Each year WordCamp Montreal strives to offer a wide variety of talks and discussions about and around WordPress. Our speakers are passionate, expert volunteers who want to teach you about WordPress and publishing on the web.
Below are the full descriptions of talks confirmed for WordCamp Montreal 2013. Talks are 45 minutes long including time for questions with 15 minutes between talks for switching rooms if necessary. A tentative hourly schedule is available.
This year, we’ve added a third track of talks which is why we need your support more than ever. Learn more.
Town Hall with Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress and will be at WordCamp Montreal 2013 to answer questions from the community. This will be a town hall format with questions from the crowd.
Troubleshooting WordPress Training for Women
The Montreal WordPress Community is offering a special training session for women in conjunction with our fifth annual WordCamp. The training session will take place on Tuesday July 2, from 6-9pm at Station C, 5605 avenue de Gaspé, suite 204.
The Troubleshooting WordPress workshop is aimed at experienced WordPress users who need a little bit of encouragement and education to be confident in their ability to troubleshoot broken WordPress sites. This is a very specific course, and is not a new user workshop. Men are welcome.
This is a directed, hands-on workshop. Students will install WordPress locally on their laptops prior to the class using MAMP or WAMP. (Please note that no class time will be devoted to installing WordPress. If you need assistance with this, please come to the Happiness Bar on Saturday or Sunday.)
Students will bring their laptops to class and during the class the instructor will “break” WordPress in several different ways. Students will solve the problems in real time with the assistance of the instructor and volunteer TAs. This is a three-hour workshop.
This session is offered in English (though some TAs may be able to field questions in French).
Spaces are extremely limited. In order to attend this hands-on workshop you must first purchase a ticket for WordCamp Montreal, and then register for this special training event.
Caching for Fun and Profit
Understanding different caching tools and techniques available to WordPress developers such as the Transient and Object Caching APIs and how/why they can make or break your site.
Prerequisites: For developers.
WordPress Hack Fest
WordPress is an open source project that relies on the help of volunteers. Here’s your chance to work on core WordPress code alongside people who do it every day.
Let’s put Montreal and our WordCamp on the WordPress community map in style, by coming together to jointly work on WordPress Core tickets and patch up some of your favourite bugs!. New contributors are welcome, but anyone who comes *must* work on core patches for WordPress.
If you have not contributed to WordPress before, prepare yourself by reading up on contributing to WordPress and setting up a development environment before you arrive. This is not a talk, it is a group activity, but Dion Hulse will be actively participating and giving guidance to any brave hackers who wish to join him.
Prerequisites: Anyone is welcome to join in, but having development experience, and a clear understanding of WordPress best practices (such as coding style, security, APIs, etc) will be invaluable to make it a great experience for all.
Comment changer la couleur d’un bouton sans anéantir l’univers?
Avez-vous déjà modifié le styles.css d’un thème? Ça ne s’est pas bien passé quand vous l’avez mis à jour, n’est-ce pas?
Voilà pourquoi on crée des « thèmes enfants » (Child Themes). Ils nous permettent de faire des modifications, et même des remplacements, sans remanier le thème principal.
En plus d’une brève introduction aux thèmes enfants, nous apprendrons comment :
- créer un thème enfant,
- modifier des styles CSS,
- ajouter du JavaScript maison et
- utiliser un modèle spécifique à un Custom Post Type.
Tout ça, sans toucher à une ligne du thème parent*. La prochaine fois que vous le mettrez à jour, vous serez bien heureux de l’avoir modifié de façon non destructive.
* Promesse sous toute réserve 😉
Préalables : Pour les débutants dans le monde des thèmes, ainsi que ceux qui ont pris des mauvais plis dans leurs habitudes. Une connaissance de base des thèmes WordPress est un atout. Des connaissances de base du CSS et/ou du JavaScript peuvent être utiles, mais ne sont aucunement nécessaires.
Créer une cyberentreprise avec WordPress
Est-ce possible d’avoir une entreprise complète sur Internet? Tout à fait! WordPress et quelques extensions vous permettront de le faire aisément. Dans cette présentation, Danielle vous présente une entreprise en ligne complète (panier d’achat, membership, affiliation et autorépondeurs) qui fonctionne grâce à WordPress et des extensions. Vous découvrirez quelles extensions ont été choisies, pourquoi ainsi que leurs avantages et inconvénients.
