WordCamp Montreal 2013

Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she now supports WordPress.com users around the world as an Automattic Happiness Engineer. She enjoys spreading her passion for WordPress at WordCamps, Girl Geek Dinners, Podcamps, and other grassroots events. Non-WordPress hours are spent collecting vintage Pyrex mixing bowls, growing organic garlic, and cavorting with her three cats.

Follow @zoonini on Twitter.

Kathryn will be giving a talk titled Help Me Help You: The Art and Science of Getting Good WordPress Support.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The image-uploading and gallery-management enhancements have been invaluable, making the process much more efficient – and dare I say it, even pleasurable – for users. I also love the gorgeous tiled galleries that were introduced in Jetpack, an offshoot from their initial development for WordPress.com.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I’ve given talks at every WordCamp Montreal since its second edition in 2010. It’s my hometown, and I like giving back to the community that’s given me so much. There’s no way I wouldn’t be here.

What is your talk going to be about?

As a volunteer in the WordPress.org support forums, and now a Happiness Engineer for WordPress.com, I’ve watched a vast number of people ask for help in some pretty ineffective ways. Knowing how to get useful WordPress assistance is in itself a skill, so I’ve decided to share some tips on what to do – and what to avoid – when you’re stuck on a WordPress problem and ready to reach out.

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

The recognition that they’re more likely to get help if they know how to ask for it properly.

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

Since I met her in 2012 at WordCamp New York City, I’ve enjoyed watching Siobhan McKeown’s transformation from entrepreneurial WordPress wordsmith to in-house Audrey Capital word ninja. After reading a fascinating sneak-peek chapter of her upcoming book chronicling the history of WordPress, I’m excited to see how the rest of it develops.

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

Something that will make me go, “Wow! This is so useful, how did we ever get by without it?”

Joseph is dedicated to accessibility and has been a practitioner since 1999. His speciality has institutionalizing accessibility: planning, organizing, and implementing well-structured and coordinated accessibility systems for institutions. He’s been using WordPress in education since 2005.

Because of his involvement in the international accessibility community, which includes many persons with all types of disabilities, He is well-connected to other accessibility practitioners and has been donating his time to help make WordPress, the open source blogging platform, accessible.

His WordPress theme creation project, Cities, now has theme teams working to create accessible themes in Montreal, Copenhagen, Sydney, Rio de Janeiro, and 12 other cities.

Follow @AccessibleJoe on Twitter.

Joseph will be giving a talk titled Cities: Making Accessible WordPress Themes.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Thanks to the WordPress Accessibility Group (@WPAccessibility) there is now more accessibility in the back end. A voluntary accessibility theme check process in draft mode has been added to the overall theme checking guidelines. If a theme passes the accessibility checking process it will be tagged: accessibility_ready.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I want to carry the message to all WordPress developers and content providers that accessibility is important. I’ve only been to Montreal once before and loved it, so visiting again will be wonderful. Also, Rocio Alvarado is doing Montreal, a Cities accessible WordPress theme. http://accessiblejoe.com/cities/

What is your talk going to be about?

Teams of people from around the world are creating free accessible WordPress themes. This is the Cities project. I’ll also be talking about accessibility in general, accessibility plugins and widgets, and the work of the WordPress accessibility group on core issues.

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

People with a wide range of needs are accessing the content you are making available with WordPress. Some simple routines will increase the accessibility of your work. If you build accessibility in, you will help everyone.

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

Natalie MacLees (@nataliemac) stands out with outstanding WordPress knowledge. Noel Saw (@noelsaw), Suzette Franck (@mt_Suzette), Chris Lema (@chrislema), Megan Gray (@HouseofGrays), Peter Medina (@draggingtheline).

The WordPress accessibility group: Joe Dolson (@joedolson), Graham Armfield (@coolfields), Cindy Otty (@ceotty), Mel Pedley (http://blackwidows.co.uk/), Amanda Rush (@cswordpress), Amy Newcombe (@_Redd), Gonz Blinko (@gonz_blinko), and also Rian Rietveld (@RianRietveld).

WordPress people: Jen Mylo (@jenmylo), Aaron Jorbin (@aaronjorbin), Matt Mullenweg (@photomatt), Andrew Nacin (@nacin), Daryl Koopersmith (@koop), Konstantin Obenland (@obenland), Mike Little (@mikelittlezed1).

And then there’s the Cities theme team leaders: Karen Mardahl (@kmdk), Lisa Herrod (@scenariogirl), Char James-Tanny (@CharJTF), Jennison Asuncion (@Jennison), Pratik Patel (@ppatel), Shilpi Kapoor (@Shilpi_Kapoor), David Kennedy (@DavidAKennedy), Simon Pascal Klein (@klepas), Rocio Alvarado at AccessibilitéWeb (@AccessibiliteWb), Ana Isabel Paraguay (@projetoinclusiv), Anna Belle Leiserson (@happywebdiva), Elle McPherson (@nethermind), (also includes Joe Dolson and Amanda Rush).

