WordCamp Montreal 2013

Richard loves the web and really loves WordPress. After attending his first WordCamp Montreal in 2010, he was hooked! Now a Happiness Engineer with Automattic, Richard wants to help spread the WordPress goodness to anyone else who’s interested in the web. When he’s not tinkering with his sites, he loves going to Mexico to eat spicy tacos and ride around on the metro!

Follow @richardmtl on Twitter.

Richard will be giving a talk titled More Multisite for the Masses.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The Media Uploader in 3.5. I remember struggling to understand how to create a Gallery, when I first learned about WordPress. 3.5 has made it so much easier!

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I am where I am today because of my first WordCamp experience, 4 years ago. I have learned so much from the community, I wanted to share a bit of that knowledge with others who might just be starting out on their own WordPress experience.

What is your talk going to be about?

I am going to talk about how easy it is to set up a Multisite installation, and the reasons you might want to do so. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it can be useful for lots of use-cases.

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

That even though some things might seem complicated to do, the documentation and tutorials out there help to make it relatively simple! Also, and this is key: Make a Backup!

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

In the local Montreal community, I’d like to give a special shout-out to Jeremy Clarke; the work he does with http://globalvoicesonline.org/ is important and his technical knowledge is impressive!

In the grander community, the work that Matt Thomas (@iammattthomas) has been doing with MP6 and the new Dashboard design has been particularly and inspired and inspiring for me lately.

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

Even easier multilingual integration. You want your WordPress in French/Spanish/Swahili? Do it with the click of a button!

Sarah has been making beautiful things for as long as she can remember. More recently, She shifted her focus to WordPress design and development. Armed with a lightweight laptop and a surprisingly lightweight suitcase, she takes her work around the world. She can usually be found tapping away anywhere there’s a power outlet—from ramshackle Soviet sleeper trains to a shack in the Amazon.

She loves building beautiful, usable websites, and hates staying in one place.

Follow @sarahsemark on Twitter.

Sarah will be giving a talk titled Build a Website on the Moon: WordPress Development from Anywhere.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Definitely the revamped media uploader. The old one was clunky and awkward. Part of WordPress’ appeal is that I can basically hand off a site to a client with very minimal instruction or documentation, and they can manage it themselves. The old media uploader was something of an anomaly in this respect. The redesign makes uploading images as intuitive as other tasks in WordPress. They did a fantastic job with it.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Working on my own all day, I’m often in a bit of a vacuum. I’m excited to share stories of my frustrations (and the occasional success!) with others who feel as passionately about it as I do.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m talking about setting up WordPress for easy local development with a simple deployment system. We’ll talk about using version control, syncing database changes, and all sorts of little snags and gotchas you might encounter en-route.

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

I’d like non-technical people to walk away feeling like setting up a system for better development is accessible to them. I’m a designer first and a developer out of necessity, and I got a system working for me that ultimately makes my work far more efficient. I’d like to give other people tools to help streamline their own development processes.

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

Great plugin developers make my life infinitely easier and me much happier. It’s incredible the variety of high-quality extensions that are available, completely free, and the dedication people have to maintaining them.

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

Better search and post filtering in the admin panel would be amazing. I have clients with 5000+ post sites and it’s a real challenge to find particular posts. Better search would help with that.

Michal Bluma wrote his first lines of HTML in the late 90s, is guilty of having used tables for layout a long time ago, loves tech and geeking out.

He left the office world at the end of 2012, after being told to do so by everyone except his own conscience. He’s currently using his skills to pay the bills full-time as a WordPress integrator and kicking butt in Front-end ChopUp-Fu (jCrane style). He greatly misses the days of Shift magazine.

Follow @isotrope on Twitter.

Michal will be giving a talk titled Comment changer la couleur d’un bouton sans anéantir l’univers?.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

What I’ve loved the most in the past year is the http://underscores.me/ starter theme. It makes for a great starting point when working on a custom site.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

For years, I’ve been crowd-sourcing my learning, debugging and inspiration. I thought it was time to try to give back to the community in my own way in person. Over the years, I’ve met many of the WPMTL folks, and admired their talks. It’s my turn to try to contribute to the collective knowledge, on a local scale.

I’ve always enjoyed helping others, teaching them. I get a great amount of satisfaction when I can help someone reach that “Aha!” moment.

