Schedule

SUNDAY 6TH NOV
TIME SLOT CERUM THEATRE THEATRE 4
11:15am – 12pm Troy Dean – Running a Small Business as a WordPress Developer Vlad Lasky – Securing Your WordPress Website
12:00pm – 12:45pm LUNCH – Sandwiches: Ham, cheese and tomato; egg & lettuce; roasted vegetables and salad; turkey, cranberries and avocado; smoked chicken and cottage cheese and Spanish onions; bababganoush , tabbouleh, avocado & cucumber
1:00pm – 1:45pm Dion Hulse – What I’ve Learnt From Working In Open-Source  Timothy Ferguson – Running an Online Bookclub with WordPress
2:00pm – 2:50pm Stephen Cronin – WordPress and Government – The Australian Perspective
Sun 3:00pm – 3:30pm AFTERNOON TEA – Lemon and Passionfruit Cake , Fruit and Hummingbird Cake
Sun 3:30pm – 4:30pm Bronson Quick – Supercharging WordPress with BuddyPress! Andy Henderson – SEO for WordPress Workshop
Closing Remarks

SATURDAY 5TH NOV
TIME SLOT CERUM THEATRE THEATRE 4
08:30am – 09:00am Registration
09:00am – 09:10am Welcome
09:10am – 10:00am Kate Swaffer – Using WordPress to capture memories
10:05am – 10:45am Jodie Miners – Building a web presence for your Community with WordPress.com and other free tools. Dan Milward – How to facilitate and build an Open Source community
10:45am – 11:15am MORNING TEA – Lamingtons & Fruit Salad
11:15am – 12:00pm Andrew Davis – How to build your first website using WordPress. John Ford – How Automattic works across 20 countries with 95 employees
12:05am – 12:45pm Vikki Maver – How to write for an online audience Stew Heckenberg – Freelance FTW (strategies for success, pitfalls to avoid)
12:50pm – 1:30pm LUNCH – Sandwiches: Ham, cheese and tomato; egg & lettuce; roasted vegetables and salad; turkey, cranberries and avocado; smoked chicken and cottage cheese and Spanish onions; bababganoush , tabbouleh, avocado & cucumber
1:35pm – 2:05pm Lightning Talks
2:10pm – 2:50pm Will McNelis – 10 Essential Plugins for your WordPress Site Dee Teal – Getting to Grips with Genesis (A WordPress Framework)
2:55pm – 3:35pm Brett Morgan – Making Blogs Graphical (with HTML5) Japh Thomson – Code quality standards and best practices, Discuss
3:40pm – 4:20pm Dejan Petrovic – Google, Angry Panda & WordPress Anthony Cole – WordPress Plugin Development 101
4:20pm – 5:00pm John O’Nolan – Designing Emotion – Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience

SEO for WordPress Workshop

Presented by Andy Henderson • Low Tech Track

Mention SEO and WordPress in the same sentence and most people automatically think of Plugins. There are certainly plenty of very handy SEO Plugins for WordPress, but there is so much more than plugins that can be with WordPress to optimise your site.  This interactive Workshop will focus on a variety of optimisation activities and strategies and includes hints, tips, ideas and suggestions on optimising your WordPress based website to improve your search rankings, increase traffic and maximise your online sales/enquiries.

Topics include :

  •          SEO Fundamentals
  •          WordPress Out of the Box
  •          Basic Configuration
  •          SEO Friendly Themes
  •          SEO Plugins (of course)
  •          SEO Content Strategies

Google, Angry Panda & WordPress

Presented by Dan Petrovic • High Tech Track

Dan Petrovic is one of Australia’s most creative and leading SEO specialists. Dan is completely obsessed with search engine optimisation and all things that relate to Google’s wonderful algorithm, so much so that it only takes a trip to his office at Brisbane Technology Park to see the equations scribbled in whiteboard marker on the office walls! This is either the work of a genius…or a crazed madmen! I’d definitely say it’s a mix of 95% of the former and 5% of the latter.

Dan’s talks on SEO are always highly entertaining, informative and engaging. Dan will touch on the infamous Google ‘Panda’ algorithm and how it affects sites with low quality perception and number of thin content pages. Dan will be explaining some elements of Google’s search algorithm in simple English because as Albert Einstein once said: “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”

Will McNelis – 10 Essential Plugins for your WordPress Site

Presented by Will McNelis • Low Tech Track

Whether you’re new to WordPress or a seasoned blogger, you may at times feel overwhelmed when choosing from the 15,000 free plugins.

Never fear, Will McNelis is here to help.

Will has plenty of experience in selecting the essential plugins when setting up client sites through his company McNelis Media. At WordCamp Gold Coast, he’s going to share this experience and reveal the 10 Essential Plugins for your WordPress Site.

How to Facilitate and Build an Open Source Community

Presented by Dan Milward • Low Tech Track

Dan is a member of WordPress royalty. His company, Instinct Entertainment, has been building WordPress Plugins & providing custom WordPress development since, well, since the dawn of the ‘Press. Instinct’s flagship plugin, the hugely popular WP e-Commerce plugin, even has a download count double the population of the Gold Coast!