Préalables: Cette conférence s’adresse autant aux débutants qu’aux créateurs de contenu et de sites.
What You Missed in Computer Science
Computer Science is a big part of web development and WordPress whether you know it or not! This talk will explain what Computer Science actually entails. You will see WordPress through the lens of someone with a Computer Science degree. We will talk about ways to describe code performance using Big-Oh notation comparing different post meta and taxonomy queries. We will also discuss concurrency as it applies to WordPress, specifically data races and how they can occur while counting post views.
Prerequisites: This is a talk for developers, mostly targeted at PHP/JavaScript.
SEO and Content Marketing with WordPress
Within the array of search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, the use of content marketing is among the latest trends being implemented to increase search engine visibility, brand awareness, and conversions. Whether companies are using WordPress as a CMS or to blog, they can take advantage of the SEO-ready aspects that the platform allows for, both natively and through the use of plugins. This is an introductory session that will highlight several important concepts, plugins, and best practices that should be considered when using WordPress as part of an Inbound marketing plan. Topics such as guest posting, types of content, linking, web analytics, and social media optimization (SMO) will be discussed.
Prerequisites: Ideally, attendees will have a basic understanding of plugins.
Build a Responsive WordPress Theme with Zurbs Foundation Framework
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.
Prerequisites: Intermediate coders, knowledge of css, jQuery, basic WP theme design.
How Video Can Boost Your Traffic
Did you know that YouTube is the number two search engine on the internet? Did you know that traffic from YouTube to your site converts higher than Facebook traffic? Now is the time for you to boost your presence using video. Learn how to create compelling video content quickly and how to use your YouTube account to drive traffic to your WordPress blog/site. The presentation will also cover the various video hosting options, how to create a video xml site map, and cover the new Yoast Video SEO plugin.
Prerequisites: For beginner level site managers and bloggers.
Priming Your WordPress Canvas – Essentials for a Solid Foundation
So you’re ready to create your very own WordPress masterpiece, but a little confused about the initial the setup process (before you paint your theme and content on the canvas). No worries. We’ll sort out a how to implement the steps and prioritize and elements/plugins you need. This is a technical talk that focuses on the not so obvious external elements that should be connected to your little WP ecosystem. You will walk away a workflow set-up tool kit and the confidence that your site will poised for future growth. Also, your OCD will rejoice.
Prerequisites: For beginners who want to have the confidence that their site has a solid setup. No knowledge of HTML required but familiarity with admin dashboard is good to have.
Tips and Tricks for Building Multilingual Sites
In this session I will share some practical tips and tricks I have learned while setting up multilingual sites.
We will look at things like:
- Quick tricks for installing WordPress language files on exisitng sites.
- How to deal with a plugin that has been internationalized, but is not localized for your language. (and do it so it’s upgrade proof)
- What to do when an internationalized plugin has no text domain.
- Some usefull backend plugins for managing sites and language files.
- How to create splash pages for a language choice.
Prerequisites: Knowledge of PHP, and WordPress action hooks and filters.
Blog Like a Journalist
We live in an era where so many different stories and experiences are made available through the Internet. This bodes well for journalism. And traditional media is noticing.
More news editors require their journalists to blog, and traditional news agencies look to blogs for news and trends. And in this landscape, it’s inevitable that the line between blogger and journalist is becoming increasingly blurred.
In this presentation, I will survey the media landscape where blogging and journalism meet. I will show where a journalistic approach and a blog approach may differ. And I will explain how a writer can maintain a high commitment to journalism, while also employing storytelling styles which are more compatible with blogs and their audiences.
Prerequisites: This presentation requires no technical knowledge of WordPress, but attendees can benefit from a casual understanding of different online and offline media forms.
Managing Multiple Authors – Creating an Editorial Process
In this session we will look at a couple of different options as to how you can handle multiple authors, whether they be guest bloggers or regular contributors. We will also look at options for creating a full blown editorial workflow with WordPress — one that will allow you to establish clear guidelines and processes for any team, whether it be a one person shop to multiple writers and editors.
