Schedule

Tuesday, 6 September 2016

Time Developer & Business Track User & Education Track
8:30 am
Registration ☀️
9:30 am
Opening Remarks
9:45 am
10:15 am
10:45 am
11:15 am
11:45 am
12:15 pm
Lunch
1:15 pm
1:45 pm
2:15 pm
2:45 pm
3:15 pm
Tea Break
3:45 pm
4:15 pm
4:45 pm
5:15 pm
5:45 pm
Closing Remarks ❤️
8:00 pm
Afterparty

Please note that this schedule may be subject to change.

Talks

The Jugaad Way: WordPress Code for Non-Developers

In this talk, I explore how customisable WordPress is by design, and show, with examples, how easy it is for non-developers to dive into WordPress coding. Thanks to WordPress hooks, and how well they are documented in the Codex, it’s possible to begin playing with WordPress code, even if you have little or no knowledge of PHP.

The Jugaad Way is just that: using existing resources and a task-based approach to get into WordPress code. It’s an approach that only requires that you know how to cut and paste, and is how I myself got into WordPress code.

Struggling to promote your theme/plugin? Don’t!

Simple but effective strategies to promote your WordPress themes / plugins – based on our experiences through success and failure.

Managing Multiple Authors/Contributors in WordPress

While WordPress is easy to use, it can be a headache to manage multiple authors for the site. This topic will cover the various way and tools I use to manage author’s post, collaboration, editorial issue, payment issues and more.

Contributing to Calypso

A getting started guide to working with Calypso, how to get around Github, how to submit issues, and how to contribute your own fixes or additions.

Amazon Alexa + WP REST API = GUI-Less WordPress Application

Do you know Amazon Alexa? / What is Amazon Alexa?

Amazon Alexa is a speech recognition service provided by Amazon.
By combining various AWS applications, you can use it in many ways imaginable.
Our team developed the applications by combining Alexa and WP REST API to control WordPress without using any GUI.

In the session, we’ll introduce GUI-less application and how to combine speech recognition service + WP REST API and how to control WordPress without any GUI.

Gaining Customer Loyalty through Support – A Case Study on WPML Team

In this topic, I share info on how our WPML team organises, works and improves over time, and so earns the love and loyalty of our customers.

I will discuss the following points in detail:

  • How the support should be defined
  • Why proper training is a good investment
  • How the appropriate team structure gives clients quick and accurate solutions
  • How to make it easier for clients (languages, time zones, searching – self-help, erratas, etc)
  • What makes a good support policy
  • Why you need to have the statistics
  • How progressive improvement identifies us, not as being simply good, but as being the best
  • Some of my own personal experiences in dealing with clients

Offloading services from WordPress to outer services, such as Google and AWS.

To serve high traffic blogs, media websites, and e-commerce shops, it is vital to configure WordPress and server setting.

A lot of people tend to have their cache, calculation, and most of other complicated things inside WordPress or on their server stack. Doing everything on WordPress works well on smaller scale websites, but when the traffic and the size of the sites grow, it is not easy to keep them stable at a reasonable cost.

My partner Digital Cube and I have worked with big clients, offering scalable and stable hosting. Our primary strategy is not doing everything inside WordPress or our web server, but utilizing Amazon Web Services and Google platforms to cache pages, to serve assets with CDNs, to calculate related posts, backup everything.

WordPress will do what WordPress is good at, leaving other services to do what they are good at. When we do this way, the total cost stays low.

To achieve this, you need to know what the external services are, how they work, and haw we can configure WordPress and services to work smoothly together. We have created and open sourced a lot of configuration, automation scripts, and WordPress plugins to get this work.

I’d like to share the basic ideas and what the audience need to do to get the same themselves.

Courting Controversy: Creating Blog Posts that Get People Talking on Social Media, without getting into trouble

Content creators often want to create compelling content that will incite debate among their social media audience, but run the risk of bearing the brunt of backlash from the public/policy makers.

I will be sharing my content creation techniques, processes and philosophy behind creating blog posts that touch on hot-button social issues, guiding the conversation beyond that, while avoiding pitfalls that come with the territory.

Hookup with WordPress

I will talk about the advantages of using/adding hooks. How it massively helps pushing features to a large codebase/theme become a cinch, when is the best time to add a hook and where you can usually best place a hook.

Building a high quality WordPress agency in South Asia

India has the second largest population in the world. More than a million people are directly working in IT sector.

Yet, WordPress agency or in general any software agency in India, or even in South Asia is often mistaken as that agency which does low quality work for ridiculously low rates!

When we started in 2009, it was very clear that we are not going to be part of this “race to the bottom” culture. We wanted to work on projects that were exciting and challenging. A kind of work that makes you proud at the end of the day!

I would like to talk about how we used innovative methods to hire passionate people, what challenges we faced in motivating our employees to be core contributors, nurturing a culture of giving back to open source and how it all helped us stand out.

The result – I am glad to say that I have the privilege to lead and work in one of the most talked about WordPress agencies in India today, for right reasons!

Using WordPress for an editorial team of 15 writers getting 1.4 million pageviews a month

Tech in Asia has a team of about 15 writers who writes 5 to 15 articles a day and get 1.4 million pageviews a month. This talk focuses on our editorial workflow and how WordPress is a part of it. I’ll also discuss what we like and dislike about WordPress, and how it can keep up with the evolving media landscape.

Using WordPress for Interdisciplinary Research

Research and scholarship are constantly evolving, becoming more collaborative and interdisciplinary. Supporting an interactive media-rich environment, WordPress is a versatile and easy to use platform to document and showcase interdisciplinary research that produces various types of research output.

