WordCamp Scranton is this Weekend
WordCamp Scranton is officially on the calendar!
WordCamp Scranton will be July 18 at Johnson College.
Location
Johnson College is located at:
3427 N. Main Avenue
Scranton, PA 18508
To get to the student parking lot, enter via the North Entrance (the Google Maps link above is set to the correct entrance), drive straight up the hill, and follow the signs to Student Parking (number 10 on the map below) – follow the green line on the map below.
Start off the day in the Moffat Building (number 5 on the map) and using the Health Science Center (number 12 on the map) for the majority of our sessions.
WordCamp signs will be posted and volunteers will be on hand to direct you.
After Party
After a long day of WordPress learning, you’re going to want to unwind little – or maybe continue the conversation. Well, you’ll have a chance to do both at the WordCamp Scranton after party!
We are happy to announce that the after party will be held at Backyard Ale House. Located on Scranton’s courthouse square at 523 Linden Street, Scranton, PA 18503. There is street parking or a garage about a block away
Backyard boasts great food, an excellent selection of beer, and a patio! Could you ask for more?
Light fare will be provided, as well as a cash bar.
Schedule
Sessions
Town Hall Q&A with Matt Mullenweg
WP3D: Using WordPress to power 3D environments
As browser compatibility with WebGL grows in support, rich 3d interfaces are more in demand with each successive year.
Moreover, even if a browser has no support for WebGL, we can degrade gracefully, and show the user an alternate site view with no more hassle than enqueueing modernizr.
This talk will initially showcase a few examples of using 3D environments in WordPress.
Developing locally with ServerPress
Want to learn how to up your development skill set by developing locally with WordPress? Well things just got a whole lot simpler with ServerPress! Learn about how easy it is to develop locally WordPress sites locally using this amazing tool.
Birthing a Child Theme
Are you using a theme on your blog or website that is almost what you’re looking for but that could use a bit of customization? Don’t want to look like everyone else using the twenty fifteen theme? Child themes let us inherit the functionality of an existing theme, while adding our own custom functionality and style to suit our tastes and needs. In this session we’ll look at how to create a child theme and some ways which we can make that baby our own.
Keynote: Coming Back to WordPress
When I started making websites 7 years ago, WordPress was the hip new thing all the cool kids were using. So I used it too.
But then time went by, and the web changed. The tools and techniques that I used changed too. I moved away from WordPress.
Now I’m back. Let me show you why I’ve returned, and why I believe that what WordPress has become over the last 7 years has ensured its continued success.
Civility and Open Source
In this session we’ll discuss some of the history of open source software, look at how subdivisions take hold, how we can all be better about working toward the common interests of all, and the all-important nature of treating one another with kindness and not leaping to conclusions.
19 Plugins You Should Be Using
Learn about the 19 plugins that I think are essential to having a well functioning (and even fun) website! Learn more about some plugins that give your website more functionality and help make client’s websites pop.
Teaching WordPress
I’ll discuss the different scenarios that we encounter when teaching WordPress to our clients, friends, and students. I’ll offer strategies for optimal sharing of our knowledge to others.
Multisite Network Do’s and Don’ts – Experience from Some Enterprise Solutions
We’ve all built a ton of WordPress sites. We’ve also managed them all too. You’ve probably heard about WordPress Multisite Networks, and all the awesome things it can (and can’t) allow you to do.
With great power, comes great responsibility. During this talk, Taylor will step through the do’s and don’ts of Multisite Networks. He will share how WordPress Multisite can be your best friend or worst enemy… but usually both… at the same time.
Expect pro-tips, eureka moments, and hard lessons learned from his experience setting up and running multisite networks for small private company intranets, all the way to global enterprise brands.
By the end of this talk you will know the pros and cons of WordPress Multisite Networks, best practices for setting up and running a multisite, and know about alternatives if multisite isn’t a fit for your next project.
The Next Step in Responsive Design – RESS
We all know about Responsive Design. But most mainstream techniques rely on the browser to call the shots and determine what and how the content gets displayed, typically using media queries.
This reliance can be taxing to poor, overworked devices. Doesn’t it make more sense to let the server, with it’s beefier processors, compile the page and send the content to the device so that the page is lighting fast regardless of the device?
This is where RESS(Server Side Responsive) steps in.
Learn how this is different from what you thought of as responsive design as well as techniques that you can use right away to significantly reduce your render time.
New users: Make WordPress your friend!
Let’s say somebody built you a WordPress site and then left you in the lurch to fend for yourself. Maybe they told you how to add content, use headings, and add images. But you forgot that stuff pretty quickly.
Get past the fear of breaking the internet. You CAN do this! This session will help you figure out what you think you can’t.
