We’re exited to annouce our WordCamp Sydney speaker line-up.
Ajax McKerral
Mastering Custom Post Types
Getting to the bottom of creating custom post types, and how this can benefit your clients.
Learn how to declare them, label them, add taxonomys and make them navigable in the Dashboard.
Then learn how to build templates for them and take full advantage of core WordPress functionality to make yours and your client’s life easier.
Bio
Ajax set up and ran the London Symphony Orchestra’s (LSO) Digital Education Program between 2004 – 2007. Upon his return to Australia, Ajax consulted with Sydney Symphony, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Recital Centre, and Victorian Opera on their online education programs.
In 2011 Ajax started Nuttify to service small to medium enterprises by building Champion Websites that grow their businesses. Ajax is a master WordPress developer and leads a small, creative team to realise the goal of helping every small business achieve outstanding growth through achieving an amazing online presence.
Ajax’s studied music at the Canberra School of Music and Music Technology at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He fell into web design and development by accident back in the heady days of 1998 by creating a website for one of his bands. And continued building websites through a variety of roles, including for the LSO.
Ajax also holds a 4th degree black belt in Iwama Ryu Aikido openhanded and weapons (buki waza) and teaches at Aikido Maai in Mt Waverley, Melbourne.
Amelia Briscoe
WordPress for Mortals: create a custom website without needing to be a coding wizard
Rainmaker: what it looks like and how it works.
Bio
I’m a web developer and designer who has been working with WordPress since 2006.
I currently work for Copyblogger Media in the tech support team.
Whilst I love to spending time wrangling code, and figuring it out for folks, I prefer to help people gain the skills and confidence they need to manage their own website.
I like to create video tutorials and screencasts for newcomers that show them how to set up their website and customize the site to make it their own.
I’m crazy about Ice Hockey, Curry and Julie Andrews, in that order.
Belinda Williams
Harnessing WordPress to Build Your Profile
Whether you’re a blogger or a specialist in your professional field, WordPress can be a powerful tool to help build your profile.
Belinda Williams, a marketing communications specialist, copywriter and fiction author, will discuss how she utilised WordPress to build her author profile.
She’ll also share insights gained from her role as a WordPress Producer around helping businesses build and run their websites, and in the development of co-founding AssistantPress.me, an online company centred around helping businesses blog effectively to build their profile.
Bio
Belinda Williams is marketing communications specialist and copywriter based in Sydney who allowed an addiction to romance and suspense get the better of her.
Belinda was named a top ten finalist in The Romance Writers of Australia Emerald award in 2013 and 2014.
Her debut novel, Radiant, a paranormal romantic suspense, is currently available on Amazon, while her contemporary romance, The Boyfriend Sessions, is due for release by Momentum (Pan Macmillan) in late October.
When she’s not writing or blogging, Belinda is also a WordPress Producer with The DMA and co-founder of AssistantPress.me, an online company centred around helping businesses blog effectively to build their profile.
Brent Shepherd
The Wonderful World of WooCommerce
WordPress, the world’s most popular publishing software, now hosts the world’s fastest growing e-commerce software – WooCommerce.So why is WooCommerce so popular? Why would you want to set up a store on WordPress? And what the heck is this WooCommerce thingamajig anyway?In this talk, I demonstrate the most interesting features of the free WooCommerce plugin and discuss why its open source foundation combined with a marketplace for extensions is helping foster a great community. I’ll then share the stories of some folks now making their living thanks to WooCommerce in the hope of inspiring others to believe they can do the same.
Bio
WooCommerce is my hobby and my profession. I developed WooCommerce Subscriptions – the most popular 3rd party extension in WooTheme’s official WooCommerce marketplace. I provided technical review the first WooCommerce book; help organise a WooCommerce meetup in San Francisco and founded a company dedicated to WooCommerce products – Prospress Inc.
Brian Miyaji
Theme and plugin localisation
The advantages of localising open-source code for WordPress, things to consider when developing software for a global audience, and how to save time for developers and translators.
