Description

WordSesh 2022 was originally broadcast live on May 16-20, 2022. Below is the full list of the presentations, speakers, and descriptions that you can watch any time as a WPSessions member.

How to Use the Hub to Streamline Your Web Design Workflow

Learn how to use the Hub by GoDaddy Pro to streamline your web design workflow from the start of the project to the handoff of the website to the client. Best of all, the Hub is a free tool you can start using instantly.

Designing Mobile UX the Right Way

Most of the global population is now using smartphones. And visitors to the mobile version of your site are increasing every year.

Sure, you are making your website “responsive”. But are you doing it right? You will forever change the way you do responsive design after this session.

From Agency Owner to Plugin Shop

There are tens of thousands of plugins out there and not many make money. In this presentation, I share my journey launching Newsletter Glue, the mistakes I made, and the lessons I’ve learnt.

5 Easy Ways to Fix your WordPress Workflow

If you are a service provider, you will learn how to quickly launch a WordPress instance from scratch or from a “pre-configured” template, to cut hours of work.

As a developer, you will learn about how to showcase your product demo in a sandbox environment and speed up your development work flow by auto spawning new WP instances on every PR merge.

As an agency, you will be able to quickly scale and coordinate projects amongst a distributed team after the talk is over.

Can Developers Prepare the Best Project Presentations?

Developers can prepare and deliver rock-solid project presentations. In this talk, Sumant will highlight the importance of designing a project presentation, how to present your project, and key elements to include in the project presentation. Learn how to stand out like a Pro with effective storytelling while using his presentation design tools and resources.

Will WordPress be Better with the Block Protocol?

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has expressed interest in joining forces with the team behind the Block Protocol, a new specification which aims to have “blocks” be portable across applications. This talk presents the benefits and costs for WordPress if it were to adopt this new protocol, and then, based on this information, it draws conclusions on how desirable it is to happen.

Developing and Defending a Free Press

Access to unbiased information is fundamental for the proper functioning of democracy. But it isn’t always a given…

This closing keynote case study finds Human Made and Altis DXP at the center of an intense and controversial national news cycle, helping defend a free press, and working to repel sophisticated and sustained DDoS attacks that brought down websites across the region.

While the stages of the project sound familiar – a large content migration, a complex site build and custom code delivery – the background to the project, the importance of the work being carried out, and the incredible pressures the team were under during delivery, set this project apart.

Accelerate Your Development Timeline Today

Are you struggling to meet your deadlines? Is your creativity being stymied by repeating tasks? Do you consistently wrestle with efficient time management?

In this talk I will share my insights on how to maximize efficiency in web development and hopefully by the end arm you with the tools needed to set yourself up for success.

Together, we will break this subject down into bite-size sections, as I walk you through my most used tools, insights and general headspace when tackling new projects.

Our journey will take us through a myriad of subjects, starting with efficiency and time management — spoiler, the 80/20 rule applies even more so in web development — and ending with my personal approach to identifying opportunities for workflow automation.

Along the way, we’ll pass waymarks such as your local environment setup — development or otherwise, how you write and more importantly read code, requirement gathering as well as team and project structure, to name a few. All of these subjects will be accompanied by real life examples pulled from my experience working with WordPress.

In an ever-changing landscape of tools, frameworks, and flavor-of-the-day technologies, it’s easy to feel like you’re standing on quicksand. So why not make sure you have a solid foundation for your professional development? Let’s do that together!

Building a Feel Good Marketing Funnel Using WordPress

In this entertaining session, Melissa will show you how to build a sales funnel that *whispers* real humans can actually enjoy.

Even the words ‘sales funnel’ sound like they were invented by an evil robot. (No one minds an evil robot in a disaster movie, but you don’t want one in your inbox).

She’ll show you her funnel building strategy, explore the moving parts and tell you the story of how she lost £30k in her first business venture (yes, she should have built a funnel!)

Even better, Melissa’s funnel-building strategy uses only two tools – WordPress and an email marketing platform.