In this talk, we will be sharing about a digital archive developed for the Digital Intangible Heritage of Asia (DIHA) research cluster at NTU College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

This DIHA archive helps to engage different interest groups on intangible heritage which covers languages, festivals, cuisines and traditional craftsmanship. The research outputs, which include publications, photographs and datasets, are captured, organised, annotated and preserved in the digital archive.

How to DIY basic digital marketing on WordPress

The digital and mobile spaces are where your marketing needs to go today. So what can you do even if you don’t have a marketing person/team? It all starts with your website.

Highly experienced in marketing in all areas and having built three websites using just basic frontend knowledge, Nicole will share how you can DIY basic digital marketing to help your business/brand.

How Being an Educator Has Changed the Way I Blog About Beauty

Being an educator has given me a larger and newer audience, most of whom impressionable teenagers between the ages of 17-19. Blogging then has become a role more accountable, and has more far-reaching and in-depth effects than ever before.

A new social responsibility is established and reinforced, and new personal blogging guidelines are aligned with the integrity embodied in the field of education.

What is the responsibility of plugin developers?

I believe we, plugin developers, is responsible to the WordPress community. We must keep plugins secure. We must make it available for every user. I’d like to talk about principles that WordPress plugin developers should keep in mind.

Open Source Studio: Learning and Content Management For Online Education In The Arts

Open Source Studio (OSS) is a collaborative, online software environment designed to meet the needs of studio-based teaching at the School of Art, Design and Media in Nanyang Technological University. OSS has been developed as a prototypical multi-site WordPress content management system situated on the school’s network.

Open Source Studio centralises content management at the class level using custom plugins that aggregate individual work into a class site. This way, students document their own work within the context of their studies so that faculty can efficiently gather and organise student projects. When students are taught to apply standardised taxonomies and other efficient database techniques to their documentation, media work is more easily retrieved, presented, and evaluated.

Using WordPress at its heart OSS tries to create a virtual studio where students and faculty can collaborate on projects in an online social space that encourages transparency and cooperative learning. Once the goal of providing online workspace for all students has been achieved, we hope to organise an institutional portfolio: a curated gallery that effectively represents the art and design work produced by the school.

Extending your WordPress project with custom post types

WordPress is extremely flexible when it comes to expansion. From small blog to a large social network it can be extend very efficiently and effectively if you use “Custom Post Types”.
In this topic I would like to discuss how we can extend WordPress Projects to anything, using WordPress Custom Post types, custom taxonomies and custom meta boxes.

Specifically, I’ll go through –

  1. Default post types in WordPress
  2. What is a  custom post type and how it works.
  3. Creating your own custom post types.
  4. Best practices in creating custom post types.
  5. Extending further with custom taxonomies and meta boxes.
  6. Displaying your data.

Contributing to WordPress Core

Almost everyone will have heard the phrase “don’t hack WordPress core” before, what’s less known is that it’s only the start of the saying. Don’t hack WordPress core, without contributing the hacks back.

Contributing to WordPress core is like riding a bike, it takes a little effort to get started but once you learn it’s a skill you’ll never forget.

You will be given a jump start on contributing, from how to use the bug tracker all the way to contributing a patch and getting your first props.

Optimising the website with Google Tag Manager

Building an online business starts with understanding behavior of users on the website. Google Tag Manager & Google Analytics combined are great tools to achieve that goal and improve the website’s conversion.

In this topic I’d like to share hard lessons learned with Google Tag Manager and what things newbies like myself can avoid. I will be sharing my experiences as a non-tech guy.

An Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming, Design Patterns, and Test-Driven Development

Since the first release of WordPress in 2003, a lot of things have changed. Perhaps the most directly significant change has occurred within the main language in which WordPress is written – PHP. The developments that PHP has gone through since 2003 would make it unrecognisable to many of those who worked with it back then. In 2004, PHP 5 introduced the beginning of proper support for object-oriented programming. The subsequent releases have added many new features to the language, and WordPress has steadily moved along with these developments.

WordPress today is like a living museum of different ways of writing PHP. This means that it can be difficult to understand the best way of writing code for your plugins, themes and extensions. Nevertheless, a “best practice” approach has emerged. It can sometimes be difficult to understand where this approach comes from, and the best way to apply it to your own projects.

In this talk, Jack will do his best to introduce you to the key principles within PHP that drive both the development of WordPress core, and many of the most widely used and well-regarded plugins.

5 Tips To Optimise WordPress To Be Faster and More Secure

There are many WordPress sites are powered by Vodien, and we are gonna share some insights, such as common traps like unoptimised themes and plugins causing site slowdowns and hacks.

We will also share why its important to work with a web developer or a reputable theme publisher for your website. Furthermore, we will provide our recommendations on a few plugins that cover different aspects, such as for security and speed.

Using blogs in Classrooms: an NTU case study

The use of blogs as a teaching tool in a course is nothing new and as shown in many literature, it is a popular tool with the present generation of professors and students who are increasingly very familiar and comfortable with using online technology for documenting and tracking of a student learning reflection, personal review and participation.

However, the success and degree of online engagement between the instructor and students is possible only with careful strategizing and close integration with the course curriculum.

Our session shares the use of WordPress to support a undergraduate class in chemistry and how the online activities were carefully planned to compliment the face-to-face time with the Professor and classmates.

Moving forward in WordPress

WordPress has created many opportunities for people all around the world, so many people are curious about how it could help them grow.

In his talk, Noel will discuss the path to success for anyone interested in working with WordPress, remote working or generally being part of this movement.

Powering your Content Site: Why WordPress?

Why self-host on WordPress versus other options? What are the revenue opportunities?

I’ll share some of my experiences starting out with WordPress, how it affected my business and life and the tools you could use to achieve success.

WordCamp Singapore 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!