Bio
Brian is the co-founder of ThemeBoy, a Melbourne-based studio focused on developing themes and plugins for sports. Their flagship league management plugin SportsPress has quickly become one of the most actively translated WordPress projects. Brian will be discussing the advantages of localising code for WordPress, things to consider when developing software for a global audience, and how to save time for developers and translators. You can find him on Twitter at @themeboy.
Cath Beaton
Lessons Learned From Client Training
Most common mistakes and some easy fixes + tips on how to communicate with your web vendor to get the most out of your WordPress websites
Bio
Cath Beaton owns Phase Creative, a boutique web design and development business working with small businesses and professionals. Her career started in graphic design in 2001 and she made the move to web design in 2007 where she worked for 5 years as a web designer for a national radio network. In 2012, she quit working for the man to pursue more flexible working arrangements and stumbled upon WordPress.
Although relatively new to the WordPress space, she dove in deep and has spent the last 2 years helping people maximise the effectiveness of their WordPress builds – then training them how to use them. Her passion for usability and design teamed with the limitless potential of WordPress has allowed her to not only get her hands dirty building beautiful websites, but also to focus on empowering her clients to get the most out of their WordPress website investment.
Chris Ryan
Running A Remote Team
I run a remote sales/ marketing team around Australia and also developers / back office in Philippines – pitfalls and techniques to help, challenges, getting started etc.
Bio pending
Dan Norris
The 7 Day Startup, How to build a scalable WordPress business in 1 week
Dan spent 7 years failing at entrepreneurship before launching one of the world’s fastest growing WordPress support providers in 1 week.
Dan’s book The 7 Day Startup is a bootstrapper’s bible for going from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
In this Talk he will present concepts from the book along with 5 criteria for building a high growth WordPress business.
Bio
Dan Norris is an award winning content marketer and the author of the book The 7 Day Startup.
In June 2013 after failing at entrepreneurship for 7 years, he founded wpcurve.com, a worldwide team of wordpress developers, providing unlimited small fixes and support, 24 / 7 for $69 per month. It became profitable in 23 days, and 14 months later has 20 staff, 500 customers and continues to grow at 15-20% per month.
Dan is a passionate content marketer and has created 600+ pieces of content around entrepreneurship, WordPress and online marketing. In 2013 he was voted Australia’s best small business blogger by the readers of Telstra’s Smarter Business Ideas magazine.
Dee Teal
Keynote Address: The WordPress Project, it’s all about YOU
What comes to mind when you think about ‘The WordPress Project’? Have you ever heard the expression?
For most people the first thing that springs to mind is probably the software, the core WordPress files you download to get WordPress up and running on your site. What you may not be aware of is the hive of activity around it that goes well and truly beyond the software. And even if you’re not a software developer, theme builder or code nerd, there’s a place for you in the bigger picture.
Dee will look at what the WordPress project looks like, introduce some of the people who are involved in it at various levels in Australia and will show you where you could get involved, whatever your skill level, and wherever your interests lie.
Bio
Dee Teal is a front end developer working primarily with the Genesis Theme framework building sites for small to medium business and under contract to a few local agencies. She’s been using WordPress exclusively for at least 5 years having had her mind blown with its possibilities at her first WordCamp, WordCamp Melbourne in 2011. Since then she’s been a sold out advocate of WordPress meetups, WordCamps and the WordPress community as a whole.
Dee has a Masters Degree in Digital Communication and Culture from the University of Sydney and can be found at http://thewebprincess.com or on Twitter as (predictably) @thewebprincess
Co-organiser WordCamp Melbourne 2013
Co-organiser WordCamp Sydney 2012
Speaker at WordCamp Gold Coast 2011 & WordCamp New Zealand 2012, WordCamp Welly 2014
Organiser at WordPress Melbourne meetups
Attended WCMelb 2011
Frankie Jarrett
How To Write A WordPress Plugin In Less Than 10 Minutes
For some, the idea of writing a WordPress plugin is scary because there is so much that you can do with them, both good and bad.
But plugins don’t have to be complicated, there are some amazing things you can do with just a few lines!
Bio
Frankie is based in St. Joseph, Missouri and works as a WordPress developer for X-Team WP, a WordPress.com VIP partner agency, working full time on the Stream plugin team.
