Speaker: Scott Basgaard

scott-basgaard Scott Basgaard lives somewhere in the mountains of beautiful Southern Norway. Born and raised in New Jersey, he moved there to live with his wife Renate. He loves all things WordPress and organized the first WordCamp Norway in 2012. Scott makes a living under his alter ego, Scotty B, who is a Support Ninja over at WooThemes specializing in WooCommerce. He’s passionate about helping others and recently organized a 24-hour-long WordPress event, which was free for community, called WordSesh.

Scott will talk about “the importance of delivering happiness to your customers and users”.

In this presentation, I’ll discuss growing and building business through customer service and discuss some tools to use along the way.

I’ll also touch on the importance of helping in the WordPress community as well, as a way of giving back and its value to both you as an individual and whatever team you are a part of.

Speaker: Tammie Lister

P1090730Hot on the heels of WordCamp San Francisco, Tammie Lister will be joining us from rainy England. Tammie is a designer who specialises in creating communities. She’s passionate about community design and mixing in psychology with design and development to create sites that make sense to humans. Over the years she’s been lucky enough to create varied projects with great clients under her company logicalbinary.com. She is a contributor to both BuddyPress and WordPress. Tammie spends most of her time living in themes and has a book due out soon about BuddyPress theme development.

Tammie will be sharing her knowledge of themes in her presentation “The Life of a Theme.”

This is a tale of a theme, from its early stages of research through to the first steps into wireframes and the move into a prototype. It’s a tale of joy, sadness and a dash of danger as browsers are fought and code tamed. This is a story that doesn’t include Photoshop but that does include designing in code. It’s a story we all know variations of and this is my version. This is the story of my design process and how I create themes.

Speaker: Frederick Townes

Frederick Townes Frederick Townes was the Founding Chief Technical Officer of Mashable, one of the top independent media sites worldwide and is currently the Senior Technical Advisor.

As a search / social media marketer and WordPress consultant, Frederick’s projects typically include WordPress as a core element. One of his largest contributions to the WordPress community was his web performance optimization framework W3 Total Cache.

Since 2003 his agency W3 EDGE has assisted startups and well-known brands like: ASOS, Adorama, AIGA, AT&T, Brian Solis, Center for Disease Control, Constant Contact, CVS Pharmacy, Envato, Hyatt, Jonathan Snook, Kodak, Hubspot, Lord & Taylor, Mashable, Microsoft, Neil Patel, Pearsonified, R.E.I., Sanyo, Sherwin Williams, Smashing Magazine, Southwest Airlines, Staples, Sony, Weight Watchers, Yahoo, Yoast and others.

He is also a serial web entrepreneur and technologist. One of his recent projects, W3 MARKUP, launched in 2007, was acquired after only 11 short months prior to his moving to Florence, Italy in 2008. Frederick currently splits time in Boston still where he focuses on his latest project Placester as a co-founder.

Frederick will be talking about business particularly “Business Optimization”

If you’ve ever wanted to make your WordPress passions a full time job you’re not alone. It’s a long journey to go from idea, to a documented, commented, socially mentioned, commonly installed and productive project. In this talk, Frederick reviews many of the tough lessons learned in trying to both build a team, community and movement around a WordPress plugin. He will share tips, best practices and pitfalls and most importantly how to address them once identified. Expect the talk to be highly interactive, the more questions and interruptions you provide the more valuable it will be.

Speaker: Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

rarstRarst is cynical, sleepy, and much into computers. He remembers DOS and the days when the Internet came in nightly dial-up packages. He has brushed through several industries (from airplane engineering to helpdesk systems), many programming languages, and circled back to web development. This time on WordPress platform. You can often find him on WordPress Stack Exchange where he helps out with all sorts of questions related to WordPress.

Rarst will be talking about “Better Site Stacks with Composer.”

This presentation explore gaps in WordPress tool chain for code dependencies, technical organization of whole-site projects, hosting and consuming PHP code. See why Composer dependency manager caught on like wildfire for these tasks in PHP ecosystem and how it can empower more robust and professional approaches to WordPress development.

Keep a better history of a project’s state, manage and easily share different contexts (production or development, stable or unstable), integrate multiple version control repositories with trivial ease, run and own your code hosting infrastructure. Composer all the things!

Q&A With Matt Mullenweg

matt-mullenwegIt’s a pleasure to have the co-founder of WordPress join us for the very first WordCamp Europe. As well as being the co-founder of WordPress, Matt is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack, and a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

Matt will be doing an hour long question and answer session with the audience. Got a question for him? Now’s your chance to ask. Want to know about the future of WordPress? Want to know what why a specific decision was made? Want to know why 3.6 took so long? Interested in what people are doing with WordPress worldwide? Want to know Matt’s favourite type of BBQ? Bring your questions along and put them to the man himself.

