The WordPress community is comprised of people and their relationships with one another and the open source CMS itself. Combined we are a global neighborhood, complete with volunteers, freelancers, employees, a marketplace, and a multitude of opportunities; opportunities for relationships, working, learning, teaching, sharing, volunteering, and more.

At its foundation, its most fundamental part, this neighborhood is built by every individual member. We are each an integral part of this growing, morphing phenomenon, so it is up to us to ensure that it is a robust living organism.

How do we do that?

*For Myself: by making sure I stay healthy both physically and emotionally
*For You: by checking in on my friends and coworkers to help where needed
*For Us: by contributing to the community in thoughtful and deliberate ways

This talk will share ideas to keep us all healthy, learning, and flourishing, for the betterment of ourselves, each other, and the WordPress neighborhood.

Design systems can be complicated to think about at the best of times. Then, try adding a brand new content editor to the mix… what can go wrong? Take a 45 minute journey with Redstamp’s Matthew Brent, discovering the highs and lows of implementing a dynamic design system in Gutenberg.

Redstamp has been providing WordPress solutions to the Tech Industry for nearly 10 years. Get an “under-the-hood” look into how they are tackling their latest challenges in WordPress using Gutenberg. You’ll learn some new things about Gutenberg, modern approaches to design systems and build tools, and also (hopefully) see some live code in action!

The WordPress community is abuzz with talk of static sites. The speed and simplicity of static pages and sites make them an attractive option for many businesses and non-profits. Yet, how easy is it to produce these sites? Turns out, there are simple, cost-effective ways for designers, content producers, and other non-technical people to build WordPress sites for quick conversion to static sites.

A highly interactive session with lots of examples of Gutenberg features and how some great plugins can interact and extend it.

Being a lead developer not only means being responsible for clean and optimized code, it also means mentoring and teaching junior developers. This is applicable for all technology fields. Having been a karate sensei for over 9 years, come learn how I took cues from my time at the dojo, and applied it to helping junior team members. From learning styles to patience, and to self-confidence, much can be learned from the martial arts.

Did you know that 25% of the world’s population identifies with a physical or metal disability?
Web Accessibility is a key factor in achieving 100% usability for your website or application. This talk will outline the fundamentals of web accessibility, how it applies to those who identify with disability, and how to implement WordPress accessibility functions using popular third-party tools.

A frank discussion with women coming from a variety of backgrounds, sharing how they got involved in WordPress, their achievements, struggles, and advice to women (of all ages) who want to get started in the WordPress sphere. Miriam Goldman is our panel moderator.

Community newspapers were once *the* way to stay informed about what’s happening in your area. That was upended by our mass adoption of social media. Now we’re all using Facebook.

But Facebook doesn’t need to be in control. There’s a better way. With WordPress, we can create a local community hub. A site for sharing stories, showcasing members, listing events, crowd-sourcing content, and selling premium subscriptions to cover costs.

In this session we’ll build a community hub website with minimal code. We’ll start with a clean WordPress installation; add pages; a theme; and plugins.

Running a local business? Launch a community hub and invite other businesses to join. Involved resident? Launch a hub and invite your neighbours. Teacher? Launch a hub for your school district. (You get the idea.)

The site wouldn’t replace Facebook. It’d exist alongside Facebook. But your community deserves a place on the web that it has actual control over.

Security is hard. And scary. And oh so confusing. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With WordPress, the basics are built in and you’re a simple checklist away from hardening your WordPress site like a pro. In this session, Todd will use plain english, entertaining stories and an all encompassing top 10 list to take you from newbie to knowledgeable in less than an hour.

Presentation will cover how to write, publish and promote high-quality blog posts that will make Google, your website or business and most importantly, your users, happy.
1) Creating Your Post – How to choose the right topic and title, write using LSIs etc.
2) Publishing Your Post – How to format for mobile users, internal linking, meta info and other on-page optimizations, and what WordPress plugins can help
3) Promoting Your Post – Don’t stop once it’s published! How to use Search Console to get it indexed quickly, creating and implementing a distribution strategy to help with SEO.

The high-tech industry is demanding and stressful with increased levels of burn-out for employees. The same holds true of solo-prenuers. Learn how the science of mindfulness changes our brains and is changing the work landscape from Google and Microsoft to Ontario Police Officers and education K – University.

In this anecdotal talk I’ll take you through how the history of modern music parallels many professionals’ journey from unrelated fields to web design. Dealing with Imposter syndrome, experimentation and mad Google skills, stories from trenches on building a career in the web.

The right plugins can make a huge impact on what you can do socially with your site. Make WordPress easier to share, reach and communicate.