Prior to this, Frankie founded a WordPress theme shop designed for churches and non-profit organizations.
He has been building with WordPress since 2007 and was a core contributor during the 3.7 release cycle.
Outside of work, Frankie is the director of music and worship at his local church, enjoys traveling with his wife and smoking his own BBQ.
Gian Wild
PDFs and accessibility
Gian Wild looks into PDF use in 2014 and the experiences of both the general public and people with disabilities.
Gian will also talk about how to deal with the legacy PDF problem.
She will explain how sometimes the best solution is not to make all your PDFs accessible, especially when resources are limited, and more importantly, how to meet accessibility requirements with thousands of untagged PDFs on your site.
Bio
Gian Wild is the Director of AccessibilityOz. She has worked in accessibility industry since 1998. Her major achievements include: the very first Australian accessible web site; the Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games; her six years active membership in the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines Working Group; accessibility reviews of public and private web sites; conference and seminar presentations; judging web awards and the development of accessibility toolkits.
Jack Skinner
Gittin’ jiggy with Git
Working on code by yourself is simple, but working with other developers can often get confusing pretty quickly.
Git is a hugely popular tool for versioning and sharing code. Some know it mode fondly as the tool made popular (and accessible) by github.
Jack will be showing you how to get started using git, how it can empower you and your team to work closer together, and how to start using git in your WordPress project.
Git is a powerful utility for team coding, and as such with great power comes great responsibility! This session will also discuss some of the workflows and strategies teams use to help streamline their development.
Bio
Jack Skinner started building websites over 10 years ago, discovered PHP 7 years ago and now spends his time building custom PHP applications using a variety of frameworks and tools (but secretly he just loves using Zend Framework 2).
In the evenings he spends his time organising the SydPHP and Zend Framework user groups, time permitting, he’s a self proclaimed unit testing, continuous integration and delivery evangelist.
James Banks
99 quick tips on how to optimise WordPress for speed & performance
Did you know that nearly half of web users expect a site to load in 2 seconds or less, and they tend to abandon a site that is not loaded within 3 seconds?
If you are a WordPress developer or site owner, optimising WordPress for speed and performance is super important if you want to convert more leads, customers and sales for your clients or from your own WordPress site.
For this presentation, I’ll show you 99 ways that you can decrease your site’s load times and increase the front-end, back-end and server-side performance of WordPress.
Bio
James has been working with WordPress primarily as a front-end developer for almost half a decade.
He has helped hundreds of local, national and international brands, from startups to multi-million dollar companies, achieve success online through his WordPress specialist agency, Web3 (http://web3.com.au).
Being a speaker at WordCamp Melbourne, Startup Weekend and various other web & tech meetups, James is seriously passionate about WordPress and giving back to the local WordPress community.
Jeremy Kelaher
NewsCorp Australia is going WordPress at scale – the why, and the how
NewsCorp Australia has recently decided to go with WordPress for some of the busiest domains in the country like news.com.au and foxsports.com.au, as well as using it for popular blogs and as a Digital Authoring Platform for lifestyle products.
This presentation will tell you how we came to this decision, and how we intend to deliver story telling at a global scale with WordPress.
Bio
Jeremy is an experienced digital architect who loves delivering content and commerce to a mass audience.
His passions are APIs and webscale design. He has used too many CMS to name, but is now settling into an extended period with WordPress thanks to his current employer NewsCorp Australia
Jordan Gillman
Future Proofing your WordPress site
Learn how to select WordPress themes and plugins that will stand the test of time.
Working with WordPress (rather than against it) to set up a site that will last longer than you do
Bio
Jordan runs Jordesign, who specialise in creating custom WordPress websites for churches, non-profits and other ministries. He lives in Wollongong on the beautiful South Coast with his wife, daughter & dog Pixel.
Kate Toon
Super Simple WordPress SEO
An evaluation of the most popular WordPress SEO Plugins, Yoast, All in One SEO. An basic breakdown of settings, other good supporting plugins. Other advice and tips that don’t rely on plugins AT ALL!