Prerequisites: None.
Facebook Promotion
You have a WordPress site that needs distribution and exposure. Zuckerberg has over a billion people relying on his increasingly complex social network for information. Well isn’t that convenient! In this talk we’ll cover how to effectively leverage Facebook to build a community, promote your efforts and spread your content far and wide.
Prerequisites: No technical knowledge is required, however attendees will get the most out of this talk if they have a basic knowledge of Facebook Pages and WordPress.
Débutant II – La gestion des médias dans WordPress
Mon atelier s’adresse à des débutant n’ayant pas nécessairement de connaissances de WordPress et portera principalement sur la gestion de médias dans l’environnement WordPress, notamment :
- Quelles sont les caractéristiques idéales d’une image pour le web (taille et format) et comment adapter nos images afin qu’elles répondent bien à ces critères;
- Comment insérer une image dans une page ou un article et comment modifier et ajuster celle-ci une fois qu’elle est insérée;
- Qu’est-ce que la bibliothèque des médias et quelles sont les options qu’elle nous offre (modification de l’aperçu d’image, réduction des dimensions de l’image, etc.);
- Comment intégrer un vidéo dans un article ou une page;
- Comment insérer un PDF à partir de la bibliothèque de médias.
Préalables: Pour les nouveau blogueurs mais les experts devraient apprendre quelques trucs.
UN WordPress, DEUX portails, TROIS leçons
Vous songez utiliser WordPress pour réaliser un répertoire ou un portail? Alors vous ne devez pas manquer cette présentation! Nous avons développé pas un, mais deux portails qui font la promotion de la région de Joliette et qui s’adressent à deux clientèles différentes: tourismejoliette.com et contactjoliette.com. Et un lien secret unit ces deux sites…
De cette expérience, nous avons tiré plusieurs leçons et découvert ce qui fonctionne ou pas sous différents aspects : thème et framework, extensions, types de contenus personnalisés, taxonomies, synchronisation de données et engin de recherche.
Préalables: Une connaissance de base de WordPress et des concepts Web sera suffisante pour apprécier cette présentation qui s’adresse à une clientèle d’affaires désireuse de mieux comprendre comment prendre avantage de WordPress dans un contexte de centre de services partagés.
The ABCs of HTML
HTML is one of the core languages of the Internet. You don’t HAVE to know HTML to build and maintain a WordPress website – but knowing the basic tags gives you more control over the content, presentation, and impact of your message. In this presentation we cover the basic HTML tags commonly used in WordPress. You’ll learn how to insert a link, format text size/style/position, load an image, and more, all through the WordPress HTML editor.
Prerequisites: For beginning bloggers and beginning HTML coders.
Cities: Making Accessible WordPress Themes
Site owners are looking for accessible WordPress themes. There is a spectacular lack of accessible WordPress themes. Accessibility practitioners around the world, including Rocio Alvarado of Montreal, are creating free accessible WordPress themes.
The presentation covers accessibility in general and as it applies to WordPress in particular including accessible plugins and widgets, and also content creation.
Prerequisites: Since it covers content creation and since it is not completely technical I’d say that everyone can benefit from it.
Sites multilingues: le grand débat qui va enfin tout régler (yeah right!)
Comment gérer un site multilingue sous WordPress? S’il y avait une seule bonne réponse, on n’en parlerait plus. La question refait pourtant surface à intervalle régulier. Nous nous proposons de tenir un débat entre partisans des trois solutions les plus courantes en ce moment: Qtranslate, WPML et WordPress Multisite. La formule serait celle d’un débat électoral télévisé: chaque parti présente d’abord sa vision d’un sujet, puis répond aux question de ses adversaires. Les sujets abordés seraient les suivants: installation et configuration, utilisation au quotidien, extensibilité et compatibilité.
Préalables: Pour bien suivre le débat, vous devrez avoir déjà installé vous-même une copie de WordPress.org.
Débutant III – Louer, acheter ou changer de quartier?
Il y a deux façons d’utiliser WordPress: en locataire (WordPress.com) ou en propriétaire (WordPress.org). Nous allons expliquer quand, comment et pourquoi passer d’une situation à l’autre.