The list goes on and on…

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

Accessibility built-in to core and every theme WCAG 2.0 AA accessible.

Troy is a WordPress designer, developer and enthusiast who enjoys pushing the envelop with each new project. With over 10 years of experience in a creative environment, he has dedicated his professional life to working with WordPress on several levels.

When he is not doing contract work or building a theme for fun, his main job is helping a small team at Carleton University enhance their web presence and providing content editors around the university with intuitive tools to help promote their activities and initiatives.

Follow @troychaplin on Twitter.

Troy will be giving a talk titled An Introduction to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I like the changes made to the media library, cleaner overall look and is more intuitive to the average person. That being said, I still feel there’s a whole lot more that can be done, and I’m sure will be done to improve the media library.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I felt like the topic that I’m speaking about (An Introduction to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies) is something that all users of WordPress should be aware of, whether they are beginners, or experienced users. Both types of functionality can open new doors and knowing more about them as you plan the future of a site can be a big help.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m speaking about Custom Post Types and Taxonomies, what they are, and how you can use them to your advantage by thinking outside of the box when planning a website. My talk will provide lots of great examples of how I’ve used them in a variety of ways across multiple sites to achieve specific goals of a project.

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

Ideas. If people walk away from my talk with new ideas on handling their various content sections then I feel that I’ve done what I’ve set out to do. I always like to believe that nothing is impossible if you allow yourself to think outside the box, and I hope to help others think the same.

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

I could easily name several core developers as I do draw inspiration from their hard work and dedication, but the community as a whole inspires me to do more. Especially those who give up their own free time to help others in the community through the WordPress forums, or contributing to core through trac, or making cool plugins and giving them out with no monetary gain. WordPress has the best community around, and the dedication and involvement inspires me to use my skills to give back however I can.

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

Improved media library would be at the top of my list. With WordPress moving more and more towards a powerful CMS, I believe a folder-like structure for organizing files by type would be a benefit.

One other area that I would love to see in core relates to the internal page linking tool. Currently it links pages using an absolute path, so when a user changes the page hierarchy, those links break. If the link were created using the page or post ID, and then the permalink would be rewritten on the front end, that would make a big difference.

Rami is a graduate of Computer Engineering from McGill University. While pursuing his studies, he worked at hot startups in Silicon Valley and Fortune 500 giants. Rami founded the Code Jam @ McGill, the university’s largest engineering competition, in order to improve training in the field. As a Teaching Assistant at his alma mater, he developed interactive educational tools to improve software engineering education. He was awarded the Scarlet Key for student leadership and significant contributions to the McGill community.

Follow @ramisayar on Twitter.

Rami will be giving a talk titled Professional WordPress Deployment.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The inclusion of the underscore and backbone JavaScript libraries was awesome as well as the general performance improvements of WP_Query.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I hope to connect with other web designers, web developers and WordPress enthusiasts. I also wish to give back and strengthen the community in Montreal.

What is your talk going to be about?

This talk will formulate techniques for professional WordPress deployment using Vagrant, Git and GitHub. This talk will demonstrate techniques on how to use Git to deploy to Linux servers in the Cloud. Following this introduction to deployment with Git, the talk will continue to more advanced topics such as setting up Vagrant for WordPress development and using Vagrant for environment simulation.

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

I want people to walk away with the sense that they can do professional and automated WordPress deployment without leaving the terminal. WordPress deployment is a subject rarely talked about much, I hope to change that.

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

I am a big fan of Matt Mullenweg and with what he is doing at Automattic. The scaling and infrastructure issues they must be facing are tremendous. I would love to know how to they tackle problems.

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

I would love to see some improvements to the WordPress multisite functionality such as an API for developers.

Richard Martin is an online entrepreneur. He created and manages a WordPress site that provides health services to clients and continuing education training for health professionals. Before going online he did product marketing in Silicon Valley with several companies including Apple, Cisco and Broadcom. Richard now lives in Ottawa. Richard is one the organizers of WordCamp Ottawa.

Follow @richardgmartin on Twitter.

Richard will be giving a talk titled How Video Can Boost Your Traffic.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

There was significant improvement on media management with the WordPress 3.5 (Elvin) release.

I have also noticed more 3rd party options for site backup.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

It is a great opportunity meet people involved in WordPress and see what they are doing.

What is your talk going to be about?

I will be speaking about how video can drive quality traffic to your WordPress site/blog.

