Sessions

Banishing the content gremlins with the S (Strategy) word

You know you need a strategy to make sales from your website but you just don’t know where to start.

We hear you, you are not alone.

In this session, Amanda will take you through the stages of creating an online strategy. She will show you some of the tactics you could be missing, and how to optimise your website and your digital marketing to turn your website into a sales machine.

You will learn how to:

  • tweak your website for a smoother customer experience
  • optimise your site for sales
  • use social media and email marketing to feed sales to your website

All in easy to follow steps.

Speaker

Debugging: Figuring it out yourself

In this session you will be able to learn how to debug an issue without having to ask others. It will also show you how to use actions and filters to view data without a source code debugger.

Damien will present a demo on debugging an issue, expanding on the tools that Brecht Ryckaert covered in ‘Debugging WordPress’ in WordCamp Belfast.

Cleaning up a hacked WordPress site

In this talk Kayleigh will explain the cleanup process that happens when someone reports a hacked site at her workplace at 34sp.com. She will cover the best cleanup process they have found.

She will also talk about how to spot if a site is hacked, the types of hacks commonly seen, and prevention steps for the future.

Convincing the world to care about their website health

Explaining to clients that website maintenance is important is often met with resistance. Although maintenance is important, it often is confusing.

Jenny will be sharing with us her experience of changing the conversation to be more accessible to everyone.

She will share her experience of demysifying why site health checks are important, how to empower users to want to upgrade and what the WordPress community and developers can to make health checks more accessible for all.

This talk is part of our focus for Digital Citizenship Week, which coincides with WordCamp Dublin.

Thinking about ergonomics

Speaker: Abha Thakor

Start Time: 10:20am

As tech people we spend hours leaning over laptops and mobile devices, peering into screens and moving between pieces of equipment in a fast-paced environment.

How often do we look at the potential damage we are doing to our hands, backs and other parts of our body from bad ergonomics and from not looking after our wellbeing in our work?

Abha Thakor will run this session helping us to look after our hands and improve our posture when working with computers and mobile devices. She will share tips on ways of reducing difficulties and potential damage, and how you can plan your working environment to be healthier for you.

This session is part of our focus on Digital Citizenship and how the WordPress community can share insights with each other and support long term involvement and work in tech.

  • Abha Thakor

    Avatar of Abha Thakor

How to start with accessibility

Most freelancers and agencies who work in web knows that accessibility matters, but during the daily working life it is sometimes hard to include accessibility into the projects.

At the same time accessibility seems like a huge area and it overwhelms sometimes to start with it.

In this talk I will show some tools and resources about accessibility that makes it easy to start with accessibility.

Also I will show the most common accessibility issues in web projects and provide simple solutions, that are easy to integrate.

Road to a faster web

The web is involving with more technology, but often the best options are the simplest.

There are various routes to improving website performance. Often the simplest approach is to remove the underlying technology which causes the performance bottle necks and use alternative methods.

JAMstack is one route to achieving these goals. In this talk, speaker Ryan will explain how to JAMstack your WordPress install and what benefits you can obtain by doing so.

Building a packing application using the WooCommerce REST API

In this talk, Louise Towler will show attendees how her firm built a packing application for a warehouse that integrates with the WooCommerce REST API to manage and pack orders from WooCommerce websites.

They built the application using Laravel. The project included:

  • building a WordPress plugin to add custom endpoints for the WooCommerce orders
  • using Webhooks and Web sockets for real time order information
  • integrating with different shipping providers
  • integrating with the Google Print Cloud API to print out shipping labels

Mindfulness session on Saturday

An introduction to Mindfulness practice

Workshop: Saturday 19 October 2019, 12:20-13:20

Mindfulness is a state of being, an approach to life (and to our work, regardless of its genre) that calls for presence and awareness, care and purpose. Living mindfully, designing mindfully, coding mindfully can be extremely rewarding, for us and for the beneficiaries of our work.

Mindfulness is defined as the basic human ability to be fully present (aware of where we are and what we’re doing) and not overly reactive (or overwhelmed) by what’s going on around us.

Mindfulness practice refers to the cultivation of this basic human ability through various methods which may include, but are not limited to colouring, movement, meditation, breathing and so on.

