Category: Technical

Subscription revenue models are an increasingly popular choice for a lot of different types of businesses — more and more websites are exploring partial or total subscription strategies.

Speakers Adrian O’Hagan from Crikey and Private Media, and Ben May from The Code Company share their experiences in building and migrating large complex WordPress subscription sites.

Two unique perspectives; Adrian’s experience as both product manager and developer, and Ben as a technical agency working with clients on these kinds of projects.

This talk will examine some of the common pain points experienced with scaling subscription sites, and how the pair have architected powerful and flexible subscription sites using SaaS products such as Chargify.

Key Take-Away

How to think about building more advanced subscription powered WordPress sites with external billing engines.

Several months ago we got REALLY EXCITED when we discovered that some industrious individuals had started implementing Gutenberg for other CMS & frameworks.

Gutenberg for Laravel? Gutenberg for Drupal? Amazing!

Then we tried it ourselves. And failed, miserably.

Back to the drawing board – we needed a different way to integrate the shiny new block editor we’d already promised our favourite client with the mother of all websites.

We’re talking a custom PHP website built on a highly complex custom enterprise CMS/ERP system developed over a 15 year period. No sweat.

Fortunately for us, the latest craze in the WordPress development world – headless WordPress – came to the rescue!

Find out about our journey as we share what we tried before landing on our final solution, what we ended up with, what we’d do differently next time and what our key takeaways from this wild adventure were!

Key Take-Away

1. There’s more than one way to skin a cat
2. Implementing Gutenberg in a non WordPress website is very challenging
3. How headless WordPress can be used for integrations
4. Challenges and learnings from a first time headless experience

• A bit of history: The web was built for sharing science
• About CSIRO (and Data61), Australia’s premier science organisation
• How we use WordPress, multisite and standalone
• In-house development vs External (understanding the needs of a large government agency)
• The challenges and our solutions: Custom themes and plugins, administering multiple sites
• The future: Gutenberg?

Key Take-Away

WordPress has a role in large organisations, but their requirements may be different to what you are used to.

So, Beyonce, unbeknownst to you, decides to wear your shirt. A paparazzi snaps her casually walking down Rodeo Drive with it.

Suddenly your site explodes and you’re getting angry emails from crazed Beyonce fans about not being able to access it.

What happened?! Was it the dreaded DDoS monster? Or did something even worse happen? You went viral…

When your WordPress site finally goes live, it’s likely that you’ve probably spent weeks or even months building, iterating and debating about it.

The last thing you’re thinking about is testing it.

But if you plan on succeeding on the most important days of your business and site, like a function room, you need to understand how many people can fit in it, otherwise you could be leaving thousands on the table when your site goes down.

Key Take-Away

This talk will cover a history of load testing, why it’s important, and a live demonstration with an open-source and free tool that everyone can access right now.