Dan has attended and spoken at WordCamps all over the world. At WordCamp Gold Coast, he’ll present on how to facilitate and build an Open Source community. A subject core to WordPress and a topic he knows a thing or two about, with tens of thousands in the community around Instinct’s plugins.

Running a Small Business as a WordPress Developer

Presented by Troy Dean • Low Tech Track

Troy’s presentation will cover the systems you can put in place to make sure you quote correctly and deliver WordPress sites efficiently. He’ll cover the plugins you should use and processes you can put in place to streamline the whole web development project.

His talk will give a blueprint for how to deliver consistent results every time, and make the most of your time. He will also cover some neat tricks around debt collection too!

If you run a small business that has clients and use WordPress, this presentation is a must.

How To Build Your First Website Using WordPress.

Presented by Andrew Davis • Low Tech Track

WordCamps bring together folks of all skill levels, from core-developers to first-time bloggers. That’s why we’ve signed Andrew Davis up to run a session especially for new-comers to WordPress.

During his session, Andrew will show how easy it can be to create your own blog or website with WordPress. He will cover the actual steps involved as well as provide a framework to help you keep on top of the process.

Building a web presence for your Community with WordPress.com and other free tools.

Presented by Jodie Miners • Low Tech Track

Every community group, sporting team or even small business, not for profit group or individual, needs their own web presence. This talk focuses on free or very low cost tools that your group can use to to get online and get organised.

WordPress.com is a fantastic tool to use for simple websites:

  • It does not have to be a blog, you can have static pages as the main landing page, and use the blog for news or events.
  • It is free, or very cheap if you want to redirect your domain to your wordpress.com site.
  • It has some great looking themes that require no coding knowledge or skills to customise (but if you are adventurous you can pay a small fee to be able to do custom themes, or buy a premium theme).
  • It still has all of of the collaborative editing features of full WordPress.

Plus we will be looking at other free tools that you can integrate with your WordPress.com website to make a fully online community including apps to manage your:

  • Emails
  • Documents
  • Events
  • Forms
  • Email Marketing, and much more.

Freelance FTW (Strategies For Success, Pitfalls To Avoid)

Presented by Stew Heckenberg • Low Tech Track

Are you working 9 to 5 as a designer or developer? Are you lying when you say “9 to 5” or “working”? A lot of what we do as designers or developers is work that doesn’t require us to sit in an office. Working under supervision often means working with interruptions. It is possible to work from home (or wherever you like) and keep hours that suit your lifestyle.

This talk explains how to use WordPress for fun and profit, with insights into strategies for success as well as pitfalls to avoid, and how to make the transition from the cubicle to the cafe.

Running an Online Bookclub with WordPress

Presented by Timothy Ferguson • Low Tech Track

Timothy Ferguson is one of the maintainers of the Gold Coast Library WordPress site gcbooks.wordpress.com. The Gold Coast Library setup their online book club as their staff training platform for Web 2.0 and are using WordPress as part of their new Online Branch strategy in 2012! Tim and his team have also trained people on how to set up blogs and post on a regular basis.

Tim has been an IT trainer with various library systems for fifteen years. In his session he’ll share experiences about building communities of readers online. Tim even uses WordPress for his own freelance writing, (19 non-vanity published books so far) at timothyferguson.wordpress.com.

Using WordPress To Capture Memories

Presented by Kate Swaffer • Low Tech Track

Kate was diagnosed with a rare younger onset dementia when she was 49. At WordCamp Gold Coast, Kate will share her personal story of living with dementia and how she uses it as motivation to live a fuller life.

Since being diagnosed, Kate has begun to use WordPress in a truly unique way – to help capture her memories, and build a personal history file, by way of words and stories embodying her feelings and emotions.

Kate volunteers as an advocate for people with dementia and through her role, one thing Kate encourages is for others to use blogs to share their life stories. Kate also strives to break down the barriers and stigma around dementia through her presentations.

Designing Emotion – Becoming a Puppet-Master of User Experience

Presented by John O’Nolan • Low Tech Track

John O’Nolan who is joining us all the way from the United Kingdom. John is an interactive designer who works with companies all over the world, from Microsoft to Virgin Atlantic Airways. John is a WordPress Core UI group contributor, was heavily involved in the WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 release cycles, and is coming over to speak at WordCamp Gold Coast all the way from sunny (*cough*) shores of the UK.

How To Write For An Online Audience

Presented by Vikki Maver • Low Tech Track

This talk will help business owners learn how to create online content that gets results .
With so much emphasis on web design, writing effective content is often overlooked.
I’ll explain why specialist writing techniques are needed for the web – and show you how to make your website message clear and compelling.

Getting to Grips with Genesis (A WordPress Framework)

Presented by Dee Teal • Low Tech Track

Dee Will be talking about using the WordPress framework Genesis.