In this one hour workshop, Raffaella Isidori will illustrate the principles and the applications of Mindfulness and Mindfulness Practice and share her experience and examples of practice.

There will be two workshops on mindfulness during the weekend:

  • Saturday 19 October 2019, 12:20-13:20
  • Sunday 20 October 2019, 11:00-12:00

Why subtitles are a must for online video

This session will reveal why subtitling needs to be budgeted and resourced as part of your website scope and video content planning. From SEO and e-learning to accessibility and usability, thinking about subtitling is a must for your marketing, behaviour change and customer engagement.

Abha will also share the progress on the Make WordPress subtitling campaign aimed at encouraging a change in how the need and benefit of subtitles is viewed. There will also be tips on using online software Amara for subtitling videos on WordPress.tv, and a great way of practising skills which can then transfer to your work.

The session will feature research with users on their experience of how subtitles allow them and others to access content rich materials. We hope at the end of this session, attendees and speakers will join the list of campaign champions.

Mini-workshop: Decoupled WordPress

This hands-on session will focus on Decoupled WordPress using REST APIs, JWT and Web Components. Code in PHP, deploy to HTML. Bring your charged laptops along to this session, specifically designed with Craig for WordCamp Dublin for attendees to be able to follow-on and develop their skills further back at home.

After a brief demo of a decoupled WordPress site on HTML, attendees will work through with some basic boilerplates. This will enable attendees to code and learn their own CUSTOM REST APIs, decoupled templates and JSON Web Tokens (JWT).

There will also be a Complete Training Course on Decoupled WP to take home and study in greater depth.

Workshop: Finding effective keywords for your site

This 90-minute workshop (limited places) on Keyword Research will take place on the Saturday. It is a special for WordCamp Dublin and will be run by members of Yoast’s e-learning team.

Doing keyword research is such an essential step in your SEO strategy. If you want to grow or at least get any traffic, you can’t skip it. We know it can be daunting though, where do you even start?

Here’s your answer: join in on Yoast Academy’s keyword research workshop! We will walk you through the steps of keyword research, so you will know how to set up and fill in your keyword research sheet. You will have so much inspiration for making new content! And best of all: it will be content that your audience is actually looking for.

WordCamp Dublin is grateful to Yoast for working with us to make available this workshop on the Saturday of the conference and a one hour workshop for students at the University on the previous day.

The workshop requires having a charged laptop. There are only a maximum of 50 spaces available.

Friday workshops

All tickets for the Friday workshops on ‘The basics of SEO: how to make sure people find your site’ and e-commerce for those new to WordPress are sold out. If you expressed an interest in attending the Friday workshop, you will be receiving an email to confirm your attendance or to be added to a waiting list. Thank you for your interest in the SEO and e-commerce workshops.

Yoga session on Saturday with Helen

Yoga instructor: Helen Odia

Session times: 2.15pm-3.15pm

Tempted to try something new, Helen nervously went to her first yoga class at university. She could barely touch her toes thanks to years of running. Loving the physical benefits each class brought her, she carried on dabbling in different styles of yoga including vinyasa flow, bikram, hatha and yin. 

It wasn’t until a few years later though, while working in London, that Helen really started to appreciate yoga as a whole. She found the more she practised, the better she could cope with the everyday stresses of city life. She was hooked.

Wanting to delve deeper, Helen completed a 250 hour Yoga Alliance certified teacher training in vinyasa flow with Stretch, London in 2018. This prompted a number of positive changes in my life. Hoping to share even just a little of this with others, Helen has been leading classes in London and then Bristol ever since.

How I wrote a popular plugin doing it all wrong

Twelve years ago Enrico wrote a small plugin for personal project and submitted it on WordPress.org. Slowly but steadily, it grew to more than three million active installations and it has become one of the most popular free plugins. This was, Enrico says ‘in spite of huge mistakes, months of neglect, epic fails and (obviously) bugs.’

In this talk, he will give a brief history of what he has learnt about WordPress, its amazing community and the power of sharing.

LaraWP: Combining WordPress and Laravel

In this talk, Chris Brosnan will introduce using WordPress as a backend application through a combination of using the WP REST API and/or a shared database with a Laravel application as a use case. He will explain how developers can harness the advantages of using a modern PHP framework based on MVC principles, coupled with the ‘wp-admin’ interface and database structure of the WordPress CMS for a more rapid and satisfying development experience.

