WordCamp Toronto

September 30, 2012 - By

This weekend was the second WordCamp Toronto (#wcto), which I attended with my esteemed colleague Rob Geldhof. The turn out was pretty impressive, especially considering that this year’s event has been divided in such a way that the more in-depth Developer’s stream will actually be in November.

I took notes, but thought I’d share some of the links I gathered. 

1) Securing WordPress by Victor Granic: A great talk about locking down WordPress. Most of it was a bit extreme for my day to day use but I would consider doing for clients. In preparing for his presentation he wrote out his thoughts fully in this post: http://switchwp.com/wordcamp-toronto-2012-presentation-on-steps-to-securing-wordpress/

2) SEO & Analytics Tools by Andy McIlwain: This was probably the least WordPressy talk for the most part. It focussed on various tools for SEO and Analytics. Some good links in the presentation. http://www.andymci.com/webmasters-toolkit-seo-analytics/

3) WordPress and Ecommerce by Jonathan Davis: Sadly I can’t find this presentation online, and my notes won’t really make sense. This ecomm plugin developer (for Shopp) briefly explained some of the complexities of onsite ecommerce, and humbly shared the title of his competition as well as his own product.

4) WordPress Backups by Rick Radko:While this was probably the talk I was most bummed out by, it’s probably still the most important one I attended. The speaker shared some of the most prominent titles in backup plugins and services, though admitted to having never used any of them. He obviously knows his stuff, but it would have been more useful if he had some hands on experience to speak to. Thankfully I got into a couple conversations on Twitter and was able to do some of my own research here. I actually sprung for Backup Buddy which is on sale until tomorrow. The speaker keeps his presentations here: http://www.slideshare.net/r3df

5)  User Roles by Erick “Radio Voice” Hitter: This talk was a great over view to how roles work in WordPress. This is actually something I’ve done a fair bit of. Whether giving Editors the ability to access Gravity Form reports, or creating new roles for our company Intranet, role editing is a key task to understand. Some great code samples in this post. http://www.ethitter.com/2012/09/the-power-of-wordpress-roles-and-capabilities-wordcamp-toronto-2012/

I didn’t get as much socializing in as I’d like (being gluten free meant I took off during the lunch break), but I still met some great nerds. Notably it was the first time someone wanted to meet me “IRL”, having read me on CSS Tricks. Neat!

 

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This post was written by ArleyM