With Genesis it is much faster to turn out a website than if I was coding everything from start to finish. It takes the heavy lifting out, speeds up my work flow, and the client ends up with a site that’s easily updated, and has inbuilt SEO and security.

How Automattic works across 20 countries with 95 employees

Presented by John Ford • Low Tech Track

John Ford will be joining us all the way from North Carolina, USA to share his experience with working at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, VaultPress, Polldaddy and many other great brands.

There are a number of benefits and challenges in a distributed work environment. At Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, nearly 100 employees interact on a daily basis while living all around the world. The heart of the operation is fueled by constant communication and open source tools that help build awesome products.

We’ll look at how the Automatticians work on a day-to-day basis, the tools they use, and ways to collaborate on projects when you’re not in the same location as your colleagues.

Dion Hulse – What I’ve Learnt From Working In Open-Source

Presented by Dion Hulse • High Tech Track

Dion is currently one of a select few with the privilege of WordPress core commit access. Having made close to 300 Trac tickets, uploaded well over 500 Trac patches (as well as too many commits to count) and had over 200,000 downloads for his Plugins this will be a talk not to be missed!

Securing Your WordPress Website

Presented by Vlad Lasky • High Tech Track

The growing popularity of WordPress has made it a target for hackers, online criminals and others who seek to cause mischief.

This talk will outline a number of techniques to help you:

*Harden your current WordPress installation
*Avoid introducing security holes when installing new themes and plugins
*Safely access your website from public computers and untrusted networks

WordPress Plugin Development 101

Presented by Anthony Cole • High Tech Track

In the history of WordCamp in Australia, there have been a total of 3 events. Anthony Cole has helped organise the two of these.

WordCamp Gold Coast will be the first camp in Australia or New Zealand Anthony has attended without the responsibilities of also organising. What better way to take advantage of all the free time than to run a workshop on plugin development?

Anthony will share his skills at WordCamp Gold Coast to help absolute beginners learn how to develop WordPress plugins. His workshop will cover fundamentals of plugin development as well as best practices such as unit testing and version control. If you’ve ever wanted to get started in WordPress plugins, this is the workshop for you.

Surely a talk not to be missed!

WordPress and Government – The Australian Perspective

Presented by Stephen Cronin • High Tech Track

Having provided custom WordPress solutions since 2007 and holding web management roles within Queensland Government for most of that time, Stephen Cronin provides insight into the challenges facing the adoption of WordPress by government within Australia.

Issues covered will include:

– The conservatism of government ICT and the impact on the adoption of WordPress within Government.
– Some of the content management systems that are commonly used within Government.
– Why WordPress often isn’t even considered for larger government sites.
– The perceived functionality gap and what the WordPress community can do to improve this.
– Opportunities for WordPress in the government in the short term.
– Trends towards the greater use of WordPress in US and UK.
– Reasons why Government *should* be embracing WordPress for all sites.

Making Blogs Graphical (with HTML5)

Presented by Brett Morgan • High Tech Track

Most blog content is text, but with the emergence of camera phones and photo-sharing apps, visually immersive blogs are becoming increasingly popular.

At WordCamp Gold Coast, Brett Morgan is going to show a vision of a new way of constructing blogs, using HTML5 technologies, that empower users and clients to express themselves in new ways.

Brett works as part of Google’s Developer Relations team on Blogger, so he knows a thing or two about blogging.

Code Quality Standards and Best Practices, Discuss

Presented by Japh Thomson • High Tech Track

Japh Thomson will be giving a presentation on  various coding standards, best practices, and resources to help improve them. He will also be aiming to get some discussion and thinking going on helping each other maintain a high level of quality in our plugin and theme code generally.

Topics Japh will cover include:

– Being aware of and adhering to good standards
– Knowing best practices for various tasks, such as use of CPTs, extra database tables, option saving, APIs (i.e. Settings API), etc.
– Feeling responsible for your code
– Getting help and peer review
– Don’t cut corners on time if you know it will impact on your QoS

Supercharging WordPress with BuddyPress!

Presented by Bronson Quick • High Tech Track

BuddyPress can turn your WordPress site into a complete social network. BuddyPress comes with activity streams, forums, mentions (ala Twitter), friending and private messaging.  It can seem rather overwhelming, which is why Bronson is here to provide guidance on how to go about adding BuddyPress to your WordPress site.

At WordCamp Gold Coast, Bronson will be conducting a hands on workshop to explain:

  • BuddyPress features
  • How to to install BuddyPress (version 1.5)
  • The extra theme template files that BuddyPress creates that differ from WordPress
  • How to turn a WordPress theme into a BuddyPress theme using the BuddyPress Template Pack (This will be a live demo!)
  • How to enhance your BuddyPress site and increase user engagement with additional BuddyPress plugins such as Achievements for BuddyPress, Group Documents,  BuddyPress Like, Welcome Pack and BuddyPress Activity Plus.

Bronson knows what he’s talking about, having helped build one of, if not the first BuddyPress powered social networking site for Government in Australia – The Edge.

So come along to Bronson’s workshop to learn how to supercharge your WordPress site with BuddyPress.