WordCamp Montreal 2012

WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Joey Kudish!

Joey is a Code Wrangler at Automattic. Previously, he was a freelancing web developer building high-scale WordPress sites and private WordPress plugins. He is the author and contributor to several WordPress plugins as well as contributor to WordPress core. Joey’s an avid coffee drinker, dog lover & enthusiastic traveler.

Follow @jkudish on twitter.

Joey will be giving a talk titled Becoming a better WordPress developer.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The theme customizer and the flexibility it brings for end-users. I think we’ll see a lot of themes and plugins take advantage of this new feature and build out some awesome integrations with it over the next few months.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Though I moved to Vancouver last year, Montreal is my hometown and I still keep in touch with some of the local community. I hope to come back every year to share some knowledge with the Montreal crew.

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk will cover WordPress coding standards, best practices, and technical tools to become a better developer. It will be a resourceful presentation for anyone beginning, interested in, and those who have been developing with WordPress for a long time. Some of the topics covered will be proper usage of hooks and filters, creating your own plugins (instead of always using that functions.php), making use of the mu-plugins folder, how to properly escape and sanitize user-generated content, security gotchas and more.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

That writing good, scalable, re-usable and secure code is more important than just quickly hacking together a solution.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

It’s tough to select just one person who inspire more than others. I follow a lot of people in the WordPress community and they each contribute in a meaningful way; whether it’s writing code, helping out in the forums, translating text, etc… I am also lucky to work with 125+ of some of the smartest people in the world over at Automattic 🙂

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I think the media enhancements in 3.5 are very promising. It’s definitely an area of WordPress that needs some work. Beyond that, I am also excited by any under-the-hood API changes that make developing with WordPress easier. One area in particular I’d like to see some work on in the next few release cycles is the Settings API.

WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Colin Vernon!

Founder of Stresslimit design, Colin has directed, architected and developed CMS platforms, intranets, applications and websites of all shapes & sizes for over a decade. His company and projects focus beautiful, useful, multi-platform communication, based mostly on WordPress as an extensible web platform. As well as being a long-time advocate of web standards, open source and the semantic web, he has lots of WordPress experience: his plugins have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and he has worked directly with Automattic on a number of projects. He is now also part of the WordPress-powered PressBooks project which aims to merge web, e-pub and print publishing for small and large authors and publishers. He also runs a record label.

Colin will be giving a talk titled WordPress Workflows and Process for small teams.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Drag-and-Drop Media Uploader ? [3.2]

is_main_query() ? [3.3]

adding ‘ep_mask’ to register_post_type() ? [3.4]

Future potential of new CRUD XMLRPC APIs for all built-in and custom post types ? [3.4]

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

We’ve been so deep in web development in general and WP specifically for so many years, it’s fun to share & give back some knowledge, plus I always learn something when presenting ideas to an interested audience.

What is your talk going to be about?

Lots of general tips for intermediate developers and small teams

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

At least one method, process or tool that will save them time or hassle from now on.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

All the core devs and contributors are awesome, but Matt is my favourite he’s so cute.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

A simple, robust theme options API that works, without coding forms or relying on externals frameworks or classes.

WordCamp Montreal is only a week away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Kathryn Presner!

Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services takes a holistic approach to web design and development, building unique sites that work well, look great, and are easily found in search-engine results by the target market. Kathryn is passionate about helping people avoid common website pitfalls and as an enthusiastic WordPress user, gives back to the open-source community by answering questions as a volunteer WordPress support-forum moderator and presenting at events like WordCamp, Podcamp, and Girl Geek Dinners. Non-web pastimes include cooking healthy and delicious food, pondering which of her three cats is the most human-like, and eagerly awaiting her first crop of homegrown organic garlic.

Follow @zoonini on Twitter.

Kathryn will be giving a talk titled Passionate About Plugins and a joint talk titled A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Over the last few months, the information presented in the plugin repository has had some valuable overhauls. For example, it now includes a prominent warning if a plugin hasn’t been updated in more than 2 years and displays an indicator like “52 of 57 support threads in the last two months have been resolved” – giving you a sense of the level of support-forum assistance you’re likely to get, should you need it.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Simple: I love sharing my passion for WordPress with beginners!

What is your talk going to be about?

Passionate About Plugins will explore some of the factors to consider when choosing a plugin from the more than 20,000 available in the repository. We’ll look at things like the likelihood of getting support if something goes amiss, the frequency of updates, and potential conflicts. A portion of the talk will feature recommended plugins, including security-related tools that make your site less vulnerable to being hacked.

