We are very excited to add a Beginner’s Track for this year’s WordCamp Portland! We have a great line up of speakers just for the beginner attendee. Here’s a list of the speakers and topics for the day (in order of the schedule), we hope you enjoy the line up and learn more about WordPress to move you along your journey.
Bob Dunn – Intro to WordPress
A Complete Beginners Guide to using WordPress! In this Bob of the online WordPress instructional site BobWP introduces attendees to the WordPress dashboard, explaining posts and pages, how to use the editor, media library and other basics to get you familiar with using WordPress.
Becky Davis – Evaluating and Selecting Themes
Themes control the look, feel and layout of your site. Picking a ready-made one can be a daunting task, so let’s take a look at themes and understand the decisions that need to be made. We’ll dive into:
- Why it’s critical to understand your brand, audience and content before you even begin looking
- What to expect a theme to do and what it won’t
- What to look for when picking a theme and good places to find them
- How to install and switch themes
- Understanding the theme file structure
- Understand how child themes work
Kathy Zant – Intro to Plugins
Extending WordPress above and beyond the core functionality is part of what makes WordPress so powerful. However, the sheer number of plugins available can be overwhelming. A strategy for evaluating plugins makes both developing managing WordPress easier. In this presentation, attendees will learn:
- Strategies and tools for evaluating one plugin over another
- Key factors to consider
- Evaluation tools
- Paid plugins versus free: do you get what you paid for?
- Managing plugins and updates
- Evaluating plugin security:
- How to research plugin security history
- Identify functionality that may be risky
Attendees will also receive a plugin evaluation checklist they can take home to help choose plugins that fit their project’s objectives.
Lightning Talks
The following are the 3 lightning talk topics for the beginner tracks:
Rocky Kev – 5 Easy Coding Tricks You Can Do in WordPress (Especially for Non-Developers)
For every WordPress user, there’s always a button that’s a bit off to the side, or a logo that doesn’t display correctly. This session will help you DIY types, who want a little more control but don’t want to spend years being a programmer. We’ll will show you a few tricks to fix common web design issues with certain plugins, with a bit of coding. We’ll do a tiny bit of HTML, CSS, and PHP, but don’t let that scare you, I’ve taught this to 50+ year old WordPress users who picked it up immediately.
Larry Swanson – DIY Content Strategy
WordPress agencies and freelance designers and developers can improve their client’s website projects by incorporating content-strategy best practices into their workflows. Anyone who has built more than one website has developed a good array of content strategy skills. I’ll show how to plug those skills into a proven framework for crafting an actionable, state-of-the-art website content strategy. If you’ve ever used “lorem ipsum” copy as you struggled to extract content from your client the day before launch, this talk is for you.
Mikey Veenstra – 3 Security Mistakes You Didn’t Realize You Made
We all take shortcuts sometimes. Whether you were swamped with client work and a corner had to be cut, or you’re stretched so thinly trying to wear every hat that something fell through the cracks, we’ve all encountered mistakes we made ourselves. While they’re mostly all forgivable, it becomes a bit of a different issue when a mistake leads to a security concern. In this talk we’ll look at three common security mistakes made by WordPress site owners every day, why they get made in the first place, and how to resolve them.
Fellene Gaylord – Building a Portfolio in WordPress
Using what we’ve learned today, Fellene will guide attendees through the process of building a working portfolio! We will cover a basic photo portfolio, and adding additional features to create an academic or professional portfolio as well. Access to the slides and additional artifacts from the session will be downloadable afterward.
Benjamin Turner – Intro to Theme Development
Creating and working with WordPress themes is a great way to learn more about WordPress as well as make your site look and function exactly how you want it. We’ll go over what goes into making a WordPress theme, as well as concepts like “the loop,” “actions and filters,” and the “template hierarchy.” By the end of the talk, you should have a good overview of WordPress themes, as well as places to go for further learning.
Andrea Middleton – Contributing to the WordPress Community
This introductory session will cover the ways that people can contribute to the WordPress global community team, no matter what their background or experience.
Here’s the schedule to plan out your day that includes the beginner, general, and developer tracks.