Whenever a post is saved, a page is loaded, a comment is created or a template is loaded, WordPress fires off events that, as developers, we have loved and cherished. These events are hooks. While hooks have been the quintessential building blocks of WordPress for over a decade, they come with a cost. Often times, developers will hook functionality into the save_post event, for instance, to fire off a notification to an external service or perform some sort of background task. The more of these tasks are hooked into WordPress, the slower WordPress becomes.

In this talk, I will show you how to alleviate these bottlenecks with asynchronous hooks – hooks that can be used to perform the exact same tasks, but not block the rest of WordPress from running. Through a library created by 10up’s Eric Mann and John Bloch for TechCrunch on WordPress VIP, the overhead of running actions can be reduced to a negligible amount.

About the Speaker: Aaron is a Sr. Web Engineer with 10up. He was a co-founder of WP Engine and the author of the WordPress Bible. Aaron has been working with WordPress since 2004 and remembers hooks and pages becoming a thing. In his free time, he spends time with his 26lb terrier, likes to sample craft beer and exercises his photography. He lives right here in Mt. Vernon, Baltimore.

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
9:00 am | Station North

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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How to Utilize Task Automation to Speed Up Your Workflow
In this talk I will showcase some of the tools I use to speed up my development process and some of the reasoning behind the way I have things set up. I will touch on subjects like developing locally, using git, the benefits of Sass and why everyone should be using it, running grunt tasks to compress your css, js, and images as well as using autoprefixer. I can also briefly touch on using frameworks if time and interest allow for it.

About the Speaker: Dustin Yoxall is CoFounder and Technical Director at Cake & Eat It Designs located in Easton, Maryland. He has over 5 years of experience building websites for clients and has spent most of that time developing on the WordPress platform. When he’s not developing he spends his time tinkering with Arduino boards and riding his bike. He is always excited to discuss workflow processes and how they can be improved!

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
3:30 pm | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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Working remotely can feel creatively isolating. Switching from a brick-and-mortar agency, to pants-optional sounds awesome — but if you’re accustomed to joining a coworker at the whiteboard, to hammer out a UI concept over marker fumes, you’ll agree the back and forth in GitHub/Slack channels doesn’t cut it.

In this talk, Anthony D. Paul, Director of User Experience at idfive, share how our work-from-home team overcomes technical and social hurdles, to mirror natural, in-person creative ideation (sketching, wireframing, etc.) with a mashup of hardware and cloud tools. This talk is best for teams allowing or considering telework, as well as freelancers who want to impress their clients.

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
2:00 pm | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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Return of the Responsive Theme

This is a ‘sequel’ to the talk I gave at WordCamps last year; taking the principles I spoke about and putting them into practice, I will talk about how in Parsec, I made images responsive, lightened load time, and introduced Sass. While earlier talks focused more on design decisions and planing, I will talk about coding, implementing, and testing!

Joe Casabona is a Front End Developer at Crowd Favorite and author of the book, Responsive Design with WordPress. He is also a Yankee fan, plays the drums, and enjoys a fine cigar from time to time. You can find him over at casabona.org or on Twitter at @jcasabona.

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
1:00 pm | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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Baltimore native John Waters has a unique creative style. The writer-director built a cult following that’s spanned the last 50 years. Chris Ford, a freelance WordPress designer at Creativity Included and project manager at Crowd Favorite, explains what Divine, Domino Sugar and dog poo can teach you about becoming a more confident, creative and effective designer. Let your freak flag fly!

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
9:00 am | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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Theme Selection, Donation Management, Event Registration, Email Marketing, CRM
WordPress can be a powerful tool in furthering your nonprofit’s mission. So many nonprofits are limited by small teams and smaller budgets. Tim Sisson, customer community team lead at InMotion Hosting, discusses the essentials for growing your nonprofit with WordPress. This talk will cover theme selection, donation collection/management, event registration/management, email marketing, e-commerce, Customer Relations Management(CRM), and finding a champion.

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
11:00 am | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
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Finding, Landing and Executing on 5 and 6-Figure Projects

Having trouble landing those larger WordPress projects? Bill Gadless, President and Co-Founder of Boston’s emagine, discusses how to identify the most lucrative prospects, how to pitch large projects and how to execute once you’ve landed the client.

If you’re looking for insights into crafting your value proposition, differentiation, overcoming objections or managing larger scale projects, this talk is for you. Bill’s responsible for sales and marketing for emagine’s 45+ person team. Their clients include multi-billion dollar, multi-national companies in tech, healthcare, and manufacturing.

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Details

Saturday, September 12, 2015
10:00 am | Downtown Track

Venue

William H. Thumel Sr. Business Center
11 W Mount Royal Ave
Baltimore, MD, 21201
View Complete Venue Details