In A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress, presented with Shannon Smith, we’ll demystify WordPress for newbies. We’ll explain the difference between themes, plugins, and widgets, and take a hands-on look at the administration area. We encourage people to bring questions about anything WordPress-related they may be wondering about.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

Passionate About Plugins: I hope people become more confident about how to make a wise choice of plugin  and excited about the potential of plugins to enhance their site.

A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress:  I want folks to feel more comfortable with WordPress terminology and better understand how the various elements like themes, databases and plugins work together to power their site, making it look and work as it does.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

The WordPress.org support forums are blessed with a team of incredibly dedicated volunteer moderators, and I raise my glass to them. Folks like Andrea R., Christine R., Esmi, Ipstenu, Jan D. and others, help an incredible number of WordPress users with grace, skill and patience.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

An optional Visual Editor for the text widget would be super handy for a lot of people.

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Tracy Levesque!

Tracy Levesque is a co-owner of YIKES, Inc., a Philadelphia web design and development shop. She has been designing websites since 1996 and working with WordPress since 2007. She spends her days building custom themes for WordPress and seeing how much functionality she can add without knowing PHP. When not wrangling HTML and CSS, Tracy rides bikes, eats sushi, chases her 5 year old daughter and takes pictures of abandoned buildings.

Tracy will be giving a talk titled Creating Custom Child Themes for WordPress.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The Theme Customizer.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I will take any opportunity to visit Canada.

What is your talk going to be about?

I am going to talk about how to customize a WordPress site using a Child Theme. The alternate title of my presentation is “How to Make WordPress Pretty Without Breaking it.”.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

The ability to create a Child theme and the knowledge and inspiration to go from there.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

I follow core developers, etc. on Twitter, but I really get my inspiration from the collaborative nature of the community as a whole.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I would love to have expand/collapse buttons on /wp-admin/edit.php?post_type=page for pages’ child pages. I know you can already sort/filter/search, but one more feature to make the page list less lengthy would be sweet.

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Yannick Lefebvre!

Yannick is a tech enthusiast and the author of the upcoming WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook, published by Packt Publishing. He has been blogging since 2003, started using WordPress in 2004 and published his first plugin, Link Library, in March 2005. Since then, he released six other plugins, all hosted on the official WordPress.org site. He absolutely loves using WordPress to develop web sites and find PHP to be a most liberating language compared to more traditional languages such as C/C++.

Follow @ylefebvre on Twitter.

Yannick will be giving a talk titled WordPress Plugin Development 201. Three copies of the WordPress Plugin Development Cookbook will be raffled off during Yannick’s presentation. To order your own copy of this title in e-book format, buy the book from Packt and enter code wcmontreal12 in the promotional box field at checkout to get 40% off until December 31st, 2012.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The new APIs to create multi-section help pages for plugin administration pages.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

To share my knowledge of plugin development with the community and show them how easy it can be for them to create and contribute new plugins to extend WordPress’ capabilities.

What is your talk going to be about?

After covering the basics of plugin development last year, this talk will covers slightly more advanced topics such as the creation of a good development environment for plugins, internationalization, javascript and enhancing plugin pages on the official repository.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

An appreciation for plugin developers’ work and an eagerness to create their own extensions to the platform.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt) is an obvious inspiration, with the way he has been building a striving business around an open source application like WordPress. Brendan Sera-Shriar (@digibomb) and Chris Bavota (@bavotasan), with their great PressWork theme that has received broad recognition in the WP community.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

A built-in form builder to be able to create things like contact forms.

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

Our next spotlight is Christopher Ross!

Christopher has spoken at WordCamp events in Toronto and Montreal in the past, taught community college courses in web design, and run a successful WordPress based consulting business since 2005.

Christopher will be giving a talk titled How to run a newspaper in WordPress.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The media uploader, it’s been such a big improvement from years gone by.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I enjoy speaking about WordPress and Montreal was my first WordCamp, there is a beautiful sense of community in Montreal.

What is your talk going to be about?

Newspaper publishing with WordPress. It’s an encompassing look at how to use WordPress for creating and publishing leading edge newspapers by using WordPress as a content manager, rather than a blogging platform.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

That WordPress is a simple, easy to use, profit enhancing platform.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

The Rennicks, Chris Bavota, the VIP team, the core developers.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Code optimization of course, more hooks for plugins, better API support.

