Ricky Blacker

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.

Kristen Symonds

This talk is aimed at users to 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.

Kel Santiago

There are many ways to contribute to WordPress and many reasons why it’s important for your business. Your company will get recognised at events, you become the face of your company as well as gain trust from the community and clients.
You 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.

Steven Cooper

In this session Steven will cover 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.

Meryl McCay

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.

• 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.