Easy, Affordable Digital Signs with WordPress (AIM5)
Learn how to set up low-cost, easy-to-maintain digital signs using WordPress, an HD-TV, and a Chromebit. Leveraging WordPress plugins, you can easily pull information from many existing sources for display on your digital sign. Creating new content is also easy, thanks to WordPress's straightforward, browser-based user interface.
Stop Repeating Yourself: Modularized WordPress Development (DPA5)
Find yourself repeating the same basic tasks on every new development project you take on? Streamline and bring consistency to your development process by designing for reusability and bootstrapping your projects using tools like Yeoman and WP-CLI. This presentation will demonstrate the effectiveness of D.R.Y. (Don't Repeat Yourself) concepts across projects, concentrating on WordPress Theme development. Additionally, it will explore design patterns that promote shared, centralized data, reducing data duplication across your sites.
3, 2, 1, Lift Off . . . Now What? Maintaining a WordPress Site for Long-Term Security (DPA6)
You've spent six months working with five different departments on your website redesign. You've gone over each page with a fine-tooth comb. You've perfected the perfect "voice" for your content, striking the right balance between fun and professional. You've launched successfully and clinked glasses at a celebratory happy hour. Congratulations! Now what? Launching a new website is a great feeling, but too often we become lax in maintaining our sites post-launch. Once the dust settles, take action to ensure that your site has the longevity and security that it deserves! When you work this hard for something, it pays to take care of it. In this presentation, I'll go over valuable maintenance tips for Wordpress, the world's most popular content management system: 1. Evaluating whether or not a content management system makes sense for you in the first place: think about maintenance before you build! 2. Setting up a project management tool or ticketing system after launch to track future requests and updates 3. Plugins, plugins, plugins. Keeping a strict "update" schedule and the importance of updates 4. After-launch training sessions and what should be covered 5. Managing permissions for users who may access your site 6. Security provisions - what to configure up front and what to do in case of an attack 7. Backups - how, when, and what to do if the worst should happen and more! Maintenance is not always a "sexy" topic, but just consider the ratio of build time to "maintenance" time. A website build may take six months, but the life of your website could extend five years or more! To say that maintenance is "half the battle" is selling it short - it's more than that. This presentation will arm you with everything you need to know before embarking on a new build, and give you valuable tips to ensure the longevity and security of your existing sites, microsites, and landing pages.
"Give it a REST" (AIM7)
WordPress is ubiquitous. It powers small sites, large sites, blogs and just about everything else you can imagine, partially because it's so versatile. With the advent of the WordPress REST API, the platform became even more flexible. Depending on how things are configured, the REST API can be used to syndicate content from a WordPress-powered site to myriad other platforms, or it can be used to send and update content from an external source to a WordPress-powered site. In this session, we'll explore some of the ways the REST API is being used, and we'll talk about the possibilities that have been opened up as a result.
Access Denied: Keeping Yourself off an Attacker's Radar (DPA8)
Google's recent Transparency Report shows that nearly half a million websites are now hosting malware, an increase of 160 percent from this time last year. Higher education websites are particularly attractive to attackers, offering access to large amounts of bandwidth and broad network space. In this session, we will examine blackbox scanning tools to discover what types of information your WordPress site might be leaking to attackers. Then we'll explore steps we can take to stop this information leakage — one key segment of a larger strategy to fortify WordPress sites.