I’m also guilty of loving to throw out metaphors. If this conference talk isn’t a success, I can always try becoming a deadpan stand-up nerd.

What is your talk going to be about?

Saving the universe, one child theme at a time. Like most, in the past, I’ve been guilty of hacking away at a theme, directly modifying its code. WordPress’ accessibility makes it almost too easy to take on bad habits.

My talk is here to show you how easy it is to alter a theme, build on top of it, in a safe manner. We’ll go over how to create a child theme. We’ll learn how to add a bit of custom CSS. We’ll be adding some custom JavaScript (and covering a few basic pitfalls that we can come across). We’ll also take a quick look at how to create a Custom Post Type template.

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

Mess with a theme’s code directly, and it will bite you in the butt. Seriously, though, there’s no way we can do a “MasterClass” in 35 minutes. My goal is to cover the topics and give the attendees tools and leads to dive into the subject matter in more depth.

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

I’m most inspired by the people I meet in our WPMTL group. We have an awesome Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/groups/199180685044/) that is always full of great questions, comments and insight. Nothing beats discussing new features, or solving problems face to face, with a pint in one’s hand.

If I had to choose folks to mention, I’d have to go with c.bavota (@bavotasan), my partner in crime; and Sonia Gaballa (@NudgeDesign), a newer partner in crime. But I’ve learned from and been inspired by great folks like Carl Alexander (@twigpress), Kirk Wight (@kwightca), the one-and-only Jeremy Clarke (@jeremyclarke ), and countless others.

Long live the local, Montreal WordPress community.

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

I’d really like an internal Custom Post Type interface to add to the CMS aspect of WordPress.

Brian Hoke is Principal of Bentley Hoke, a web consultancy in Syracuse, New York, USA, founded in 2000. The firm offers development, design, and marketing services for clients from the professional development, nonprofit, education, retail, and government sectors, with particular development strengths in WordPress, jQuery, Ruby on Rails, and responsive design.

Follow @bentleyhoke on Twitter.

Brian will be giving a talk titled jQuery and WordPress: Enhancing Sites with Client-Side Scripting.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

While not specific to this past year, I very much appreciate the continuing development of custom post types in WordPress of late: the ability to render domain-specific fields, properties, and display for a given kind of item more easily makes WordPress so much more flexible than in years past. For a developer like me, custom post types feels very much like object oriented programming – the same convenience of tying idiosyncratic fields, item-specific behavior, and custom rendering for a “book”, an “item for sale”, or a “directory listing”, say, makes WordPress that much more powerful.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

The chance to participate in a conference of like-minded folks, the professional-development opportunity to flesh out ideas I use in my own consulting work, and the chance to again visit Montreal were all reasons. Since signing up, I’ve been very much excited by the list of speakers and topics and impressed with the professionalism of the conference organizers.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’ll discuss how to use jQuery, the JavaScript library, to add functionality to WordPress sites. I’ll start with some discussion of how to add JS libraries (like jQuery, as well as jQuery plugins) to WordPress, then cover how to add DOM manipulation, render content via AJAX, effect autocomplete search, and some other topics.

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

I’d like folks to walk away with some sense of what I constantly struggle with in my own day-to-day consulting: working through WordPress is almost always easier than working around or against it. As a developer, my first tendency is to bang out some code to solve a given functionality or display challenge – but WordPress really exists as an ecosystem to facilitate this kind of thing. Whether it’s through including JavaScript scripts, using built-in DOM elements like classes and ids, or making use of existing-theme CSS, I find that my work is most successful when I write the least code. In using the twentytwelve theme as a starting point for my presentation, I’m hoping to show that, with just a little bit of jQuery client-side code, one can add a whole bunch of useful functionality and cool presentational pizzazz with just what WordPress offers out of the box.

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

I find some of the weekly-digest emails quite useful: wpMail.me is great, as are the ones from SitePoint and some others. While not Wordprss-specific, I read A List Apart religiously.

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

I don’t have any specific wishlist features – most of the time, I end up finding that WordPress already has some (or quite a bit) of what I need for a given project or site already built in. I guess my biggest wish is to keep finding out more about what WordPress already offers in terms of existing code and use it more and more effectively!