This session is for anyone who has hit the limit of where their time and talent alone can take them and wants to generate a steady stream of new leads by building an automated system that doesn’t feel salesy or ‘sleazy’.

Incident Response: What Happens After the Worst Case Scenario

OK, you’ve got hacked and have hired a cleanup service. It is not magic, let me share with you what happens inside the black box, using a couple of examples to guide you about how this process works. You also will learn some tricks you can apply by yourself!

In Cybersecurity, the term Blue Team refers to white hat hackers (security analysts) teams that are working every day to discover vulnerabilities exploited by black hat hackers (cyberterrorists), to understand the underneath intentions and to fix hacked scenarios, between other tasks.

Pressing for Performance

The wonderful world of WordPress has been around a near two decades. In that time, we have seen so much change on the web. Web performance was once about raw timing, but today user experience and several metrics share the stage. We now have core web vitals and Lighthouse scores to contend with.

For example:

Only 19% of WordPress sites have good core web vitals, ranking it 3rd last among the top 10 CMSs.
28% of WordPress sites have good largest contentful paint – tied for last in top 10 CMSs.
WordPress sites also have a median Lighthouse score of 26, ranking below the median average across the web, but also loads 24 resources under the /plugins/ path.

Could these figures be related? Pressing for Performance is a talk about using these data points to help make well-researched decisions along with best practices in order to improve WordPress’s web performance and provide the best user experience possible.

Eliminating Friction from Your Products, Customers, and Your Life

Nobody likes friction. But here’s the problem – familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt, sometimes it breeds acceptance. We get used to the friction we see and experience regularly.

But your life doesn’t have to be that way. Neither do the lives of your prospects. And your product, ordering and customer onboarding all can do without friction.

In this talk, I’ll show you a simple way to manage friction audits and how to eliminate most of the friction in your life.

Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: How to Prepare for a High Traffic Event

When Christine Clauder created a website to help Hank, a rescue dog, get adopted, a basic hosting plan seemed like the right choice. Then, she went viral. Her story was broadcast on television and drove an insane amount of traffic to her site.

That’s a good problem to have, no? Well… not if your site keeps crashing. Join us to hear Christine’s tips and what you can (and should!) do to prepare for traffic spikes, and how to know if your hosting plan is really “unlimited.”

How do Big Enterprises Use WordPress for Publishing?

Big enterprises like Ask.com and PepsiCo use the same open-source WordPress as any high-school blogger. However, there is a huge difference in workflow, plugins, and implementation of WordPress for enterprises. In this talk, I’ll share some of those tools, techniques, and workflows in WordPress being used by large enterprises worldwide.

— What matters most to enterprises when they use WordPress?
— How do enterprises assess a WordPress plugin?
— How publishing workflow for enterprises works in WordPress?

Admins Are Users, Too! Building Great Experiences for WordPress Admins

As WordPress Developers, we should all know that user experience is a fundamental key to success. People matter more than websites, right? But oftentimes, we forget that Admins are users, too, and their experience matters. In this session, Josh will discuss essential principles and practical tools we can all use to empower WordPress admins and dashboard users to work more effectively, and enjoy their work a bit more in the process!

How Live Streaming Transformed My Career

Are you a developer looking for a way to have more fun with your work? Let’s dig into how I got started as a webdev streamer, how it enhanced my life, and how it can do the same for you and other developers. In our time together, I’ll share my personal experience as a streamer, the things I’ve tried, the lessons I learned, the ways I’ve grown, and how you can build on these lessons yourself.

Buying and Selling WordPress Businesses

In 2009, Pippin Williamson started selling WordPress plugins under the moniker Pippin’s Plugins. In the 12 years that followed he grew the business into Sandhills Development and expanded to a team of 27, acquiring dozens of other WordPress products along the way.

In 2021, Pippin sold his entire suite of WordPress plugins and services to AwesomeMotive, and the full business operations and team along with them. Then he quietly made an exit from the entire WordPress scene.

In this exclusive interview session, we’ll hear more of this story along with actionable advice you can use if you ever acquire or sell a business.

