Our final speaker announcement before WordCamp Brisbane is a panel on “The Future Of Mobile / Mobile & Web”. The future of WordPress and mobile devices will be changing considerably over the next 12 – 18 months as new technology and frameworks emerge. This panel discussion will cover all things mobile from responsive design right through to mobile apps. During the session we will have an MC leading the discussion but we will be encouraging audience questions.

Our panel of our experts is James Banks, Lucy Bloomfield, Nik Cree and Ryan McCue.

Ryan McCue

We have our final speaker announcement for WordCamp Brisbane (apart from a panel that we have to announce too 🙂 )! Ryan McCue will be talking about The WordPress REST API. The WordPress REST API is a simple but powerful way to interact with WordPress. There is also a 2.0 Beta available of the project on Github which is being actively maintained and updated as the project works it’s way into WordPress core. Ryan started this project as a WordPress Google Summer of Code project and it has been growing in leaps and bounds since that project started.

This project will affect everyone who works with WordPress! The WordPress REST API will change the way use WordPress as it’s not only able to expose WordPress content, meta, users and media in JSON. You can easily extend the API to expose content and settings from custom post types and plugins that you have developed. Not only can you view the data but you can perform any CRUD activities provided you’re authenticated via the API’s endpoints.

This means that you can use mobile, desktop and web applications that you create in any programming language or framework and update your WordPress data without having to login to WordPress.  This will really make it a lot easier to use “WordPress as an application framework”. Ryan’s talk will cover the project goals and will make you excited about the future of WordPress!

Ryan was only 14 when he committed his first WordPress patch but he’s been contributing to open source software since he was 11 or 12. He’s also maintained SimplePie which is an RSS and Atom reader this is used in WordPress core. He’s now a Senior Engineer at Human Made and is one of the lead developers of the WP REST API project.

You can follow him on Twitter.

Warren Denley

We have another speaker announcement for WordCamp Brisbane, Warren Denley will be talking about email marketing!

Getting the right people to your site is hard enough. And making a sale to first time visitors is nearly impossible. So you need a way to build a relationship with your visitors and keep them coming back to your site until they are ready to buy from you.

You Need Email Marketing! Warren’s talk will cover:

• Selecting an email provider.
• Quick start guide to setting up your account and creating your first list.
• Creating your email template.
• Integrating your list with your site (collecting subscribers).
• Communicating with your list.
• Measuring, monitoring and improving your engagement.
• Case studies – what works and what doesn’t.
• Taking it further – segmentation and funnels.

Key Takeaways

• Understanding of how to set up your email list.
• How to integrate your email list with your site.
• How to nurture your list to create more sales for your business.

Working as a Business Analyst on technical projects for over 15 years, Warren has developed a knack for moulding available technologies into business solutions. As a WordPress Consultant, Warren has spoken at WordCamp Melbourne (Australia) and regularly speaks at WordPress Meetups in Melbourne (for which he is a co-organiser).

When not creating websites or helping people with WordPress technical issues, Warren likes to test his physical endurance, having already completed the Oxfam 100km walk 3 times and Tough Mudder in 2014.

You can follow Warren on Twitter.

Ricky Blacker

We’ve got yet another speaker announcement for you! Once you’ve learnt about WordPress themes you’ll probably want to start customising and creating child themes so Ricky Blacker will teach you how you can get started doing that. Ricky will present a simple guide to bending your WordPress theme to your will! Learn how to tweak and change the design of your website without hundreds of plugins or years of coding experience. Using easy to learn skills, you will unleash your inner designer, and become a WordPress master!

Ricky’s presentation will cover some of the following topics:

• Preparing your WordPress site for customisation.
• Some of the tools needed to achieve amazing results.
• Simple beginners tips to make basic changes beyond your themes customizer.
• What a WordPress child theme is.
• How to create a WordPress child theme.

Ricky is a self taught web professional who found and fell in love with WordPress, and the community behind it while looking for a CMS platform to build websites for clients. He soon fell down a rabbit hole full of plugins, themes and passionate WordPress devotees, which forever changed his life and has taken him on an extraordinary journey, filled with late night talks with equally enamoured Wordies and fueled by craft beers.

Ricky runs Data Guru, a small web design business based on Brisbane’s Northside, which develops sites for small to medium sized businesses, as well as doing Pro Bono work for not for profit groups.

He is a Co-Organizer for the Sunshine Coast WordPress Meetup Group, and also regularly attends the Brisbane WordPress Meetup and Brisbane Web Design Meetup groups.