With this approach one can combine the best of both worlds in a way that can be adapted for a project and the development team’s methodology. Chris will show through a real-world example, how the WP REST API was so important to the evolution of WordPress into more than just a CMS and how it makes the use of WordPress as a headless CMS so advantageous.

WordPress is a rapidly evolving CMS to the point where it is no longer simply a CMS but has serious potential uses as an application framework, data source and headless CMS for a PHP or JavaScript framework, for increased performance and yet unrealised potential uses. Laravel is just one framework in which WordPress can be used. Chris will give a brief introduction to the concepts of Laravel being used with WordPress in building complex web applications to show that there is no need to firmly choose between the two and that the strong advantages of both options can be fully realised in our development projects no matter the purpose.

Mindful design: Designing with presence for purpose and inclusion

While the notion of mindfulness has had a resurgence as a buzzword, its most profound meaning goes beyond light meditation and coloring books. The principles of Mindfulness can also be applied to all aspects of our work.

Mindfulness is a state of being, an approach to life (and to work, regardless of its genre) that calls for presence and awareness, care and purpose. Living mindfully, designing mindfully, coding mindfully can be extremely rewarding, for us and for the beneficiaries of our work.

A mindful approach to design intrinsically implies awareness and the necessary presence for inclusivity, accessibility, openness, and ethics, but it also adds value to our daily practice, as well as to our final outcomes: a powerful and relevant way to make a difference in our life, and in the lives of those who share our path.

This talk mixes a personal story, the principles behind the practice of mindfulness, and their application to the design practice (or, in fact, any practice that implies the production of a creative product, including, at large, coding or other practices). It also aims at introducing mindfulness (as a quality of the mind and as a practice) as a successful approach at the work we do in tech, along with offering – lightly – inspiration for dealing with mental health-related issues, like rumination, the Impostor Syndrome and overall anxiety.

Bringing 2FA with the Web Authentication API to WordPress

Making authentication as safe yet frictionless as possible is a delicate challenge. Existing solutions like backup codes, email login links, SMS codes or security keys haven’t always worked across devices or browsers or use cases.

Luckily, the Web Authentication API aims to provide developers with a unified way to work with fingerprint sensors, security keys and the like on the basis of a standardised web API.

In this talk we will explore this new API, look at a few use cases like 2FA and password-less authentication and close with a look at how this API could benefit WordPress developers and users as well through the 2FA feature project.

How to build a successful and meaningful partnership

The WordPress community is built on human relationships. In the context of business, nothing that lasts was ever built by a single person.

In the same way people connect with other people and develop networks, small companies can interact with larger organisations in a strategic way to build strong mutually beneficial partnerships.

Creating these relations requires time, effort and understanding. However, a lot of people struggle when it comes to contacting, developing and creating a connection with other entrepreneurs or large companies.

Thankfully, there are steps you can follow to approach a potential partner and write enticing emails and proposals that will immediately get their attention and bring you the desired results.

As a Partnerships Manager at SiteGround, our speaker develops relations like these. She will share practical tips and guidelines to help you express the benefits of a mutual partnership and expand them into a successful collaboration.

Closing Remarks

Contributor Session: Participate in the teams

We will have tasks where you can join in on community, marketing, WordPress.tv and more. There will be help for those starting out on their contributing journey and those wanting to explore new teams, such as, theme review.

If you can help or are new to contributing, please team as soon as possible on dublin@wordcamp.org – please put ‘Contributor session’ in the subject.

What is contributing about? Find out more on our Contributor Session page.

Teams you can discover at WordCamp Dublin 2019

  • Accessibility – Maja Benke
  • Community – Marcin Kilarski
  • Marketing – Abha Thakor and Scott Jones
  • Support – Kayleigh Thorpe
  • Theme Review – Colm Troy
  • WordPress.tv – Mark Smallman and Leo Mindel
  • Site Health Check – Jenny Wong

The Marketing team

Some of the tasks already identified are:

  • Facebook Live
  • podcasting setup and tips document
  • identifying videos on WordPress.tv suitable for marketing WordPress (bring headphones)
  • subtitling videos on WordPress.tv
  • more to follow.