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

I’m happy to present our next spotlight, Tom Auger!

Tom Auger (@TomAuger) is a designer, developer and educator and a core contributor to WordPress. His passion is to gain a deep understanding of the inner workings of WordPress internals and he leverages this knowledge in client-facing projects with digital agency Zeitguys, inc, as well as by giving back to the WordPress community through support forums, the WordPress Codex, and talking at WordCamps.

Tom will be giving a talk titled Advanced Post Queries: Best Practices for Accessing your Data.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

There have been some flashy UI and Theme changes that have been pretty neat and some great improvements under the hood, but wait ’till you see what 3.5 has in store…

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I had a great time speaking last year, Montreal is a great city, and when you’ve been living and breathing WordPress for the last year like I have you really just want to talk about it to people who are interested! My family is sick of hearing about it.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m diving deep into one of the most important (possibly THE most important) aspects of WordPress: the database, which of course is the gateway to all your content! What’s exciting is that you don’t have to be a database programmer or a SQL guru to interact with it (though SOME degree of coding of course is necessary). In fact, in most cases, even if you ARE good with database stuff, it’s best to leave the dirty work to WordPress and stay out of the weeds.

The problem is there are so many ways to get at your posts, categories and media, that it’s hard to know when you’re supposed to use what. So my talk will try to cover the entire range – from low-level actions and filters you may not have known about to really easy-to-use, high-level functions that make getting whatever slice of content you want possible even for WordPress beginners.

Will there be coding involved? Sure there will, but my aim is to have something for everyone – from people just starting to tweak their sites and themes to hard-core developers who want to just get that much more out of WordPress. I’m going to try to use real-world website examples and (gulp) I’ll be running a server off my laptop so we can see this stuff in action. It’s going to be an adventure for sure, so come along for the ride!

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I want everyone to be using the correct methods for getting at their content (posts, categories, media etc), taking full advantage of the rich set of functions that WordPress makes available.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Aside from the usual suspects like Nacin and Otto42, Koop, Scribu and the like (disclaimer: incomplete list!), I’m inspired by (and I’m not even kidding) all the guys like Jer who make things like WordCamp happen. Open Source projects are more than just code, and it’s this huge network of volunteers, orgnizers, documenters, testers that makes it happen. Guys like Sergey who basically live in Trac and just does triage on tickets that come in (not to mention contributing a truckload of patches) really impress me.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Well, my personal pet peeve with WordPress has always been the Media Centre, feature images (post thumbnails), the gallery, all that stuff. That needs a serious overhaul. The good news is that it’s very likely we’ll be seeing some big improvements in that area very soon. Keep your eyes on the dev channel and the new P2 blog for updates!

WordCamp Montreal is two weeks away! We’re excited to bring you a new speaker spotlight series this year!

I’m happy to present our first spotlight, CT Moore!

A recovering agency hack, CT Moore (@gypsybandito) is a strategist, blogger, and speaker who specializes in SEO and social content strategy.

CT will be giving a talk titled SEO for WordPress.

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What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I don’t know if it was in the last 365 days per se, but being able to install plugins & themes through the backend user interface was a huge win for me. I hardly ever use my FTP client anymore.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I love the WordPress community. By learning my way around WordPress, I’ve learned CSS and a bit of PHP, and none of that would’ve been possible if the community hadn’t been there to share their knowledge and lend a hand when I needed it. So it’s always been important to me to either give back to the community, or pass the buck forward by sharing my own experience with others.

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk is going to be about SEO. I know that WordPress is relatively SEO-friendly right out of the box, but there is so much more bloggers can do to help their content rank better, and that’s what I do for a living (SEO), so that’s what I want to share with the community.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I want them to walk away with an actionable to-do list. I want them to learn from me and say “Oh, that’s what I can be doing better with my blog,” and then go do it. I want them to walk away with something they can use immediately and see the benefits of in the near future.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Brendan Sera-Shriar (@digibomb) has always inspired me for both his knowledge of WordPress as a platform, as well as his passion for community involvement. Andrea Rennick (@andrea_r) has also been an inspiration. I mean, she an actually WordPress community moderator, and despite her accomplishments, she still takes the time to help out those who know so much less than her. That, and I met her at Wordcamp a couple years ago, and she’s always been willing to help me troubleshoot problems here and there.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I’d like to see more advance SEO options integrated into the core framework. There are a few really great plugins out there, but WordPress out of the box lacks some things (like redirects and custom meta info) that I think any basic user can benefit from.