Nous allons aussi aborder les embûches liées au transfert de contenu vers WordPress à partir d’une autre plate-forme de publication. Enfin, parce que nous sommes wild de même, nous allons suggérer quelques cas d’utilisation où WordPress ne serait peut-être pas la solution idéale.
Préalables: La présentation s’adresse à des utilisateurs WordPress de niveau débutant à intermédiaire. Elle sera accessible à tous ceux et celles qui auront suivi les deux premiers ateliers pour débutants.
Fundamentals of Theme Development
It’s easy to get going with WordPress theme development, but this can mean overlooking some fundamentals along the way. Themes are in the spotlight as we step through the WordPress loading sequence, seeing where the Loop comes from, how the Template Hierarchy makes its decisions, and why child themes trump their parent. We’ll use our new-found knowledge to safely modify the Loop (and create our own), and to learn the difference between Actions and Filters.
Prerequisites: For intermediate to advanced developers
3.5 Ways to Make Your Life Easier
Do you get frustrated and spend too much time with front end coding? Are you still spending time trying to improve your workflow? Come learn about 3 ways I’ve changed my workflow by combining SASS, Icon Fonts, Zen Coding. But what about the other 0.5? You’ll just have to wait and see.
Prerequisites: Intermediate developers with a knowledge of WordPress theming, CSS and semantic HTML.
Keep Your Code Organized! Templates, functions.php and Custom Plugins
If you’ve written PHP for a theme you should know by now that you need to keep anything complicated outside the templates. Functions.php can be a good place for this but there are many pitfalls and considerations you should keep in mind before (over)using it. This talk will examine your choices for organizing the code that makes up a WP site, ensuring you have plugin code in plugins and theme code in themes (it’s not hard!).
Prerequisites: This talk is for people already prepared to write themes and plugins. For best results PHP/HTML/CSS awareness are recommended.
Mieux filtrer vos listes avec Ajax
À travers des exemples concrets, nous illustrerons comment l’usage d’AJAX peut améliorer la gestion et le filtrage (ex: multiples catégories) de listes d’information dynamiques dans un environnement WordPress.
Cette conférence s’adresse principalement à des personnes avec des connaissances en programmation.
Préalables: Bonne connaissance du HTML, du PHP et du Javascript. Idéalement une connaissance de AJAX. Comprendre le code généré par WordPress (“the loop”). Compréhension des “custom post type”.
Spearhead Your Career by Contributing to WordPress
Becoming a fantastic WordPress developer/designer/blogger/themer can be daunting. Once you start working with the CMS, you soon realize that there are lots of different directions one can take and the learning curve can be steep, but you don’t have to do it alone.
During this presentation, I’ll show you how there’s a whole community ready to help and how you can be part of it. Contributing by helping on the forums, submitting themes, plugins and patches is a great way to expand your network, your knowledge and join an amazing community of like-minded folks.
Prerequisites: none. This talk is for everyone.
More Multisite for the Masses
An introduction to WordPress Multisite: domain mapping, user
management, plugin management, etc.
Level: Advanced user, beginner developer.
Prerequisites: How to install WordPress, How to modify wp-config.php
Débutant I – WordPress.com : le tour du propriétaire
Mon atelier s’adresse aux débutants ayant peu d’expérience et voulant comprendre les possibilités de WordPress. On verra comment :
- Se retrouver entre WordPress.com et .org ?
- Comprendre la difference entre un article et une page;
- Choisir un thème et le personnaliser;
- Différencier les categories des mot-clés
- Activer les widgets et les menus;
- Coller du texte Word sans que ça soit laid;
- Ajouter des utilisateurs;
- Fouiller dans les options cachées.
Préalables: Pour les nouveau blogueurs mais les experts devraient apprendre quelques trucs qui les aideront à vulgariser WordPress auprès des néophytes.
Zero to Hero: Five Steps to a Blog People Will Actually Want to Read
In this session, aimed at people in the Blogger/User track, we’ll answer the question: “I started a blog; now what?”