Contributor session: Using block content editor in WordPress

This is a practical session on using the new block editor in the content management system with tips for finding your way around it. There will be some examples from WordCamp websites to help those who might be thinking of volunteering for a future event or want more experience of how to use it.

We are inviting advance requests for areas to work on, common issues faced on WordCamp sites, and questions to help you use blocks in content. These can be emailed to dublin@wordcamp.org – please use the word ‘block editor’ in the subject.

This session is part of our programme to coincide with Digital Citizenship Week.

Contributor session: Livestreaming practical workshop

A hands on practical session on tips and equipment you can use to livestream Meetups, WordCamps and other events in your business.

If you have an attendee ticket for the conference and would like to book for this session, email dublin@wordcamp.org by 10 October 2019 including ‘livestream booking’ in the subject. There will be some opportunities to observe or volunteer for a practice session on the Saturday for those booking for the Sunday workshop.

Yoga session on Sunday with Helen

Yoga instructor: Helen Odia

Session start: 10:00pm

Tempted to try something new, Helen nervously went to her first yoga class at university. She could barely touch her toes thanks to years of running. Loving the physical benefits each class brought her, she carried on dabbling in different styles of yoga including vinyasa flow, bikram, hatha and yin. 

It wasn’t until a few years later though, while working in London, that Helen really started to appreciate yoga as a whole. She found the more she practised, the better she could cope with the everyday stresses of city life. She was hooked.

Wanting to delve deeper, Helen completed a 250 hour Yoga Alliance certified teacher training in vinyasa flow with Stretch, London in 2018. This prompted a number of positive changes in my life. Hoping to share even just a little of this with others, Helen has been leading classes in London and then Bristol ever since.

How blocks have changed UX design

‘Blocks’ as a concept existed before Gutenberg, but they have become a lot more important to the future of WordPress and the web.

In this talk, the speaker will take you through how blocks have changed their approach to UX Design as a digital agency, how clients are benefitting from this, how it is made them quicker at delivering our designs and how all of this results in a better experience for site managers and end-users.

You will walk away with practical tips about selling and presenting blocks as an idea to clients, workflow ideas to make things easier for developers and a smile on your face. 🙂

How to secure your WordPress website

If you use a security plugin to make your site secure, you’re in the good path. However, there is more than the plugin installation to truly secure your site. From the beginner user to the expert one, this session has you covered on some of the ways to avoid being hacked and compromising your online presence.

Under Pressure – build up resilience and keep burnout at bay (extended version)

Session time: Sunday 11:00am

Burnout is one of the biggest threats to building an engaged team. A recent study found that 95% of HR leaders admit that burnout is sabotaging their companies’ work quality and employee retention; yet there is no obvious solution on the horizon.

Jochen is a long-time IT manager in corporate and startup environments, and has had to deal with burnout many times (both himself and to support team members). He asks: “How can we stay sane and productive in a world of rapidly changing objectives? Well, if the answer was easy, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. And yes, we really have to talk about it.”

In this 45 minute session, he will share his experience with building resilience for himself and his team. He will cover useful practices for managers, employees and the self-employed, such as:

  • recognising burnout symptoms
  •  breaking out of the negative belief cycle
  •  contributing to a healthy company culture
  •  reducing time and resource pressure
  •  restoring focus
  •  building healthy relationships
  •  dealing with change
  •  developing lasting resilience

Scaling effectively with WordPress

There are many misconceptions about WordPress. One of the most common and long enduring misconceptions is that WordPress does not scale well and is only for small sites.

The myth that WordPress does not scale well is what this talk will focus on and debunk. Speaker Chris Brosnan said: “I will discuss how although this assumption is untrue, as with many misconceptions, there is a small grain of truth in this assumption that comes mainly from wider misconceptions about the use of WordPress and its purpose.”

He will go onto explain how with adequate planning and due consideration before, during and after the development of a WordPress project’s lifecycle, you can ensure that your projects scale very well and have the flexibility necessary to add new features without too much scope creep or causing the product to perform poorly.

WordPress is now much more than a CMS and with careful planning, due consideration, avoiding waste and adopting a serious software development mindset to WordPress projects, it is very possible to build a WordPress site that will scale effectively.