WordPress for Schools
I recently replaced a proprietary SaaS CMS for the largest school district in the state (Newark, NJ). We launched our 70+ schools sites on Aug 29, on top of WordPress. Our district site is 30,000 pages and 300,000+ media assets. In the end, we cut our annual web site management budget in half and have beautiful new web sites powered by WordPress that ease the pain points our content owners, administrators and technology coordinators have when managing their school web sites. This presentation will cover how this was achieved using WordPress, how it has solved many of the problems we were facing with our vendor-controlled proprietary system, and how we have embraced the concept of WordPress as an Application Framework, allowing us to create all kinds of sites, applications, and mobile apps directly from WordPress.
WordPress Upgrades: Ready, Set, Go!
WordPress upgrades, they bring us new features, faster sites, and better security. But pushing that upgrade button can be a scary moment, unless you’ve ensured your site is ready and compatible. I’ll show you the best practices for ensuring your site is ready including a simple strategy that works whether you manage one site or hundreds.
Speakers
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the open-source blogging platform, WordPress, the most popular publishing platform on the web, and the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com andJetpack. Additionally, Matt is a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.
Rami Abraham
Rami is a WordPress developer and ‘gif savant’ at WebDevStudios. He’s been building with WordPress since version 2.8, with a heavy focus in JavaScript and CSS. Prior to that, he worked in a few lead roles at web agencies, with a focus on JavaScript application development. He enjoys working with an unending variety of frameworks, SVG animation, and is part of the AffiliateWP support team after hours.
Zach LeBar
During his time in the Web industry he’s done a little bit of everything. He’s a designer, a developer, a writer, and an artist. He’s been a sysadmin, a technical support officer, even an Apple senior advisor. At the heart of it all though has been the Web. Thanks to the power and openness found online, he’s been able to teach himself everything he knows today about web design and development.
Lauren Pittenger
Lauren is a front end developer and designer. She chose her topic because she sees bloggers using out-of-the-box default WordPress themes and she wants to show them that there are ways that we can make our sites our own without having to know how to build an entire theme from scratch.
Taylor McCaslin
Taylor McCaslin is a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. He currently works at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years. He even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer! Since then, Taylor has created custom WordPress themes and plugins for a large range of clients from SMBs to multinational corporations.
Dustin Leer
Dustin is a proud poppa that loves graphic & web design. Currently he is addicted to Olympic Lifting, learning all he can aboutWordPress, PHP, JavaScript/jQuery & responsive web design! He has been designing stuff since and has been making the web beautiful and functional.
Renée Moore
Renee had a really bad website using iWeb (remember that from Mac?), wanted to improve it, and heard about WordPress. She called her friend who was also new in business and convinced her they should try this WordPress thing. After getting her site set up, she started to learn all she could about WordPress and now she does sites for others. She chose her topic because plugins are what made her fall in love with WordPress.
Anthony Laurence
Anthony started as a designer and developer and have been building WordPress sites. During his career he quickly learned that most clients need more than just a website built, so he gravitated into taking on online marketing duties as well. He picked RESS as a topic because it is an important tool that every developer and designer should know in order to provide their clients with the websites that their clients need to stand out and truly compete on the web.
Ben Dunkle
Ben is a core designer for WordPress.org. He’s designed thousands of icons for WP, including the current Dashicons that we see in the wp-admin. He’s a full-time professor at Canisius College in Buffalo, NY, and a designer for Field 2, his design consultancy.
Kerch McConlogue
Kerch McConlogue, retired ADHD coach and front-end developer, has been writing code by hand for 16 years and using WordPress since version 1.5. Her passion is for helping WordPress novices to understand (at least) the basics of care and feeding of their own site and to get past their fears of breaking the internet and of their site developer.
Cameron Barrett
Cameron (@camworld) pioneered the blog format in the late 1990s. He’s built web sites for presidential candidates, the U.S. Army, the World Economic Forum and led the migration of 70+ web sites from a proprietary SaaS to WordPress for NJ’s largest public school district. He’s now migrating all 14,000+ U.S. public school districts to WordPress (via his startup/SaaS K12presser.com), saving millions of taxpayer dollars.
George Stephanis
George Stephanis is the Team Lead for the Jetpack Pit Crew at Automattic (the company behind WordPress.com). When not working on Jetpack, he spends his time contributing to Core, running the WordPress Lancaster Meetup Group and WordCamp Lancaster PA, and is a regular on the WP Watercooler podcast.
Dustin Meza
Dustin Meza is the Senior Manager of Customer Experience Operations at WP Engine. He has been in the hosting industry for 7 years and has been with WP Engine for 2 years. At WP Engine, Dustin oversees many aspects of the WordPress platform including WordPress upgrades for over 100,000 WordPress installs.