We’ll cover five basic areas:
- Context (how to keep an active blog and your sanity)
- Customization (basic, free tweaks to make your site’s personality shine)
- Content (finding your voice and developing a content strategy)
- Community (becoming an engaged part of the blogosphere and finding your fans)
- Continue (where to go for help and inspiration)
The presentation will be relevant to uses of both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. While we won’t be able to create the World’s Best Blog in 45 minutes, we can explore the world of possibilities, start to ask questions to focus our sites’ design and content, and come up with a game plan for building the site we want.
Prerequisites: This session is for beginning bloggers. It is helpful (but not totally necessary) if participants have already registered for a WordPress.com site or installed WordPress on their own host.
Build a Website on the Moon: WordPress Development from Anywhere
Frustrated with building WordPress sites? I’ve been there. Travelling, I often find myself with unreliable internet, and I realized that my development process needed an overhaul. So, late one night working with the geckos in Cambodia, I set about optimizing the process. After a great deal of trial and error, I developed a series of tools that will allow anyone to better manage their WordPress development practises.
This talk is designed to help you get a leg up on streamlining your development process so that you spend less time mucking about and more time making a beautiful website.
We’ll touch on how to get a local development environment set up and optimized. Then, we’ll talk about how to set up git for version control. We’ll learn how to keep everything—from plugins and themes to database changes—in sync, even once you have multiple copies of the site running on different servers, and different people making changes to the content. Along the way, we’ll discuss any potential snags and problems, as well as security issues and ideas for optimizing development. Finally, we’ll discuss best practises for moving from a development to a production environment.
Prerequisites: An overwhelming sense of frustration with WordPress development, and an understanding of basic WordPress folder hierarchy.
jQuery and WordPress: Enhancing Sites with Client-Side Scripting
This presentation will include a brief overview of jQuery, then I’ll explain how to integrate jQuery into WordPress sites, offer examples of custom jQuery development to produce some common site enhancements, and discuss how to customize some common plugins.
Prerequisites: I’d put the ideal audience member as more coder than blogger, but perhaps someone who is not expert at JavaScript and jQuery: a presentation that might be a stretch for the non-technical blogger, perhaps a little too basic for expert coders, but a good overview and useful talk for those somewhere in the middle.
Podcasting with WordPress: Getting Started and Best Practices
Have you ever wanted to start a podcast? Did you think that it was going to be too hard for you to start? Did you think that you would need a ton of specialized equipment and know-how to get things up and running? If you tried to do this years ago, yes, you did. But today, with nothing but a computer, an internet connection, and an installation of WordPress – you can set up, record and publish your own podcast in a day. Will cover the installation of WordPress and related plugins and feed configuration for iTunes along with best practices for audio file exporting and the use of YouTube for video podcasts.
Prerequisites: A familiarity with WordPress and installing plugins is helpful. The talk will be geared towards a beginner audience.
Want to Make a Book? Working with WordPress/PressBooks Makes It Easy
We will introduce PressBooks.com, and the PressBooks GPL plugin, and describe how we have repurposed WordPress to turn it into a professional book publishing tool that anyone can use (for free!). We’ll work with the audience to assemble and publish a book during the session, with ebook AND print outputs. For those who want, we will deliver a printed and bound book by the end of WordCamp Montreal, in partnership with the Espresso Book Machine.
Prerequisites: none.
SEO for WordPress
So most people who use blogs rely on WordPress, and WordPress has a lot of SEO potential, but out of the box, it just doesn’t cut it. In this session we’ll explore how to use WordPress to maximize your chances of ranking for the terms that are most relevant to your content. Specifically, we’ll look at:
- Building a Keyword Targeted Category
- Taxonomy
- Key SEO Plugins
- Addressing Duplicate Content
After this session, audience members should (1) have a firm grasp on the fundamentals of onsite SEO, and (2) know what themes and plugins can help them implement these SEO and social features.
Prerequisites: Basic WordPress admin knowledge.
Help Me Help You: The Art and Science of Getting Good WordPress Support
Visual Editor stopped working? Plugin update gone awry? Getting useful help when you’re stuck on a WordPress problem is not always as straightforward as it seems. This session will be packed with tips on how to ask for assistance in the WordPress support forums and other arenas – in a way that will let others help you more easily and effectively. We’ll also cover some handy techniques for basic troubleshooting on your own – before contacting tech support.
