WordPress Theme Accessibility – building websites that EVERYONE can use

The focus of this presentation will be on making a WordPress theme more accessible for those with disabilities. This presentation will be programming specific, and cover various HTML and CSS requirements to ensure any WordPress theme is accessibility-ready. I will cover accessible images, media, link text, headings, keyboard navigation, colour contrast, skip links, and forms; and how a developer can program these aspects to meet WCAG 2.0 Guidelines.

What Boston Gave WordPress, and What WordPress Gave Boston

The original team behind WCBos (Kurt, John, Jake, Erick, Amanda and Daisy) have been discussing how to mark the 5th Anniversary. We’d like to do a lighthearted and inspiring talk about how far the Boston WP community has come (through the meetup and camp), but also what its meant to various people in the community, including ourselves. There are some mind boggling stories to be told. So the talk is about what the community has put into WordPress and what WordPress has given us.

We’re still yammering about the right format- whether its a panel or an actual talk, but we’ll be soliciting stories from the community to tell. We really don’t intend to make this about ourselves, but rather about the somewhat extraordinary way WordPress has transformed the lives of people in the Boston community. Its a “thank you”.

The New JSON REST API

A new JSON REST API is slated for WordPress 4.1 core integration. I am one of the key contributors to this project and the lead contributor for the client-side Backbone driven app. I want to show everyone why this new API is awesome, some cool things you can do with it, and how you can start using it now!

Finding the Speed Bumps in Your Code

WordPress is fast out-of-the-box, but is your theme or plugin slowing it down? We’ll start with a sluggish site, systematically identify the slow points, and do what we can to speed it up. In the end, we’ll have our site running like the Road Runner without having to add any performance-enhancing plugins. Meep meep!

Grunting Your Way to Success

Making changes to your WordPress theme used to be as simple as updating an PHP or CSS file and clicking save. Now we have CSS preprocessors, image minification, javascript minification, script concatenation, and much more.

That’s where Grunt comes in. It will do all of this, and more, for you automatically.

In this session we’ll discuss what exactly Grunt is, what it can do for you, and go over setting up Grunt so you can begin using it in your WordPress themes.

Essential Tools for Building a WordPress Publication

We’ll give attendees a behind-the-scenes look at building a publications website from scratch using our recent work on the acclaimed Harvard Law Review website. We’ll look into the design systems that publications need and the WordPress tools to make a complex publication come together.

Designing for Content

In this talk, I’ll go over the method I’ve created for designing websites from the content outward. I’ll cover aspects of designing in code, type choices, line height and typographic scale, creating a proper base style sheet for your child theme, usability best practices, semantic structure, and more. Since the web is fundamentally a text-based, utilitarian medium, making good type choices is arguably the most important aspect of web design. In this presentation, I’ll walk you through the things I’ve learned in my 15 years designing for the web.

WordPress Setup for Large Projects

The session would define the life cycle and infrastructure for larger projects such as enterprise or corporate platforms. We will cover the process of setting up version control (SVN/Git), tests with PHPUnit/Grunt/Behat, dependency management with Composer, deployment with Capistrano, using Vagrant, Travis CI, collaborating in GitHub. I would provide examples from the WordPress Core, WP-CLI, Easy Digital Downloads. It would outline the benefits of using various systems to improve the collaboration, deployment and forming a community around a project/plugin for more stable and robust work when the codebase gets larger.