Tag Archives: speakers

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.

Speaker: Sara Rosso

SaraRosso_2013We’re excited to welcome VIP Global Services Manager, Sara Rosso, from Automattic to speak at WordCamp Europe. Originally from California, Sara has spent the past 10 years living in Italy so she’s intimately familiar with the WordPress world on both sides of the Atlantic. Part of her job at Automattic is discovering VIP success stories and sharing them with the world, which is exactly what she’ll be doing at WordCamp Europe in her presentation, Why Big Brands Love WordPress.

WordPress now powers more than 18% of the top 10 million sites in the world, and some of the brands and enterprises using WordPress might surprise you! We’ll take a look at the latest sites which are pushing WordPress to new heights, the compelling reasons they decided to go with WordPress, and what they learned along the way. We’ll spend some time busting myths about WordPress as well as provide some great examples of powerful and beautiful sites using WordPress that will be interesting and useful for developers, designers, and users alike.

Panel: Running a WordPress Development Shop

WordPress development shops are big business and the number of them is growing all of the time. Agencies are hiring freelancers and absorbing talent from all over the WordPress community.  From the challenges of working in open source, to bidding for huge projects, from competition to collaboration, this panel will discuss what it’s like to run a WordPress development agency in Europe.

The panelists are:

Announcing our First Speaker: Joost de Valk

joost-de-valkOur first speaker needs little introduction which makes us even more excited to introduce him.

Joost de Valk is the guy behind Yoast.com, the original source for SEO expertise and WordPress. He’s also the author of the hugely popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

A Netherlands native, Joost will be joining us to share his presentation “The Triumph of the Commons“.

Here’s what he’ll be talking about:

If you’re running a business based on open-source software like WordPress, that business depends on the prosperity of the open-source project; its demise could result in the demise of your business, while the project’s growth can result in your business flourishing.

As your business and the project grow, you’ll find them becoming more and more entwined. This may be an unusual situation for a business but it’s also a fortuitous one. In this presentation I’ll explore what it means for your business to be involved with an open source project, and how, by supporting it, you can be part of the triumph of the commons.

If your business is built on WordPress, come along to listen to what Joost has to say and to join in with the discussion afterwards.

Speaker Applications Close!

Speaker applications for WordCamp Europe are now closed. We have almost 80 applications and around 20 speaking slots available. That means there’s some fierce competition for those slots.

We would love to be able to accept everyone but of course we’re not going to be able to. However, here are some of the things we’ll be looking for when we put together the final schedule:

  • diversity of subject matter. We’ve got to have content that appeals to developers, designers, bloggers, business owners, and everyone in between.
  • diversity of geographical location and gender. The final schedule will represent the WordPress community worldwide, while particularly showcasing WordPressers in Europe.
  • novelty – is the presentation saying something new? Or saying something old in a new way?
  • relevance – is the content relevant to WordPress and WordPress users today?

We’ll also be looking at videos, checking out past slides, and generally scrutinising each application to make sure that the programme for WordCamp Europe is as good as it can be.

Thank you to everyone who applied. You’ll be hearing from us in a couple of weeks!