Prerequisites: No prerequisites – for beginner to intermediate users, designers, and developers.
Theme Selection Strategy: How to Pick the Right WordPress Theme for Your Project
The WordPress theme market has grown and grown over the past few years. There are many great themes out there, but many customers find themselves disappointed, because they didn’t know what to expect, or get what they thought they were getting. This presentation gives you a roadmap to follow, to help you make better decisions, saving you time, money, and frustration.
Prerequisites: This talk is aimed at WordPress beginners. It should also benefit theme builders and those who serve clients, by providing a window into the frustrations that the beginners do face.
Professional WordPress Deployment
This talk will formulate techniques for professional WordPress deployment using Vagrant, Git and GitHub. This talk demonstrate techniques on how to use Git to deploy to Linux servers. 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 and deployment.
Prerequisites: Knowledge of the Command Line and Linux. The talk is aimed to intermediate and higher coders.
Steps to Securing WordPress
My presentation is about how to make a WordPress installation super secure. There are lots of steps that can be taken to turn WordPress into a veritable fortress and I plan on providing those in a clear and concise talk.
The main thing I want people to get from my talk is that security is not a one trick pony. There are many layers that help make WordPress more secure and even doing one or two of them is worth the effort. If you have the inclination to do them all then you can rest assured knowing your site probably won’t be the one getting hacked.
Prerequisites: This talk is appropriate for people of all levels of WordPress skill. It provides an overview and details of the steps required to keep a WordPress website secure.
An Introduction to Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
Have you ever used a theme or a plugin that offers an additional content area outside of the standard Posts or Pages? These are called Custom Post Types, a great feature in WordPress that allows you to break out into specific areas of content that can be used for anything the mind can imagine. Add in some taxonomies, and you can quickly raise the level of content organization throughout your site!
Whether you are learning about theme development and want to add separate content sections of your own or simply new to using WordPress to manage your content, it is to your advantage to know and understand what custom post types and taxonomies are, and what they can do to simplify your publishing or development life.
Prerequisites: For beginner / intermediate developers.
Plugins: A Double-Edged Sword
As most WordPress users know, plugins can be used to enhance WordPress sites in many ways. Unfortunately, they can also easily break your work. From javascript errors to buggy updates, from slow-performing code to stylesheet conflicts, this talk aims to help users identify and troubleshoot problems with plugins as they work on their creations.
Prerequisites: Basic WordPress, CSS and javascript knowledge.
Microsocial: How Tiny Bits of Data Can Make or Break Your Website
Seen and unseen, tiny bits of data are hard at work on every website. Search engines and social networks are using this information. But are you making them work for you? Microformats, microdata, metadata : what are they, what do they do, and how can you use them to attract visitors and improve SEO on your WordPress site.
This will be a presentation in three parts: a brief introduction to structured data, some easy actionable steps for the intermediate blogger, and some code examples for those hoping to integrate microformats or microdata into their WordPress themes and plugins.
Prerequisites: The first part of this presentation will cover the basics for intermediate bloggers who don’t code. The second part will cover code for designers/developers.
Women and WordPress • Femmes et WordPress
An informal unconference event which will look at the role of women in the WordPress community. We’ll look at why women make up more than half the bloggers, but usually about a quarter of WordCamp speakers, and an even smaller percentage of developers, coders and contributors. We will also examine ways of increasing other forms of diversity in the WordPress community. This isn’t a traditional presentation but a group brainstorming session. If you don’t like something, change it. Here’s your chance. Audience participation is expected. All are welcome (men too!). Bilingual session.
Prerequisites: This session is for everyone.
WordPress Happiness Bar
The Happiness Bar is not a presentation, it’s a part of the event where volunteer experts hang around and help attendees with any questions they have. Get your WordPress questions answered, one-on-one, by some of the best experts around. Tricky configuration question? Plugins issues? Wanting to bring WordPress in your enterprise but wondering if it’ll fit in? Whatever the question, our friendly volunteers will make sure you leave the chat with solutions.
WordPress Experts: The Happiness Bar needs you! If you’re better at answering questions than asking please come to the bar and help out! You can sign up to be an official happiness barista on the volunteering page.
Prerequisites: This session is for everyone.