Speaker: Dre Armeda

dreYou must have been living under a Drupal stone if you’re in the WordPress community and haven’t heard of Dre Armeda. The hat-wearing, taco-eating, (actual) ninja, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sucuri Security and joins us all the way from San Diego. Dre is also the host of The DradCast, the WordPress podcast that hosts with partner-in-crime Brad Williams.

He’ll be sharing his knowledge of WordPress security in a presentation called “Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!”

Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet? In this session I will show a demo on how quickly your site can be hacked, and your reputation put on the line. I’ll cover various scenarios that can affect your website like Pharma Hack, SEO Poisoning, and malicious redirects. I’ll then aid you by providing some tips to help reduce risk now and forever. Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

Awesome! And remember to ask Dre to show you his WordPress tattoo.

Speaker: Rocío Valdivia

rocioWe’d like to welcome Rocío Valdivia to WordCamp Europe. Rocío is a developer at the Spanish development and consultancy, Mecus. Along with the rest of the team, she’s a WordPress Consultant, part of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, organises the WordPress Sevilla meetup and WordCamp. She has extensive experience with WordPress and BuddyPress plugins, themes development and improvement, and is one of the authors of “WordPress para Dummies”, the Spanish version of “WordPress for Dummies”, published November 2012. She’s currently a consultant and a lecturer at conferences and seminars on WordPress and BuddyPress.

In her presentation, Rocío will be sharing a case study of the Spanish WordPress + Multisite installation El Club Express:

I’ll be sharing a WP Multisite + BuddyPress Case Study on a what’s on guide and magazine for cultural events. I’ll highlight a few of the most interesting features, demonstrating the potential that WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress has. I’ll talk about our successes and lessons learned and how you might apply these in a real world context.

Speaker: Brad Williams

brad_williamsWe’d like to welcome Brad Williams as our next WordCamp Europe speaker. Brad is the co-founder of WebDev Studios, a co-host on the DradCast podcast and a published author of Professional WordPress and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. He lives in Philadelphia where he organizes both the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Philly. He is a leading WordPress developer and security expert; he’ll be talking about “Writing Secure WordPress Code.”

…you’ll learn the proper way to write the most secure code in WordPress. Whether you’re a plugin developer or build themes, it’s extremely important to understand how to secure your code from hacks and exploits. Overlooking some very easy to follow techniques can expose your website to the hackers everywhere. WordPress features a number of built-in methods to help make sure your code is safe and secure, and we’ll cover each and everyone in detail.

Speaker: Vitaly Friedman

vitaly_friedmanVitaly Friedman is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the inimitable Smashing Magazine. Based out of Freiburg, Germany, Smashing Magazine is one of the most popular web design magazine out there, featuring high quality articles from the brightest star in web design and development. Vitaly wrangles the whole team, seeking out new authors, attending and speaking at conferences, and by being a beacon in the web design community.

We’re delighted that Vitaly is joining us for his very first WordCamp, where he’ll share his experiences of running one of the most popular blogs around in his presentation “Behind the Scenes at Smashing Magazine“:

Smashing Magazine started in September 2006 as an almost unstyled WordPress-powered blog. Over the course of years, a simple blog evolved into a professional online publication with a thorough editorial process and numerous quality reviews. How did it happen? What lessons were learned along the way? In this talk, I’ll be speaking about the experiences, mistakes and failures of Smashing Magazine and how recovering from them helped make the magazine better, stronger and more successful.

If you want to know what it takes to run a large-scale, multi-author WordPress blog, this is the presentation for you.

 

Speaker: Boone Gorges

booneJoining us from Queens, New York, is one of BuddyPress’ lead developers, the talented Boone Gorges. As well as working on the core BuddyPress project, Boone is a prolific plugin developer, and oversees the Commons in a Box, Anthologize, and Participad projects. Boone is a former academic, and most of his clients are universities and other non-profit institutions. In his spare time, he is a competitive crossword solver, a jazz pianist, and an afficianado of pizza and barbecue.

Boone will be getting technical with BuddyPress in his presentation “Herding Cats with the BuddyPress Activity Component.”

BuddyPress is great for building niche community sites. But, in the hands of the right developer, BP can power much more than just social networks. The Activity component is a prime example of this flexibility. bp-activity provides a rich API for storing, retrieving, and displaying a wide variety of transactional data. BP itself uses this API for tracking events of a social nature – “Boone and John became friends”, “Boone updated his profile”, etc. But bp-activity is flexible enough to store metadata about, say, e-commerce transactions or RSS items. In this way, the Activity stream defines a standardized schema and set of API functions for querying various types of data that may itself be stored in mutually incompatible ways.

This presentation will give developers an overview of the Activity component, including its data schema, the CRUD methods provided by the bp-activity API, and the activity metadata functions. We’ll talk about how any WordPress plugin can support the Activity stream as a progressive enhancement. And we’ll discuss one or two real-life examples of Activity being used in innovative ways.