Chris will focus on scaling in terms of effective coding standards and structuring the system in a way to scale effectively to minimise bloat and ensure loading times are low while the website grows larger.

The (Very) Large Side of WordPress

There are several ways to run many WordPress sites from a single WordPress install – Multi Site, Multi Network modes, and some more exotic ways to run multiple sites from single codebase and more recently, Docker containers. All of them have their own pros and cons. The speaker Arūnas Liuiza says: “I’ve tried them all and I’d love to share some lessons I’ve learned along the way.”

Lightning Talk: Scaling a WordPress business

Vito will share his perspective of the natural evolution of WordPress business from a freelancer to an agency and pointing out the stages he believes we should pay attention to and where we should place our focus when wanting to scale.

The session will cover:

  • pillars of a growing WordPress business
  • a recipe for scale
  • leveraging what you know
  • power of you
  • work day of the ‘King or Queen’
  • what you can do today

The information is based on Vito’s personal experience growing from a freelancer to an agency with a team of 12 within three years, and later rapidly scaling a product and within the first month reaching six figures for its first plugin. It will also feature the results of a survey Vito’s agency ran with approximately 600 WordPress professionals from around the world on how they ran their businesses.

Lightning Talk: Selling WordPress, Panel Q&A

This is a discussion Scott Jones has been having with other agency owners and the cool people on the WordPress marketing team since last year. He said: “It’s a challenge that I face in my business life each day, when WordPress comes up against other CMS and DXP platforms, especially when they have such great presence and marketing behind them.”

He believes we need to do more to show why the open source WordPress is more than just a credible competitor and to support our community in communicating the benefits of WordPress to their clients.

So why is WordPress a sellable CMS? And how easy or hard is it to endorse WordPress when a client is asking about other platforms?

Scott said: “These are some of the questions I want to help to answer. It’s something that I work to achieve on a daily basis (with a mixture of success and failure).”

The CMS we all love is flexible, expandable, fast, well-supported, great for content editors and ultimately great for business. It’s not just a small blogging platform anymore, it’s a product that suits tiny businesses and enterprise businesses in equal measure, depending on the experience of the designers and developers working with it.

Scott Jones aims in this talk to give a fairly broad range of people new ideas, new arguments and renewed thinking on how to say “WordPress is the platform for you.”

This lightning talk will be followed by a short panel Q&A with Make WordPress contributors Abha Thakor and Colm Troy.

Mindfulness session on Sunday

Workshop: Sunday 20 October 2019, 1:30pm – 2:30pm

An introduction to mindfulness practice

Dandelion with blue sky behind

Mindfulness is a state of being, an approach to life (and to our work, regardless of its genre) that calls for presence and awareness, care and purpose. Living mindfully, designing mindfully, coding mindfully can be extremely rewarding, for us and for the beneficiaries of our work.

Mindfulness is defined as the basic human ability to be fully present (aware of where we are and what we’re doing) and not overly reactive (or overwhelmed) by what’s going on around us.

Mindfulness practice refers to the cultivation of this basic human ability through various methods which may include, but are not limited to, colouring, movement, meditation, breathing, etc.

In the workshop, Raffaella Isidori will illustrate the principles and the applications of Mindfulness and Mindfulness Practice and share her experience and examples of practice.

There will be two workshops on Mindfulness during the WordCamp: one on the Saturday and the other on the Sunday.

Lightning Talk: Modernising your site with CSS

Do you want to learn how to use the power of modern CSS to improve your WordPress project and delight your users? Building a solid UI can be challenging when you are building a website or blog. It can feel like your creativity is being held back, but there are newer CSS features to help you be more creative. We are pleased that Camila Waz, Co-organiser of Dublin’s CSS Meetup, will be joining us to share her experience of working in these areas.

Like WordPress, CSS has evolved with features and functionality into an even more powerful tool. It can solve a lot of problems and speed up your theme styling by making use of new CSS features, for example, CSS Grid and CSS variables. By digging a little further into CSS, developers can discover possibilities to streamline their development practices and to present great interfaces.

Attendees will be shown how to implement CSS in an easy to maintain way, using many of the new technologies available for styling, layout and theming.

This session is aimed at frontend developers and those new to development. Camila will share links on how to use the new CSS properties and share some code to help attendees practice back in the office or at home.

