Our final six talks (and speakers) are here! Read all about them below.

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A dummies guide to CPTs and ACFs

Jo Minney

No longer just a humble blogging platform, WordPress is now the favourite CMS of choice for a majority of web developers. One reason for this is the fundamental architecture of the platform that uses “post types” to store and deliver stuff – from media attachments to pages, blog posts to testimonials. With Custom Post Types (CPTs) you too can harness the power of WordPress to become a pseudo-developer! Pair that with Custom Fields and all of a sudden you can supercharge your WordPress experience, and best of all you can do it for free without needing to be a developer.

With a fairly bizarre WordPress origin story, Jo originally chose WP because she really, really likes SQL databases and liked the idea of a well-supported, open-source CMS that was built on one. She is now confident in, and even teaches, all of the front end coding languages used in WordPress, but still avoids PHP like the plague!

She is easily recognisable by her bright purple hair and dorky glasses 🙂

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How I Built My WordPress Business with (Almost) Zero Investment 

Rajendra Zore

Now that WordPress is maturing and the ecosystem is thriving, it may seem overwhelming to start a new business. But you can do it.

Many of you may be soloprenuers running a one-person agency. In this talk, I will share how I started an $18 a year service that turned into thousands per month. Hint: I didn’t get venture capital, do crazy marketing, or anything shady.
Let’s talk about digital tools to help your side hustle become a business — including what to do and what not to do. Tools, tricks, laughter, and tears.

Rajendra Zore (Raj for short) started his career in risk assessment and management. Though it may sound intimidating, it was a natural fit for him to start several companies. He is currently the CMO of RunCloud as well as CEO of two of his own companies. One client described Raj as “a self-made man who is achieving in the world on his own terms.” 

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Introduction To Plugin Development

Cameron Jones

Have you ever wanted to build your own plugin? Or maybe you’re just curious as to how plugins work? We’ll take a look at some popular plugins, learn the WordPress hook system, then walk through building your first custom WordPress plugin from scratch. 

Cameron Jones is the founder of the premium plugin store Mongoose Marketplace, best known for the Mongoose Page Plugin used by more than 30,000 WordPress websites. He lives on the Gold Coast, plays for AFL and cricket clubs and takes care of a very hungry teenager.

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Advanced Custom Blocks – creating customised editing experiences in a Gutenberg world using Advanced Custom Fields

Alex Bishop

This talk covers the new ACF blocks functionality, with a further dive into how this approach can lead to more modularised components. We’re currently experimenting with this at work, and have seen some nice patterns fall out of our efforts so far. Alex will discuss the basics, and then some more ‘advanced’ topics like utilising ACF builder & classes for each block.

Alex James Bishop is a Senior Web Developer at Frame Creative, as well as the organiser of the South Australian WordPress Meetups. A veteran of many WordCamps and hackathons, he’s passionate about introducing developers to modern PHP practices, automation, and testing.

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10 Things Your WordPress Website Can Do…That You May Not Know it Could

Paul Luxford

Have you ever wondered what your website could do for you, other than just being a pretty brochure online? In this talk, discover 10 things that your website could do that you may not have thought was possible.

Paul runs Gold Coast Business Websites, a business dedicated to building successful WordPress websites, hosting, website training and WPGeni which is a website care service.

You can’t do that with WordPress

Samuel Levy

In the past 15 years the technology of the web has evolved, enabling exciting new techniques and tools for web developers. WordPress has evolved with it, but some of the newer and more exciting tools are still out of reach… or are they?

This is a developer focused talk about bringing newer technologies into WordPress development through the use (and abuse) of plugins and themes.

Sam is a backend PHP developer who takes joy in exploring bad ideas with ridiculous code, and emerging with an elegant solution. He has spent almost 15 years in the industry, learning how to push the limits of what can (or should) be done with code.

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Make sure you purchase up your ticket today so you don’t miss any of the talks.

WordCamp Brisbane 2019 is getting closer, so we have another 7 presentations to announce! Better grab your ticket today!