QuickPost: Hacking the Block Editor for Faster Content Creation

This talk explores how the plugin QuickPost came into service of agencies using WordPress and professional end-users in the small business and non-profit space. It also covers some high-level technical details on how the plugin works.

Block Theme Adoption: A Gradual Approach

An entirely new way to think about theme development was introduced in WordPress 5.9 with the addition of Block Themes. Changing the way your existing and future themes are built, however, can be a daunting and time-prohibitive process.

Join me as I share some ways you can begin taking advantage of Block Theme features today, without a complete code overhaul. Tapping into exciting new features of the block editor can be added to almost any theme. By incorporating Global Styles via theme.json or templates and template parts made entirely of block markup you can see immediate benefits with gradual block theme adoption.

Bodacious Block Themes: An in-depth Look at this New Era of Theming

We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg. What we didn’t know, was by how much.

Block themes are the catalyst by which the full block editing experience comes to fruition. With block templates, template parts (i.e. headers and footers), patterns, style variants, template editing and more — there’s much to unpack on this new era of block themes.

So let’s dive in and take an in-depth look at what a block theme consists of, and how you can build and share them with others.

Getting Started with Continuous Integration and WordPress

Writing high-quality WordPress code is hard to do. It requires constant effort on our part and good self-awareness to know when we slipped up. But, if your business has any sort of success (which we all want!), you’re going to work with more and more people. And many of them are likely to touch with your code.

This is going to put a strain on your development processes. It becomes harder to maintain a certain level of code quality. And you’re no longer the only person pushing code. You’re now part of a team and you need a way to standardize all of the things you once did on your own.

That’s the goal of continuous integration. It lets you automate your different development workflows from testing to deployment. This ensures that the quality of your code stays consistent.

This talk will go over the basics of continuous integration. We’ll also go over some of the tools that are available. And then we’ll finish by looking at how you put these tools together to create your own continuous integration environment.

Developing an SDK for Personalization at the Edge

The Edge. The final…frontier? What even is “the edge” beyond just another tech buzzword? And how can I actually use the edge for something actually useful for my site and visitors?

In this talk, I will answer all of these questions and talk about how we at Pantheon have built a software development kit for Drupal and WordPress to enable personalized content by integrating with our edge layer.

We’ll talk about what personalization means for site owners, and get into some of the technical implementation details of how we’ve built our SDKs and how they can be used for personalized content creation.

Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

A case study more than a year in the making, this keynote follows seven team members, from different agencies, who were responsible for key aspects of rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov for the Biden-Harris administration.

Due to several unprecedented constraints, the team had a total of six weeks to design, develop, test, and launch the entire project ahead of an immovable deadline of 12:01pm Eastern Time on Inauguration Day.

Despite the compressed timeline, the team sought to create an online home grounded in inclusivity, accessibility, performance, and security.

They prioritized WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, carefully crafted custom toggles for contrast and enlarging tex, and partnered with technical specialists who are blind and visually impaired. Additionally, the team recruited translators who ensured every piece of content was thoughtfully translated into Spanish.

Under the hood, a highly customized Gutenberg editing experience was built on a flexible, user-centric publishing framework designed to adapt with the Administration as their digital communication needs grow and change.

And all of this is on top of an entirely new brand, design, and UX strategy – produced expressly for the new administration – to help govern the enormous number of decisions that had to be made quickly.

Come and learn how a cross-functional team from multiple different agencies pulled off the incredible!

Convert a Classic Theme to a Block Theme

Together, we will set up the header and footer in a block theme, learn to work with Templates and Template Parts, set up page contents, and dive into how Styles work.

Throughout the workshop we’ll discuss which website projects can benefit from the new FSE features the most, what limitations we are still facing, and how the future of WordPress themes will most likely look like.

Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: The Workshop

Discover new ways to prepare for and prevent the multitude of problems that arise from traffic spikes and increased website popularity.

Tiffany will teach you how to measure and monitor the web properties you’re developing along with important hosting resources you can take advantage of to ensure every day is a smooth day of production.