Lightning Talk: How popup libraries emerged with WordPress

Popup Libraries is an artist-led social initiative to create small pop-up libraries in arts organisations, community centres and other non-commercial spaces that are open to the public.

Each small library is built from books donated by the local community and other elements of the libraries are made from recycled materials. In addition to the books, the libraries also have notebooks, pencils, paper and pens to encourage visitors to engage with creating ideas or images inspired by the books.

It started out as a WordPress website featuring news about found popup libraries and featuring a resource section to encourage visitors to start their own library with downloadable pdfs of posters and labels.

The project’s first Popup Library was opened recently at Rua Red Arts Centre in Tallaght, Dublin.

The project was established to inspire creativity, encourage recycling and enhance community spaces.

Graphic designer and photographer Doreen Kennedy will tell the story of how it evolved from a WordPress website, its site structure and how both parts of the project are open source.

Lightning Talk: Building a bespoke CRM to scale our web business

When Paudie made the move from a freelancer to taking on his first employee it was a massive jump. It presented a number of problems: sharing passwords, sharing client info, ensuring consistency in processes, project management. Scale, even at a small level was tough!

His firm built, and continue to develop an internal CRM and project management tool. It is their dashboard for everything. Built in WordPress and React, it is their go-to for everything project related. Using various tools to ingrate with key API systems.

Their next task is to expand their internal CRM, linking it to their accountancy software.

“It’s a great project that has grown and improved over its life. And goes to show just what is possible with WordPress.”

Paudie added: “It has cut down on wasted time and is a dashboard that controls everything we do. It has allowed the business to scale with relative ease and adds a huge level of automation into every task that the studio carries out.”

This talk will show the capabilities of WordPress from a technical perspective and also, show that you can use WordPress in innovative ways to produce products that can really work for businesses, both commercially and in-house.

Migrating a WordPress business from self-managed hardware to the Cloud

As Founder and CEO for Sotic, a Digital Sports agency which delivers big name sports websites on WordPress, Leo has considerable experience in both working with Cloud technology and live events. In 2015 Sotic started the journey, migrating its own data centre to Cloud. Four years later the company is now 100% cloud based, running a number of fast and award winning WordPress sites, including for the Six Nations Rugby, England Netball, Tour of Great Britain and Irish Rugby.

This talk will look at the journey his 30-person digital agency undertook to migrate, the pitfalls along the way and how this move has unlocked a huge improvement in SEO, web performance, customer service levels, development cycles as well as improving employee well-being and work life balance.

You can connect with: @wfckeego / sotic.net / https://profiles.wordpress.org/wfckeego/

The one page you must customise on your site and how to do it

An often overlooked, if not wholly forgotten page is the 404. This page is essential for everything. We all forget to redirect a page or miss a link, and arriving at an uncustomised 404 page is not good for business.

Sabrina will explain the reasons why it is important for user experience, to retaining customers and getting visitors to look again at your offer. She will give some tips on how to customise it.

Creating flow in your digital work to bring balance and happiness

Start time: Sunday, 2.45pm

Exploring prioritisation, impact and knowing when to stop.

Emer will give tips on prioritising deliverables for users and understanding what is enough for a first release or a minimum viable product. She will explain why delivering in increments in phased delivery creates higher quality products which are more on target while reducing stress levels and reduce project creep (constantly adding on to requirements) which can add negativity and difficulty to your workload. That feeling it is never done.

Stop trying to force grow an oak tree, start with a sapling which will help inspire and nourish your projects and avoid your burnout. She will bring in techniques from Agile, Scrum and Kanban from her work in her corporate days to directly help WordPress businesses and project managers.

  • How do we prioritise and decide what is essential now just for the project but for your own wellbeing? 
  • How to we address impact on each feature and impact to ourselves? 
  • How can we create a better experience for everyone?

A developer’s guide to working with marketing teams

As somebody who has been both a developer and marketing team leader in their career, Rhys has been able to observe when projects go wrong between developers and an external or internal marketing team.

In this talk, Rhys will share a few areas where relationships can break down, how to avoid problems before they arise, and also tips to get marketing teams on your side so you can both serve a happy client.

