WordCamp Montreal is an event that I really wanted to attend since last year. Finally, I has the the opportunity to participate on 23 and 24 July. It was my first WordCamp! I had the chance to attend many conferences. Congratulations to all the speakers, I am sure, have worked very hard to produce these beautiful presentations!
Therefore, I had great difficulty choosing what to attend presentations. At least, all presentations are filmed and will be available in a few weeks / months on WordPress.tv. Each presentation lasted about 45 minutes for questions.
Saturday – July 23, 2016:
9h00: Testing WordPress: It Doesn’t Actually Suck—Max Kovalenkov
First conference of the weekend! I was not fully awake, but we got advice about how to do tests on WordPress. It was really similar to the concepts I’m learning in my class about tests this semester at university. It was a revision for the exam next week! 😉
He showed us many tools to test our blog:
- PHPUnit
- wordpress.tv : videos of Nikolay, Ben and Carl
- GitHub
- WP code unit tests
- Codeception
- Wraith
- Continuous Integration
His slides are here.
10 h : Best blogging tools to simplify life – Jennifer Doré Dallas
The conference was very interesting. Presented in French by Jennifer Dallas Doré, she has a really great energy and it was a pleasure to listen to her. In her discussion, she suggested extensions and productivity tools she uses for her WordPress blog.
The plugins I didn’t know existed :
- Coschedule
- $ 15 per month, but it’s an all-in-one calendar
- WordPress Editorial Calendar
- You can have an editorial calendar directly in your WordPress dashboard
- WP Smush
Productivity tools :
- RescueTime
I only listed the tools I didn’t know before. If you want to know everything she suggested, her slides are available here.
11h00: How to Stop Over-Thinking and Hit Publish—Lynne Rutledge
13h00: Money Talks: How to Not Get Robbed—Belinda Darcey & Cie
What a great conference – so helpful! It was a discussion between 5 freelancers who share their experiences and lessons learned the hard way during their years of freelance.
What came out of the conference is:
- Having a contract is essential! It should contain:
- Delivery dates
- What is included and what isn’t
- Price – The client can obtain money so that we receive the money faster. We can ask for 50% on signing or 40%-40%-20% (40% on signing, 40% after the first review and 20% when the website is done).
- Limits about tech advice the client can ask (don’t repair his printer, for example)
- You can also have a paragraph about “being kind”. If the client doesn’t have a great attitude towards you, fire him!
- Produce an estimated
- Don’t underestimate the hours it will take
- Use your past clients to guess how many hours you’ll need to complete a task
- Be paid hourly
- Clients are faster when skyping
- Clients are respectful of your time
- If you pay before a certain date, the client can get a discount (he’ll pay sooner!)
- To calculate the hours spent working, use Freshbooks.
- To know what you’re doing on your computer : RescueTime
14h00: Behind The Curtain: Reviewing Plugin For WordPress.org—Mika Epstein
Une photo publiée par Marie-Philippe (@girlknowstech) le
I was very curious to know the reality of someone who actually contributes to WordPress.org. Mika Epstein checks 80% of plugins that are submitted to the directory. Approving an extension seems to take hours – when you know how many extensions are submitted each week, it is a impressive! The process is fairly complete, but it usually starts with the author of the extension. If she already knows him/her she will approve its plugin faster. If she doesn’t, she will look at each line of code. Also, she verify whether the plugin has been created by the person claiming it. To do so, she visits the author’s website, for example.
This presentation was very interesting (can’t stop saying these words but all of them were). Mika Epstein is passionate about her work and it’s beautiful to see! If you would like more information, there’s a bit more on her slides.
15h30: Don’t Fear the Custom Theme: How to Build a custom WordPress Theme with Only Four Files—Linn Øyen Farley
16 h 30 : GPL licence, questions and answers – Alexandre Simard et Marcel Naud
Discussion between Alexandre Simard and Marcel Naud (a WordPress developer and an intellectual property lawyer).
Sunday – July 24, 2016 :
9 h : How To Brand Your WordPress Site – Tippi Thole
It was a very informative presentation! She showed us an example of a rebranding she has done for a client.
I now understand much better the importance of creating a color chart and stick to it. The uniformity of colors and styles is very important in a website. As I am a developer and not a designer, it was very good advice for me.
Also, I did not know that “Google Fonts” existed!
The slides are available here.
10h: How to Succeed As An Independent Blogger – Brian Rotsztein
The title of his presentation clearly explains the essence of his conference. How to define the success of a blogger? It’s not just about making money. Success is to have free samples, access to events, products and free services, etc.
The reality is that this is not free! We must work hard and spending money (buying plugins, themes, etc.). You also need a lot of time!
Loved this conference because it is true that having a blog takes time. This is what I realized in the last weeks – do not you find that the number of published articles has declined recently? 😉
11 h : Security, Don’t Be a Target – Maxime Jobin
I wrote a lot of very useful notes on this conference, then I realized that while Maxime Jobin published a very structured article that summarize everything he said on his blog. So I’ll let you visit his blog if you want to have its security advice. For my part, I learned many new tools that I will apply soon in my blog!
13 h 30 : WordPress and React : Best of Both Worlds – Ziad Saab
I learned what is React. I liked to see what it’s capable of.
His slides are available here !
14 h 30 : WooCommerce for 7 to 77 ans – Jean-François Arsenault
The conference consisted of a demonstration on how to install and configure the plugin WooCommerce on a website. Jean-François Arsenault spoke about Stripe to pay online. It is an alternative to PayPal that is easy to implement.
As I never had to use WooCommerce, it was a good introduction to the subject for me! I could see what it looked installing WooCommerce! Admittedly, this is not very complicated to do as he is a very complete online store module!
If you’re interested in reading his slides, they are available here.
15 h 30 à 16 h : Break with great desserts!
16 h à 17 h : Happiness Bar
Finally, I was at the Happiness Bar with Daniel and he gave me great advice on how to make my blog faster to load.
Conclusion
It was my first WordCamp and I am very happy. I’ll return next year. I have many notes on what I learned during the weekend and I have several points that are added on the list of technologies that I need to learn.
Also, I am eager to apply some advice on my blog to make it evolve! See the next few weeks … I’ll probably do an article about the changes that will be made following my learning.
