My year on the front line, cleaning infected sites

Stephen Rees-Carter

Stephen has been working with the Wordfence Site Cleaning team part-time since early 2017, Fast-forward to the middle of 2018 and he’s recently stepped back from cleaning to join the Wordfence team full time as a developer, so now it’s time for him to tell us his story.

He’ll share stories from the more memorable sites he’s cleaned, revealing his all-time favourite WordPress malwares, and the epic tale of the persistent attacker that almost thwarted them completely.

Scattered throughout will be tips and ideas to help protect your site from compromise and keep everyone (except the bad guys!) happy.

Stephen has been a PHP developer for many long years and still loves working with PHP each day. He joined the security industry back in 2012 and has been working on security products, large SaaS applications, and spent some time cleaning infected WordPress websites. Now he’s a senior developer at Wordfence/Defiant, working hard to secure your website.

Using WordPress to set up an internet radio station

Richard Scherer

Richard is joining us to discuss the pleasures and pitfalls of setting up web streaming from a WordPress site, including equipment, licensing issues, and adventures with Gutenberg.

Websites are now expected to be media rich as well as responsive – but how do you use WordPress to present and maintain such content, beyond embedding YouTube files? Richard will be answering this, and much much more.

In mid-2018 Richard co-founded Living Arts Canberra, a not-for-profit WordPress website, set up particularly for the arts and community sectors. It features interviews which are available both as podcasts and from a internet radio stream. While its focus is primarily local, its reach is worldwide.

Richard began his professional career in media as a newspaper journalist before moving into communications for a number of federal government departments and agencies. His first website, in the mid-1990s, was hand-coded, but for more than 10 years he’s used WordPress as his CMS of choice to design websites for community and not-for-profit groups.

How we handle 90% of our annual traffic in 5 mins

Phillip Johnson

Phillip works in the music and festival space, and they see the majority of the traffic within the first hour after the lineup announce. 18 months ago we launched a new WordPress site at 8am for the lineup announce only to have it drowned in traffic and crash instantly… for 6 hours.

He’ll talk about the codebase they’ve worked on for all their websites, so that they can be launched instantly without any fear of the site failing. He’ll cover how they have utilised OOP PHP with MVC in their WordPress environment to cope with high server load while maintaining low hosting costs.

Phillip is a passionate web developer with experience in all areas of multimedia. Originally hailing from Brisbane, He now work out of Melbourne with a specialty in music touring and festival websites.