Deploying and using WordPress in a learning environment

WordPress is used as the primary CMS for web development modules in Dundalk Institute of Technology (DkIT) throughout the various business and computing departments as well in at least two evening classes. It is also used for several public facing systems including the ITLC Tutorials website and internal systems such as inventory control and room booking.

In this session, Paul will discuss the mass deployment of WordPress in environments like this as well as how to easily provide students with professional documentation and support. He will touch on Active Directory integration, security and other issues to be considered when deploying WordPress in a learning environment.

There will be practical demonstrations of how WordPress is now being deployed inside the DkIT Virtualisation Sandbox (powered by XCP-ng and Xen Orchestra) and their new web-based Containerisation Environment (powered by Docker and Portainer).

Yoga session on Sunday with Eimear

Yoga instructor: Eimear Coulter Murphy

Session start: 3:15pm

Learn how to release tension from your body, become more flexible and help bring calm to your mind through breathing techniques, yoga postures and visualisation.

This Hatha yoga session is for all abilities, no previous experience necessary. Attendees may be seated or lay on the floor. If possible, please bring a mat or a blanket.

Lightning Talk: Consistent content: How to win loyal customers and create brand ambassadors

Consistent content: how to win loyal customers and create brand ambassadors.

Content marketing is no longer a new or hot topic – everyone gave it a try in some capacity. For some, it helped their business explode and reach the next level. For others, it felt like they could have spend their time better, and they slowly but surely give up.

It’s no surprise: creating content takes time and costs money. It can take months until you see any results, and even then, you expected more. So why would you then focus on creating content regularly, and how can you do so to make sure it brings you results?

In this talk, you will learn about:

  • companies who grew rapidly thanks to content
  • what makes up a successful piece of content creating a sustainable strategy so you can get the best results with less time investment
  • reaching your target audience with content, from early prospects to loyal customers
  • metrics you will want to monitor to know you’re on track.

The session will be packed with examples, practical tips and resources to help take your organisation to the next level.

Making WordPress fly with Jetpack

In this talk Kayleigh will be showing the various features of the Jetpack plugin, from its built in analytics, to form and portfolio building, and how you can use the Jetpack plugin to improve your site’s visibility.She will use real examples from her own site to show how much you can do with this one plugin.

Lightning Talk: Perspective on working with WordPress

Time Saving Plugins

When we’re developing a website, we all encounter issues and problems. What do we do?

a) Write the code to fix it

b) Pay someone else to fix it

In WordPress there’s an option c – plugins!

WordPress plugins are pieces of software that can be uploaded to your site to extend and expand the functionality of your WordPress site.

If you’ve had a problem or issue, the chances are, someone else had that issue too!

The unique and cool thing about WordPress is; someone comes up with a solution, writes the code to fix it, packages it up as a plugin and makes their solution available to the whole community for free.

Clare McSharry creates websites using WordPress and loves plugins. She regularly gives WordPress training courses and a popular section is her “favourite plugins” section.

Here she shares some of her favourites, and helps us get the most out of them.

Lightning Talk: How to build up resilience and keep burnout at bay

Burnout is one of the biggest threats to building an engaged team. A recent study found that 95% of HR leaders admit that burnout is sabotaging their companies’ work quality and employee retention; yet there is no obvious solution on the horizon.

Jochen is a long-time IT manager in corporate and startup environments, and has had to deal with burnout many times (both himself and to support team members). He asks: “How can we stay sane and productive in a world of rapidly changing objectives? Well, if the answer was easy, we wouldn’t have to talk about it. And yes, we really have to talk about it.”

In this talk, he will share his experience with building resilience for himself and his team. He will cover useful practices for managers, employees and the self-employed, such as:

  • recognising burnout symptoms
  • breaking out of the negative belief cycle
  • contributing to a healthy company culture
  • reducing time and resource pressure
  • restoring focus
  • building healthy relationships
  • dealing with change
  • developing lasting resilience

Open questions

Closing remarks

It’s a wrap! Discover the highlights of this three day event, share the fun and meet all those who have contributed to make it happen. Find out about some of the other WordCamps taking place and how you can get involved in future WordPress events in Ireland and Northern Ireland too. And, of course, discover whose pet dog or cat photo is crowned the event mascot. It’s going to be worth staying for!