In his spare time (not that he has much of that), he is a temporary Australian (motorcycle rider), plays keyboards and sings in a local Brissy band and tries to stay on top of the ever changing Web Development world. He is passionate about sharing his knowledge of WordPress with anyone who will listen, and loves helping newbies find their legs with the WordPress back end, and show them what can be achieved with this powerful platform.

You can follow Ricky on Twitter.

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Jo Grey

We’re adding yet another fabulous speaker to our lineup for WordCamp Brisbane! Jo Grey will be teaching you why having a great looking website isn’t enough. Jo will give you 3 tips to help web designers get the right content from clients and soome easy-to-use sites designers can refer their clients to, such as building infographics, images for their blogs, and topic ideas.

Jo will cover some of the following topics during her presentation:

• Why a pretty website isn’t enough.
• Providing content slows the web designer down.
• Content generating ideas.
• Content moving with the times – not static.
• Clients start off strong, then fade when novelty of being a blogger fades.
• Strategies and tips to help clients manage their content
• Ways web designers can help get the right content the first time.
• Repurposing existing content.
• Engagement.
• Personality in content.
• Stories matter.

Jo Grey has over 20 years of experience in marketing and communications. She is the director of a new corporate communications agency in Brisbane: Cornerstone Communications. Jo and her team know that every brand has a story, and their job is to help you (or your clients) build a content strategy to tell that story.

Content can be words, great infographics, videos, a blog, a digital magazine or ebook, or a short social media post. Whatever fits with your (or your clients’ business) is what the team of hand-picked experts at Cornerstone Communications can do.

Previously, Jo has managed the marketing, communications and media for a range of companies, including state government and tertiary education. In her spare time, Jo studies for her PhD in communications using video-conferencing, walks the dog and eats copious amounts of chocolate.

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Kristen Symonds

By the end of the WordCamp Brisbane weekend we’re aiming to make new WordPress new users leave the event feeling confident with themes, plugins and of course the WordPress admin dashboard!  Kristen’s talk is aimed at users to help them get the most out of their WordPress publishing experience.

Kristen’s talk will include some of the overlooked parts of WordPress admin such as:

• The Help menu.
• Screen Options.
• Drag & drop media.
• Inserting multiple images at once.
• Use the Edit Selection section of media dialogue.
• Page Ordering.
• Bulk Edit.
• Emoji.
• And many more!

Kristen Symonds, (aka Kristarella) is co-organiser of the WPSydney meetup group, co-organiser WordCamp Sydney 2014 and a WordPress fanatic. She also loves photography, craft (especially knitting and crochet), Sci-Fi and Fantasy, and board games.

Kristen is married to Dave and has two pet rabbits named Kaylee and Monty; they all live together in suburban Sydney.

You can follow Kristen on Twitter.

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Kel Santiago

Happy Monday all! You should read about our next speaker, Kel Santiago, while your second coffee is kicking in for the day. Kel will be talking about why your business should contribute back to WordPress why it’s important for your business. Your business will get recognised at events, you’ll become the face of your company and gain trust from the community and clients. You’ll fly the flag for WordPress which is globally-recognised and when you contribute, you gain new friends, meet new people and for company’s like Digital Cube, business is not about the money, it’s about the people!

Kel Santiago will show you some of the many ways to contribute to WordPress such as:

• WordPress Tips from Users Around the World.
• What it Takes to Contribute.
• DigitalCube’s Five for the Future.
• Contributing back via:
  • Plugins.
  • Speaking, Sponsoring and Organising WordCamps.
  • Translations / Polyglots.
  • Writing WordPress books.
  • VCCW.
  • VVV.
  • WP-CLI.

Kel is a Japan-based writer and evangelist of DigitalCube Co. Ltd. Advanced Consulting Partner of Amazon Web Services and Code Poet WordPress Consultant. They were the first in Japan and all of Asia.

You can follow Kel on Twitter.

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Steven Cooper

It’s time for another speaker announcement. This talks for the developers! Steven will be talking about how you can integrate WordPress with external APIs. This will be done with the help of a creatively written story and with the help of actors who will play the part of the various stages of the API calls from retrieving the token from a server to the transaction and even the nasty old chargeback. Steven will be using the PayPal and Braintree API’s as his example API’s.

Steven’s talk will be entertainment from the very beginning, engaging young and old alike and suitable for all ages. Actors in a talk, who’d have thunk it!? Quite often developers use API’s via SDKs and don’t understand the interactions that are happening so Steven thought this would be a light hearted way to make the journey entertaining!