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

My talk will leverage three years of using video to generate high quality traffic to my site and my goal is to share lessons-learned and best practices for creating, producing, distributing, and promoting video.

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

I like what Yoast has done in the SEO space. His plugins are top notch, his team provides good support, and the content on his site is very informative.

Who do I follow – that’s a tough question. It constantly changes as new “stuff” is being developed all the time.

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

I would like a better way to manage editorial content and calendar. I have tried several plugins and I am not totally happy.

One more thing: the WordPress team should recognize Max Roach and his contribution to bebop and name a future release after him.

Brendan Sera-Shriar has been an interactive designer, developer, college and university professor, community manager, author, consultant, and professional speaker at some of the largest corporations and festivals in the world, including Microsoft, Mozilla Firefox, Sun Microsystems, WordCamp, BlogWorld, SXSW and more. His work has also appeared in TechCrunch, TechVibes, WordPress TV, and a host of other blogs. He was also featured in the October 2012 issue of Marketing Magazine.

Not only does Brendan help others build their businesses he has also founded a few himself, including StartupBump, Creer Magazine, and PressWork.

Despite being known best for his work as a WordPress designer, developer, and WordCamp speaker and organizer, Brendan’s best communications skills lie in his ability to help organizations understand how they can build communities around their products and services.

Follow @digibomb on Twitter.

Brendan will be giving a talk titled Build a Responsive WordPress Theme with Zurbs Foundation Framework.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I wouldn’t exactly say that this improvement was implemented this year, however it has become more relevant – responsivity!

The ability to truly make a as site respond to screen sizes and resolutions is very very different than multi-screen design.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I have been involved with WordPress as a developer, designer, evangelist, teacher, organizer and more since version 1.2. Open source is all about giving back and helping others and WordCamp is a perfect opportunity to this with the community. On side note, as an ex organizer and veteran speaker at many a WordCamp – it’s in my blood!

What is your talk going to be about?

Responsive design is becoming an expected standard for web developers. Your website or blog needs to look good and function on all screens and devices all the time, and just choosing a “responsive” WordPress theme isn’t always the best choice. In this session you’ll learn how easy it is to integrate foundation.css into your WordPress theme and how to get added functionality from their jQuery and zepto libraries. We’ll also dive into the css to understand how “responsivity” works.

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

That guy is AWESOME!

Joking aside, I want new and veteran WordPress developers and designers to walk away with understanding of the importance of design developing “responsive” on the modern web. Building responsive sites today is a must!

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

This might be cop out – but I’m most inspired by 1000’s of open sources out there pushing the limits of WordPress in an effort to continually make it better software for every type of user.

Who do I follow – that’s a tough question. It constantly changes as new “stuff” is being developed all the time.

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

Well, that’s easy! I’d like to see all wp themes on .com and .org built on a responsive framework.

Brad is the president of Symetris, a web development company he founded in Montreal in 2004. He believes strongly in open-sources CMS projects. Symetris specializes in the development of sites in WordPress and Drupal.

Follow @symetris on Twitter.

Brad will be giving a talk titled Mieux filtrer vos listes avec Ajax.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Better media management (photo galleries, etc) – WordPress 3.5 “Elvin”

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Symetris loves WordPress, and open-source community development. We’re regulars at events like these where we can share knowledge with other WordPress fanatics.

What is your talk going to be about?

Better list filtering with AJAX. Websites have lots of information, and we usually reach a “list” page before selecting exactly which content page to read. Being able to filter and order that list effectively is really useful to help visitors find what they’re looking for.

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

Allowing users to manipulate/filter/order lists can really enhance their website experience. And WordPress has the tools to implement it.

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

@Otto42

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

Better multilingualism integration. More flexible content types. Easier management of user permissions.

Victor has been building and hosting WordPress websites for about 5 years. During the 15 years I’ve worked in the computer field I’ve managed high performance networks and specialized in several areas of security. Currently I’m a founder of a Canadian managed WordPress hosting company specializing in fast, secure, reliable and easy to use hosting services focused only on WordPress.

Follow @boreal321 on Twitter.

Victor will be giving a talk titled Steps to Securing WordPress.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Ability to create simple media galleries.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I did it last year in Toronto and I was amazed by how much people appreciated the information. I thought I’d share that same info and what I’ve learned since. Of course there’s also the benefit of presenting myself as someone who is knowledgeable about WordPress which might help my business succeed.

What is your talk going to be about?

How to make and keep your WordPress secure.

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

Nothing is 100% secure. WordPress can be kept safe from untargeted mass hack attempts.

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

Cristian Burcă, Mark Jaiquith, Jane Wells, Siobhan McKeown, Otto, Nacin.

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

Better search, sort and filtering in the admin screens. Better documentation.