack Tollman

Residing in Portland, Oregon, Zack longs for the cold, snowy days of his Alaskan youth. He enjoys strumming his guitar, playing hockey, and spending time with his fiancée and dog. Otherwise, you’ll find him at his computer meticulously spinning lines of clean WordPress code as a developer at The Theme Foundry.
Follow Zack on Twitter

Don’t Miss This

When you join us live you’ll have an opportunity to ask these experts whatever questions you like. This is incredibly valuable, given that they contribute to the very tools we use to build the internet. If you cannot make it to the live event you can of course watch the recording immediately after it is finished airing.

Get your ticket today!

Join us for Building a WordPress Business on July 13, 2013

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In our second session we’re diving deep into the world of business development. Not all of the topics here are strictly specific to WordPress businesses, but all of them are applicable to WordPress businesses.

Our experts for Building a WordPress Business are Chris Lema, globe-trotting super blogger and VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, Cory Miller, founder and CEO of iThemes, and Carl Hancock, co-founder of Rocket Genius (creators of Gravity Forms).

About the Session

With the experience that can only come from starting and running five start-ups, Chris Lema is going to tackle the challenges of growth, particularly when it comes to growing the internal team. Whether you’re a solopreneur looking to hire #2, or a small team of engineers looking to hire your first marketing person, his tips, strategies and lessons learned (mistakes) will help.

Cory Miller will introduce us to his passion of being a great leader, and running a successful company. Cory loves his team like a family, and he wants to teach you to do the same. When you view your team like a family, a profound and powerful thing happens: it helps you to go farther together than you ever could individually.

After this we’ll open the session to a panel discussion featuring all three experts, Chris Lema, Cory Miller, and Carl Hancock. We have a few primer questions to get the conversation rolling, but the balance of the time will be available to attendees to ask their pressing questions. This is a tremendous opportunity, and one you’ll almost certainly want to experience live.

Topics Covered:

  • Creating your first Startup
  • Making your first hire
  • Growing your team from 1 to 2, to 3, to 5, to 10, to 20…
  • Learning from mistakes
  • Empowering your team
  • Narrowing your focus
  • Cultivating good clients and customers
  • Selling WordPress Products
  • Supporting a growing and demanding customer base
  • Pricing your products and services
  • Plus a panel discussion with all 3 presenters!

A bit about your experts:

Each of our speakers brings with them sage wisdom from years of hard-won business experience thanks, in part, to WordPress.

Chris Lema

Chris Lema is the VP of Software Engineering at Emphasys Software, where he manages high performers and oversees product development and innovation. He’s also a blogger, ebook author and runs a WordPress meetup in North County San Diego.

Follow Chris on Twitter

Cory Miller

Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time web entrepreneur. In January 2008, he founded iThemes in his home, fulfilling a lifelong dream of running his own company. Now iThemes has grown to over 20+ team members, hundreds of products and thousands of customers worldwide.

Follow Cory on Twitter

Carl Hancock

Carl Hancock is one of the co-founders of Rocketgenius, Inc. A premier provider of WordPress plugin solutions and the creators of one one of the most successful commercial WordPress plugins: Gravity Forms. He loves building innovative solutions for WordPress, and is a devoted father, loving husband, amateur photographer, startup founder and travel addict.

Follow Carl on Twitter

Don’t miss out

When you join us live you’ll have a very rare and coveted opportunity to ask these great minds any question you like. I don’t think I can stress enough just how incredible this opportunity truly is. To get a single hour with any one of these experts will cost some serious (well spent) cash, and thanks to WPSessions you can get an hour with each of them for only $25. You’ll be hard pressed to find a better investment.

Secure your seat today!

Join us for WordPress Plugin Development on June 22, 2013

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Happy Monday! Our first session is under a week away, and I’m not sure I could be any more excited! To help you prepare, and get excited too, here’s a bit more about what you can expect.

For this session, each presenter will be bringing a greater level of understanding to the plugin development process, ranging from beginner/introductory topics all the way up to advanced development techniques. Whether you’re just getting into WordPress development, of you’ve been developing years, you stand to learn something from this dynamic speaker lineup.

The topics we will cover:

  • Understanding the basic plugin architecture
  • Determine whether code belongs in a theme or a plugin
  • Activation and deactivation hooks, uninstall.php
  • Importance of function namespacing
  • Understanding and Using Hooks and Filters
  • Preparing your plugin for language translations
  • Registering admin menu items
  • Creating a Settings page
  • Data Validation and Sanitization
  • Using wp_remote_post() and wp_remote_get()
  • Releasing your plugin on WordPress.org
  • and more…

An a bit about your presenters:

These guys are the real deal, with decades of development experience between the three of them. I’m personally excited to learn something new from each of them.

Pippin Williamson
 Pippin is a WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, KS. He’s been working with WP for over 5 years and has written more than 50 plugins. Pippin also serves as a member of the WordPress.org plugin review team. You might also know him from his ecommerce plugin, Easy Digital Downloads. Follow Pippin on Twitter

Daniel Espinoza
 In 15 months Daniel went from zero plugins and no product income to 20 plugins and over $7K per month in sales. Whether you have premium plugins in development or are just thinking about building them, Daniel will share valuable lessons on how to design, build, support and sell your plugins. Follow Daniel on Twitter

Topher DeRosia
topher Topher has been a web developer since before Netscape 1.0. He started using PHP/MySQL soon after PHP 2.0 came out, but didn’t really fall in love with WordPress until WP3.0. Since then he’s developed dozens of sites with WordPress, stretching the CMS metaphor at every opportunity. Follow Topher on Twitter

Space is Limited

In order to help things run as smooth as possible, I’ve limited the live session to just 60 attendees. I’ve done this so that everyone attending has ample opportunity to ask their questions and be heard, and to limit the potential number of technical difficulties we could face. If you’re not among the first 60, don’t fret: your ticket will grant you access to the entire session recording immediately after the live portion is over.

Buy your ticket now, and join us for WordPress history in the making!

Update: Watch this session for FREE – If you don’t have the $25 to invest in this first session, WebDevStudios is giving away FIVE tickets to the event, you can enter to win on their blog.