Steven’s talk will cover some of the following topics:

• The benefits of using the WordPress HTTP API.
• How to use the WordPress HTTP API.
• Token based authentication with an API.
• Debugging and testing APIs.

Steven Cooper is responsible for working with the strong developer community within Asia-Pacific, to develop and nurture the healthy start-up culture that continues to flourish across the region.

Over the last 20 years, Steven has worked as a senior developer for a host of start-ups and as a developer analyst for more than 10 years with Sensis. Before joining PayPal, he configured and spec’d mass production technology hardware for the likes of Virgin, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Visa, St. George and Westpac.

In his current role, Steven hopes to align businesses with the most appropriate PayPal solutions – products that deliver efficiency, flexibility and enable scalability.

You can follow Steven on Twitter.

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Meryl McCay

We have another speaker announcement for WordCamp Brisbane. This is another great talk for the WordPress users. Selina will be giving you the run down on WordPress plugins and our next speaker Meryl McCay will be giving you the low down on WordPress themes so you’ll have all aspects of WordPress covered.

There are so many themes out there; how do you choose? Especially if you’re not a coder, so building one from the ground up is not an option. Or your CSS skills are more like “What on earth is CSS?” Where can you find quality themes? Meryl will introduce you to several sources of WordPress themes and some of the pitfalls for the unwary beginner, such as “I’ve installed the theme but it doesn’t look anything like the demo!” Plus, Meryl’s got a couple of favourite themes she’d like to share with you.

Meryl’s talk will cover the following topics:

• Introduction
• Sources of themes (e.g. ThemeForest, WooThemes, StudioPress, Elegant Themes, etc)
• Why doesn’t it look like the demo; There’s more to implementing a theme than just installing it!
• Pitfalls for the unwary (e.g. image sizes, theme option panels, support, etc)
• Tweaking CSS for the novice – where do you start? (including a look at Firebug and the CSS Hero plugin)
• A few of my favourite themes (Canvas by WooThemes, Divi by Elegant Themes, KingSize from ThemeForest)
• Questions

Meryl has been using WordPress since 2011, but still considers herself to be a novice. Having seen the list of august speakers coming to the WordCamp, people with serious dev skills, entrepreneurs and the like, she has some trepidation about volunteering to present; however, we all had to start somewhere and if she can inspire another newbie to think “Hey, I can do that too”, then the anxiety will have been worth it!

As a non-coder she finds the WordPress platform perfectly suited to the skills she can bring to the table. With over 20 years’ experience as an Information Professional (aka a Librarian), helping small businesses and not-for-profit organisations to create well-structured websites, with quality content, that they are able to manage themselves (to a large degree) is something she finds very satisfying.

Being programmatically challenged, Meryl uses quality commercial themes to do the heavy lifting and has begun to delve into the mysteries of CSS in order to tweak the design to suit the client. Still unsure about whether this fascination with WordPress can actually generate an income, she has nonetheless taken the plunge and finally got a business card. ☺

You can follow Meryl on Twitter.

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Jamie Madden

What’s that? You want MOAR speakers announcements! Sure thing! 🙂 This speaker announcement is going to appeal to developers and command line junkies. Jamie Madden will be talking about using WP-CLI.

Being able to build and maintain WordPress installations from the command line has many advantages. You can automate the setup and installation of a base site template including all your settings, plugins and users preconfigured and ready to go.

WP-CLI provides a command line interface to your WordPress site for the install, update of plugins, import and modification of data and more, all without the need of a web browser.

Jamie’s talk will go through the basics of WP-CLI along with a demo of some of the available commands. He will share a script he uses to quickly build a development environments for plugin and theme development.

• The talk will start with what WP-CLI is.
• Advantages of using the command line.
• Basic Commands.
• Demo: Install core and base plugins.
• Demo: Import demo content.
• Advanced commands.
• Demo: Creating a script to automate the previous.

Jamie has spent over 15 years as a systems administrator and developer. He is interested in all areas of technology both on and offline. Jamie has always aimed to automate his environments wherever possible. Starting in the early days with shell scripts and moving through to tools like Chef.

Jamie has been a WordPress user and developer since the early days of version 1.5. He has utilised WordPress for all levels of products including basic websites, blogs, e-commerce, auctions, helpdesk systems and more. He is the lead developer of WC Vendors a free Multi Vendor WooCommerce plugin.

Outside of the IT world Jamie enjoys a variety of music and photography and tries to combine the two whenever possible.

You can follow Jamie on Twitter.

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