Speaker Spotlight: Jonathan Perlman

Jonathan Perlman is an experienced web developer and teacher that works for Dawson College in Montreal, Quebec. He builds custom web solutions for the students, faculty and staff. Recently he’s been leveraging WordPress more and more to do the heavy lifting while focusing on the needs of the institution with custom themes and plugins. Some of his sites have been built for a select few whereas others are visited by 12,000+ applicants. Jonathan is also an instructor for Dawson’s Centre for Training and Development specializing in web technologies such as HTML & CSS, PHP and WordPress.

Jonathan will be giving a talk titled “The Dawson Way of Doing Things: A Study of Our Path Using WordPress“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

My favorite improvement would have to be customizer. I routinely try to give users the ability to add and remove widgets to change their site. While customizer is not perfect, it really beats having to go back and forth between front and backend to make changes.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I work in education and I teach, therefore I believe in spreading knowledge, experience and giving back to the community.

What is your talk going to be about?

Dawson College has had it’s fair share of success and failures using WordPress over 6 or so years. We’re going to see how Dawson chose it’s main publishing platform to be WordPress, what went right and wrong, and how we’ve built some of our high traffic and high profile sites.

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

Use WordPress multi-site for the right reason!

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

Morten Rand-Hendriksen inspires me to never stop learning. I follow David Bisset @dimensionmedia cause he always tweeting about interesting things.

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

Multi-language baked into core.

WordCamp Montreal 2016 is over. Check out the next edition!