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.

As an experienced Internet marketing entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, and author, Brian has spent much of the past two decades helping companies excel on the Internet. His latest book, Content Marketing Ideas, has been highly praised by critics. He’s the head of well-established brands such as Uniseo (a boutique Internet marketing agency) and RedstoneX.com (a web design and online marketing company), where he brings a hype-free, seasoned approach to working with clients. You may have caught his appearances on CTV News or local radio shows. He writes about SEO, content marketing, social media, business, and entrepreneurship, among other topics. His work has been used by USA Today, ABC News, Social Media Today, Search Engine Journal, and other prominent sources. Brian holds two Master’s degrees, has taught university courses, and provides training services on Internet marketing. His love affair with WordPress began in 2005 when he started with version 1.6!

Follow @brianrotsztein on Twitter.

Brian will be giving a talk titled “Use Content Marketing to Better Reach Your Ideal Audience“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I like the automatic updating feature.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Thanks to WordPress, my companies and clients have been able to thrive. We specialize in WordPress and I appreciate what the software has done for us. As such, I’d like to give back to the community and help keep it strong by giving a talk.

What is your talk going to be about?

I will be highlighting some key ideas with respect to content marketing that anyone who uses WordPress for blogging or business should be using. Attendees will have clear takeaways to implement right after the session.

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

The right content can grow an audience… but how do you determine what the right content is? Find out!

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

I’ve been to every WordCamp in Montreal and many of the meetups. The organizing team is comprised of volunteers and they always do a great job. It’s a model to follow and inspiring.

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

I’d love to have front-end editing.

Dana has over 10 years of experience in Marketing, Communication, and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). She has worked on many exciting marketing and community projects with industry leaders in retail (like Starbucks), IT (like ITS and babyTEL) and NGO’s (like AFDC).

She’s inspired by innovation and technology and how it changes the human experience. She works in companies that make a positive impact on the world. She loves collaborating with passionate team members on projects as a customer advocate.

She sets marketing strategy according to their business goals and works with her design and development team to plan out project sprints to make sure they’re on track to achieve them. Having ideas is the fun part, weeding through these ideas and creating a project plan out of them and see them come to life is even more fun!

She also works closely with the sales team to talk to customers and partners and get testimonials, case studies and feedback to improve the company’s marketing efforts.

Follow @DizzyD7 on Twitter.

Dana will be giving a talk titled “How to Create a Website that Doesn’t Suck (Using SMART Objectives, Personas and Wireframes)“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Streamlined plugin updates

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

It was exciting to be part of such an awesome event with developers, marketers, designers and bloggers. I look forward to sharing my learnings with everyone and learn from the other speakers and attendees

What is your talk going to be about?

How to create a website that doesn’t suck (using SMART objectives, personas and wireframes).

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

I would love attendees to be able to set up a web strategy so that their website will be successful in achieving their desired objectives – whatever they may be.

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

A variety of developers, designers, etc.

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

Better GA integration – Some plugins are available but not effective the ability to easily customize different pages of the same theme

Luca Sartoni is a media professional with more than a decade of technical and marketing background. Thanks to his extensive experience in different business environments, from SMEs to large corporate projects, Luca helps companies scale up their business adopting data driven strategies. He does not believe in Santa Claus, magical spells and everything that is not backed up by facts. Luca is a Growth Engineer at Automattic.

Follow @lucasartoni on Twitter.

Luca will be giving a talk titled “Why the Plumber Always Wins“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Auto-updates

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

WordCamp Montreal is a must-be event. I was there last year and I had such a nice experience that I totally wanted to be there again this year. What a great community!

What is your talk going to be about?

I’ll be analyzing why a plumber can afford not to have a site, not to have any personal branding, not to do networking and still have a strong negotiation power and excel in their business. I will teach WordPress freelances how to integrate plumber strategies in their marketing.

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

Being able to raise their prices, get better client, provide more value.

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

I’m inspired by all the WorsPress contributors who give a love of their time and effort to strengthen the community itself.

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

Instant install and better media management.

Andrea is a writer, translator, information designer and all-around WordPress enthusiast.

She started using WordPress in 2013 and in two short years, went from knowing nothing to using WordPress 60 hours a week for a variety of projects and clients.

Follow @andreazoellner on Twitter.

Andrea will be giving a talk titled “How I Made a Career Using WordPress Without Knowing a Line of Code“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

This might sound silly, but I was pretty excited about Emoji support. I’m sure there are far more crucial and important updates to WordPress, but being able to use the same vaguely meaningful drawings across all my platforms has been a revelation.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

When the call for speakers went out, several colleagues and friends encouraged me to apply. I had some ideas for Beginner Track topics, but I was terrified at the thought of being a presenter. But I didn’t want to let feelings of inadequacy keep me from giving it a shot though, and that’s exactly what my talk is about.

What is your talk going to be about?

In general, I fall into the content end of the WordPress spectrum. But in my experience, communications professionals and writers have a lot to contribute to the tech industry. I want to encourage beginners who think using WordPress professionally or learning to code is beyond them. I took a chance and pivoted my career towards more technical roles over a year ago and discovered it’s possible to leverage your unique skill-set for all sorts of WordPress-related projects.

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

If people are curious about the tech industry but afraid of the technical learning curve, I’m hoping they’ll feel encouraged and empowered by my talk. I want them to think: “Hey, I CAN do this”.

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

I’m going to use this opportunity to highlight the tremendous work of fellow speaker Kathryn Presner (I hope you’re going to see her talk!). She’s a Happiness Engineer at Automattic and has encouraged me and many others to hone their skills, learn to code and even become WordCamp speakers. She’s also involved in the Montreal grassroots initiatives Girl Geeks and Ladies Learning Code, mentoring young women to get involved in the tech industry.

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

While this goes against everything I preach, I’m terrible at keeping up a regular blogging schedule. I need a WordPress bot that threatens to post a really embarrassing blog post if I miss a post day. That fear would be motivation enough.

And someone should figure out how to make a portmanteau of the words feature and future. It’s a puzzler.

Shanta R. Nathwani is a Web Design and Information Architecture Consultant as well as an Instructor in Web Design and CCIT Capstone at Sheridan College, located in Oakville, Ontario, Canada which includes teaching WordPress. The ICCIT program is a joint program with the University of Toronto at Mississauga. She teaches students and small businesses how to use their websites and social media to increase their online presence leading to increased revenues and improved customer service. She has assisted companies to incorporate social media in the real estate, financial, non-profit, education and technical fields to name a few. She is from Toronto, Ontario, but now lives in Hamilton, Ontario.

Follow @ShantaDotCa on Twitter.

Shanta will be giving a talk titled “Posts vs. Pages & Categories vs. Tags“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

Implementing Theme Customizations. Makes it so much easier to make small changes to your themes without learning how to code.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I missed the deadline last year and wasn’t going to miss another. Been years since I’ve been to Montreal and miss the city.

What is your talk going to be about?

Content Architecture helps find the focus of your website as well as how to lead visitors through your website to find what they seek.

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

A starting point for organizing your content. It may not solve everything, but this will help you to narrow down what should be on your site and what shouldn’t. This is a spiritual journey in many cases and you won’t solve it in one sitting. This stuff takes time. You’ll walk away with a lot of post-it notes!

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

Al Davis inspired me to do my WordCamp Tour last year and this year. Now I’m crowdfunding my way across the continent! The other person that I really enjoy seeing is Mendel Kurland. He’s easy going and is supportive of everyone in the community, no matter who they are.

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

I would love to have WordPress be capable of becoming a full-blown LMS for academics, not just single students here and there. Long shot I know, but not impossible for WordPress.