Mel is a Design Engineer at Automattic and WordPress core contributor. She loves big type, cold brew coffee, and printmaking.

Follow @melchoyce on Twitter.

Mel will be giving a talk titled “WordPress Design Trends“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I’m loving a lot of the smaller improvements to the editing experience. For example, you can now paste a link on top of a highlighted work or sentence in the editor and it’ll make that into a link! It’s pretty handy.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

It’s so close to Boston, but I’ve never actually been before. I keep hearing great things about the community in Montreal, so I decided to come check it out. :) I’ve only been to Canada once before as a kid, so I’m excited to cross over the border!

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about some common and new design trends in the WordPress ecosystem, including some up-and-coming features, like the WordPress API, that are sure to change the landscape. It’s going to be mostly a show-and-tell style presentation.

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

“Wow — WordPress can do that? WordPress can look like that?” and “Ooh… Maybe I shouldn’t do that, too.”

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

There’s a lot of awesome women in the WordPress community I find inspiring and like to follow, such as Helen Hou-Sandí, Ella Van Dorpe, Rachel Baker, Michelle Schulp, Sara Cannon, Tammie Lister, Cami Kaos, Andrea Middleton, and Jen Mylo.

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

I’d love to see more incremental updates to the editor (since it’s where I spend a lot of my time) and definitely continual UX improvements to the Customizer. I’m looking forward to being able to handle the majority of site setup in one place.

I also have some personal pet peeves I’d like to see changed, like having comments turned off on pages by default, and adding a media widget to core.

Allison is a freelance web developer and designer from the New York area. She’s been making stuff with WordPress since 2005 and loves finding new ways to customize it for nonprofits and small businesses. She also blogs about independent travel and minimalistpacking, and podcasts about TV shows and fandom.

Follow @allilevine on Twitter.

Allison will be giving a talk titled “Custom Post Types, Fields, and Meta Boxes to Do the Impossible with WordPress“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I think in the past year WordPress has really become a platform that enables, rather than restricts, ideas, from distraction-free writing to the new Press This to complex query ordering.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I met some amazing women at another local conference who encouraged me to give my first talk at WordCamp Montreal. I also love sharing what I’ve learned while working with WordPress.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about how I use WordPress’ custom building blocks (post types, meta boxes, fields, templates, etc.) to solve real-world problems.

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

You can create, chop up, put back together, and display pretty much any type of content in a transformative way with WordPress.

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

@zoonini, @KarvelDigital, @davidperel, @noeltock, @jenmylo, @alisothegeek, @boone, @helenhousandi, @laras126, @calliaweb to name a few.

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

I’d like to see WordPress leverage not only its developer and support communities but also the huge network of content experts that it has brought together. WordPress has the potential to be our handbook to everything, based on actual knowledge and contribution rather than a proprietary search engine formula.

Michael has been playing around with the code for more than a decade with a tireless curiosity. Today, WordPress is the reason he bikes every day to his job where he enjoys learning and improving web development practices day in and day out. Besides that, he was made in Belgium … which might also explain a never-ending enthusiasm for beer, people and simple joys of life!

Follow @MichaelBontyes on Twitter.

Michael will be giving a talk titled “Create Your Own Shortcode“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I really appreciated the mobile and admin focus during the last releases. For example the extra features available now with the Press This tool make user’s life better and expand the on the fly publishing possibilities.

I also like the new meta queries options integrated in the WP Query parameters. It pushes back the limit of the complex queries especially in the use of custom content and fields.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

A lot of our work is based on open source project and contributions and we are constantly learning from the others. That’s why it seems logical to share what we know with interested people at an event like Wordcamp!

What is your talk going to be about?

The presentation aims to show how to create your own shortcode. It goes through the introduction questions like “what’s a shortcode and when is it interesting to use it?”. It also includes the practical development steps to create and implement the custom shortcode in an existing theme or plugin.

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

The goal is to share an introduction to the shortcodes and see people walking away from the talk with the ability to create and implement their own shortcode in their plugins or themes.

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

I don’t really follow someone in particular (except Sarah Gooding!). The Advanced WordPress FB group is also an interesting source of information and opinions. Also the WordPress development planning and the codex!

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

I would be happy to see more developments concerning the Json Rest API. Focusing on the the security and stability of WordPress is also really important.

Kathryn thrives on helping people get the most out of WordPress. After a career designing and building websites for clients, she joined Automattic as a Happiness Engineer in 2012. She’s currently Theme Whisperer on the Theme Team, where she helps folks with customization, configuration, and troubleshooting. She enjoys spreading her passion for WordPress at grassroots events like WordCamps, Girl Geeks, and Ladies Learning Code, and also loves encouraging new public speakers.

Follow @zoonini on Twitter.

Kathryn will be giving a talk titled “A CSS Adventure“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The overhaul of the theme and plugin directories on WordPress.org and within wp-admin.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

How could I not participate in my home WordCamp? :-)

What is your talk going to be about?

Customizing a site with CSS is powerful and useful – but can seem intimidating if you’re new to it. I’ll walk us through the basics of using CSS to make changes like modifying text size and colour, and hiding elements in the theme. We’ll look at what CSS can do, what the different parts of CSS code mean, and how to put together a piece of CSS that accomplishes your goal. We’ll go through a few examples together and see how much fun CSS can be.

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

I hope people will be inspired to go straight to their site and make a tweak they’ve been wanting to get done!

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

I’m inspired by all the folks who do the unglamorous work to support WordPress and strengthen the community, whether it’s translating strings, helping make sure WordPress is accessible, or answering forum questions.

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

More intuitive theme setup.

Shannon Smith is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She supports things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also sewist and mother of four.

Follow @cafenoirdesign on Twitter.

Shannon will be giving a talk titled “Ça coûte combien un site Web?“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

It’s been around for a bit more than a year, but my favourite improvement has to be WordPress in Canadian English. Finally! Language support generally, has improved a lot with in the past year, and I really like the option to choose the language directly from the admin as well. It just makes using WordPress so much easier.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

WordCamp Montreal is always a lot of fun. There are so many people doing new and interesting things with WordPress. It’s one of the reasons I love supporting open source software. And WordCamp is a great place to hear all about some really creative projects. Every year I learn something new and it’s great to be able to contribute to the community.

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk will be “How much does a website cost?”. You can pay 0$ or 100,00$ for a website, but people have a lot of questions about why that is. Why is the price range so large? How do you know if you’re getting your money’s worth? I hope I’ll be able to answer some of those questions. We’ll look at options for several different budgets and what happens with each one.

But I’ll also be talking about the process of getting a website built, especially from the point of view of a business owner or non-profit. My talk will walk you through choosing a good developer, evaluating their work, and knowing what to budget for. I’ll talk about why the cheapest option is sometimes the most expensive and what happens after your website is finished.

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

Hopefully people will walk out of my talk with a better understanding of how websites in different price ranges are built, and, obviously, know how much a website costs.

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

I would love to see WordPress incorporate true multilingual support. I’m really excited about how much better WordPress now works when it’s set up in a language other than English. But I’d love it if it were easier and more intuitive to build complex sites that work in multiple languages at once.