Bio
Kate Toon is an award-winning SEO copywriter and SEO consultant with over 18 years’ experience.
She’s worked with big brands such as Westpac, the RTA, Curash and Kmart and helped countless small businesses improve their SEO and product great content.
Kate recently founded the Clever Copywriting School with the goal of educating other writers and business owners on the ins and outs of copywriting and SEO.
Luke Carbis
Better, Faster, Stronger: Best Practices for Coding in WordPress
Take your WordPress development from **competence** to **excellence**.
This discussion will cover some best practices around writing code for WordPress. What are the WordPress Coding Standards, and why should you use them?
What’s the best way of including scripts and styles? Is there a better way of handling AJAX?
We’ll talk about questions like these, and start you on your way to writing fast, safe, and beautiful code.
Bio
Luke is a lead developer on the Stream plugin, working from the beaches of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. He is an accomplished WordPress course facilitator, meetup organizer, plugin developer, and WordCamp speaker.
Before joining Stream, Luke built a plugin development business in the WordPress e-Commerce space. His work included popular extensions for platforms like WooCommerce and WP e-Commerce. He also engaged with creative agencies to conceptualise and create custom WordPress solutions.
When he’s not in a code trance, you can find Luke spending time with his family or drinking coffee. He also enjoys analog photography, board games, and travel.
Maeve Lander
WordPress Security
How to fortify your WordPress installation and keep those nasty hackers and sctipt-kiddies at arms length.
Bio
Maeve is a UI designer and front end developer from Perth, with a passion for WordPress.
She’s built a healthy collection of plugins – currently around 15 of them on the loose – and is kept pretty busy maintaining and supporting them!
By day Maeve heads the team at Enigma Digital, a small production agency devoted to custom WordPress development.
Maeve’s a keen musician, so when she’s not pushing pixels you’ll find her playing jazz trumpet or working on her app – Orpheus, sheet music reader for Android.
Peter Wilson
CSS Naming Conventions
This talk will compare several naming conventions and the pros and cons of each. From here, we’ll look how these benefits can be applied from the beginning of a project, assist the design process and how they apply to WordPress themes and plugins.
Bio
Peter (@pwcc) has been making websites since around 1995. A front-end developer with a love for CSS. Peter has worked on sites for some of the countries largest and smallest businesses.
Scott Huntley
A Beginner’s Guide to Popping the Bonnet and Getting Your Hands Dirty
Modifying WordPress beyond plugins and themes is difficult, right?
It might surprise you to find out there are some mods anyone can easily make to their WordPress site.
This presentation is focused on helping beginners overcome their fears of working with the code behind WordPress.
Scott will show you how easy it is to work with custom post types, change the login screen logo, modify a theme and add a custom dashboard widget. Seeing how easy it is to mod your code will have you popping the bonnet and tinkering with WordPress in no time.
Bio
Kenneth Scott Huntley (call him Scott) was working as a programmer for an Internet start-up in Vancouver until an Australian girl convinced him to turn his life upside down ten years ago. He is now an instructor at SWSi TAFE, teaching HTML, CSS, Social Media, Database, and customising Content Management Systems. Scott is a fan of WordPress, and is the co-coordinator of the Parramatta WordPress meetup group. He is an Associate of Australian Computer Society, and a member of the Australian Web Industry Association.
Steven Cooper
WordPress, WooCommerce and IoT
Demonstrating how WordPress + WooCommerce can be integrated with an IoT based solution to help business do business.
Bio
Steven Cooper is responsible for working with the strong developer community within Asia-Pacific, to develop and nurture the healthy start-up culture that continues to flourish across the region.
Over the last 20 years, Steven has worked as a senior developer for a host of start-ups and as a developer analyst for more than 10 years with Sensis. Before joining PayPal, he configured and spec’d mass
production technology hardware for the likes of Virgin, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Visa, St. George and Westpac.
In his current role, Steven hopes to align businesses with the most appropriate PayPal solutions – products that deliver efficiency, flexibility and enable scalability.