Mike is seasoned web developer with over 14 years of experience. Currently, he works at Carleton University where he and a small team manage 250+ WordPress sites. When he’s not up to his neck in code, or banging his head against his desk, he enjoys playing music and jumping out of perfectly good airplanes.

Follow @cuweb on Twitter.

Michael will be giving a talk titled 3.5 Ways to Make Your Life Easier.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Lately, i’ve been developing in the 3.6 beta environment and I think some of the upcoming features are some of the best to date. The overall improvements to the UI of the admin panel, and the editorial workflow are very cool. The changes to the post revision and the post-locking and autosave systems will be an amazing improvement, especially for our environment at Carleton University which has hundreds of authors. 3.6 is going to be awesome!

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Last year I was at WordCamp San Francisco last year, and I was at WordCamp Ottawa this year. Both were amazing, fun, and extremely educational experiences. They inspired me to get involved in anyway I could.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m talking about development methods that I use to make coding easier and faster but that also increase the overall quality the sites that I develop. There are very simple things that you can add into your development process that will make all the difference.

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

I think many of the things i’m discussing are things developers always wished for (variables and functions in CSS, creating fully valid and semantic markup with one line of text, etc). I’m hoping people walk away with new methods they can apply to make their development process faster and easier.

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

I know this is probably a very typical answer, but the community probably inspires me the most. There’s always someone willing to lend a helping and and developers giving their time to make WordPress better.

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

Continued improvements to the admin UI are always welcome. Accessibility improvements to not only the core themes and admin panel, but also to the default HTML output would be a welcome addition. I’d also like to see more upgrades done to the media manager, adding a way to structure or organize the media would be a massive improvement especially for those that use WordPress as a CMS.

With over 16 years of inbound marketing experience, entrepreneur Brian Rotsztein brings a seasoned approach to working with clients. As the head of two full-service web companies (RedstoneX.com and Uniseo.com) that specialize in web design, mobile websites, SEO, social media and Internet marketing, he helps businesses gain a competitive advantage. He holds two Master’s degrees, has taught university courses, and provides professional consulting and training services for topics such as SEO and social media. He’s been a WordPress fan since he started using version 1.6 (in 2005!).

Follow @brianrotsztein on Twitter.

Brian will be giving a talk titled SEO and Content Marketing with WordPress.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

We’re using advanced custom fields in more creative ways than ever before.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Work related to WordPress (such as custom theme design, mobile design, plugin customization, SEO and Internet marketing with WordPress, WP training workshops, etc.) are among our most in-demand services. A lot of my team’s success has been due to our leadership with WordPress. I’m proud of our success with WordPress and WordCamp gives me the opportunity to give back to the community.

What is your talk going to be about?

One of the hot trends in SEO is content marketing and WordPress is a great platform to use for that purpose.

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

I’d like attendees to understand how WordPress can be used for promoting content and how it relates to SEO. It’s a powerful tool to get more people to consume useful content. The session is geared towards both bloggers and the business world.

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

I think Matt Mullenweg continues to do a phenomenal job with WordPress.

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

I’m always looking out for an improved wysiwyg editor.

Meagan Hanes is the Creative Architect of Love Digimedia, an Ottawa-based online presence solutions company specializing in WordPress for small businesses, solopreneurs, and artists. With over a decade of digital design experience, Love combines technical knowledge with business expertise to produce fantastic long-term digital solutions.

Follow @LoveDigimedia on Twitter.

Meagan will be giving a talk titled The ABCs of HTML.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The improved Media Manager! Content is so important in a successful website. Having an easy-to-use media manager makes it easy to find, manage, insert, and delete user-uploaded content, leading to more healthy and successful long-term WordPress installations!

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I was very inspired by WordCamp Ottawa to give back to the WordPress community, and found the first opportunity for me to do so!

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk is about one the coding language that powers the internet, HTML. Instead of a heavy and dry lecture, my talk is focused on the key HTML tags you need to know to master the WordPress Editor. If you’ve ever had a post not look right upon publishing, it’s often because of a simple HTML tag. My talk will help you develop the confidence to understand these tags and accomplish common blogging tasks like inserting links, pictures, and basic formatting – no headache required!

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

I want people to walk away confident that HTML is not as scary as they once thought, and encouraged to learn more!

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

So many people it’s hard to list!

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

I would like to see more structure/exportability/compatibility around Custom Post Types. Right now we are heading into data locking territory, not good!