Tareq Hasan
Using Grunt in your WordPress development workflow & WP-CLI
How you can use Grunt to automate some processes in your WordPress plugin/theme development.
Also how you can use WP-Cli to manage your WordPress from the command line.
Bio
Tareq is a developer who is very passionate about programming and web development. Creating something new excites him most of the times. He just loves PHP and WordPress and he beleives anything can be built using WordPress.
He created some plugins like WP User Frontend, WP Project Manager and various others. You can find more on his github account. He is the founder of weDevs, which is a WordPress based product oriented company.
Troy Dean
The Truth Behind Becoming the Leader of a Tribe: Peeling the Curtain Back on WP Elevation
An insider’s look at how Troy built up WP Elevation.
Bio
I am a WordPress consultant and co-founder of Video User Manuals, a video tutorial plug-in to teach your client how to use WordPress, as well as WP Elevation, the world’s first business accelerator program for WordPress consultants. I speak regularly at WordCamps and have delivered solutions for clients including Jessica Watson (the Australian girl who sailed around the world at the age of 16), F1 Grand Prix and The Ashes Cricket.
Vlad Lasky
Make WordPress Fly with Virtual Server Hosting
If your WordPress site is being used for something serious, shared web hosting just doesn’t cut it. Caching plugins and CDNs are often just masking poor host performance.
Virtual server hosting is now more affordable than ever. For as little as $10/month, you can get your own private SSD Linux server hosted in the Cloud.
Vlad shares his tips on choosing the right virtual server and setting it up for top WordPress performance, including configuration & tuning tips for Apache, PHP, Opcode Caches, MySQL and WordPress itself.
Bio
Vladimir Lasky, Computer Systems Engineer and actor, discovered WordPress in early 2008 when he first got into blogging. He immediately recognised WordPress to be a powerful enabling tool to help anyone build a strong online voice with far less effort than before.
Today, Vlad is the lead developer at Aussie WP Expert, a WordPress development & consulting business based in Sydney. He has presented talks on security and spam prevention at three previous WordCamps.
Outside of WordPress, Vlad is involved with other Engineering/IT businesses including Precision Tracking – a provider of GPS vehicle and fleet tracking solutions and RemoteLaboratory.com which develops remotely accessible laboratories for science and engineering education. He is involved in the NBN Defender Campaign, which is lobbying the Australian government to complete the deployment of a Fibre-to-the-Premises National Broadband Network. He also has a passion for synthesizer keyboards & electronic music.
Past talks:
Securing Your WordPress Website – WordCamp Gold Coast 2011
Securing Your WordPress Website – WordCamp Sydney 2012
Beating Spam on your Blog/Site – WordCamp Melbourne 2013
Warren Denley
Build Your Site Tonight – Be Blogging Tomorrow
Too many people think building a site is hard work, or something only a “professional” can do. For less than the cost of a cheap developer, you can actually create a better result yourself.
Bio
WordPress consultant and co-founder of DIY Website Coach, a business dedicated to helping people create and manage their own professional looking, business ready website.
I am passionate about WordPress and love using it to deliver simple and elegant solutions to business problems. I am happiest when I am helping clients cut through tech terror and website panic and achieve elegant solutions.
Weston Ruter
Customize all the things! Getting excited about the Customizer
The Customizer is one of the least known yet most powerful features of WordPress.
We need to get past thinking of it as the “Theme Customizer” which only good for tweaking colors and a limited number of settings.
No, the Customizer provides a framework for live-previewing any change to WordPress.
In WordPress 3.9 I led development of incorporating Widget management to the Customizer, and I’d like to get on a soapbox to get people excited about developing their own custom controls for the Customizer.
Bio
Weston is passionate about the Open Web, the freedom of information and the interconnectedness of people and devices.
He’s been heavily involved in web development since the late 90’s and has a degree in Computer Science.
He started a blog on WordPress 1.2—when WordPress was just a year old—and he started developing with WordPress primarily since 2007.
Weston heads up development at X-Team WP, and he is a core contributor to WordPress and a component maintainer for the Customizer.
Weston lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife and two young boys, and he loves working from home so he can spend lots of time with them.