5 things I wish I knew when I started with WordPress

Tremayne Pendragon

I’ll take you through 5 core things that I wish I knew when I start to develop on WordPress ( with examples/demos )

Starting my development life in high school, I have had to teach myself a lot of thing from how do I convince myself and the client that I can do their project to how to build a site on budget within the scope the client has requested.

One of my main points that I would touch on and will spend a bit of time on is imposter syndrome as it was something that I didn’t realize I had until I went to a WordCamp, and had to work a lot at trying to break out of it.

Tremayne is a freelance developer from Brisbane, currently studying my bachelors of computer science at CSU. He has been developing since high school, and just have had to learn how to can make a living of something he enjoyed.
“To know me in a nutshell, I like naming random objects, I’m a dog person, and I’m spaced over tabs. I don’t really like clutter and bad coffee.”

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Little Known Secrets To Supercharge Your WordPress.Org Site with WordPress.com

Nik Cree

This one login gives your website security, analytics, spam prevention, secure login, Plugin and Theme management, Profile Pic when you comment all over the web, eCommerce, speed and performance optimisation, SEO connect, quick posting, widget visibility options, custom Post types (Testimonials and Portfolio), social sharing and so much more … all for Free!

These are some of the under the hood, little known and underutilised features that are available to every WordPress site but are not included in the code bundle when with an initial install.

You have to know where to look but will be truely amazed with what is available with a single username and password to supercharge your website … and all for FREE!

P.S. If you have been running on WordPress for years, chances are you have overlooked or dismissed some of these tools this presentation will give you a whole new perspective on the power that is now at your fingertips.

Nik runs the “Business Owners Smashing It Online” Meetup in the Gold Coast and Brisbane, moderates a Facebook page by the same name and co-host the Gold Coast WordPress Meetup. And …is starting to have a life, not quite on the beaches of the world but he does have some money to spend, time to hang out with his partner and kids (only if they want him to as they in their teens and 20’s).

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Why is Website Maintenance so Important

Marthie Talu

I will discuss with the audience the top reasons why it is so important to perform maintenance on your website. Whether you do it yourself and you pay someone to do it for you. This is one of the most neglected areas of a website, and just like a car, it requires regular maintenance otherwise it will break down and get viruses etc and cause your business to halt.

Prevention has always been better than cure. As a web developer, I can’t tell you how many websites I opened only to discover that no updates have been done since the website has been built. 

Marthie is a graphic designer and website developer with a background in Public Relations and IT. She has been developing websites for the past 7 years and recently started doing workshops to help business owners understand their websites better.

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Building a hybrid JavaScript app for WordPress (how & why we embedded our SPA without going completely Headless)

Georgia Mountford

At the end of 2018, we launched a custom eLearning platform that is built on the WordPress backend and experienced through our ReactJS frontend. In this talk, I would like to discuss why we chose the hybrid approach and how it’s a viable option for designers/developers looking to modernise their WordPress sites incrementally. I will share the technical challenges we faced throughout the project, including how we overcame them, and what we intend to do next with our web app.

Georgia spends her days helping people bring their business to life online. Her career has followed an exciting and varied path through tech (design & development) and communications (writing, digital media & marketing) ever since she graduated with degrees in Journalism and IT. Georgia’s love for websites started long before WordPress ‘was a thing’ and her favourite projects are those that demand a mix of technical and creative skills. An avid Potter fan, she firmly believes that she and her fellow “computer people” are basically modern-day wizards who make magic by turning someone’s vision into reality.

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One of the Hidden Gems of WooCommerce – Stock Management

Toni Livesey

The story behind my presentation was a call for help via an email by someone who was having trouble with the stock management setup in a WooCommerce shop. My presentation is for beginners of WooCommerce – the importance of setting up stock management in their WooCommerce Shops & the different ways to do this and will include setting up stock quantity control for individual products and variations of their products such as sizes, shapes, colours etc.

I will briefly touch on the different types of items that can benefit from stock/inventory control within their WooCommerce website and integrating POS systems for stock management.

Toni spends time-solving other peoples’ problems with WordPress, WooCommerce and social media because she loves a challenge.

In her spare time, she’s a wife, mother and stepmother to 10 and grandmother to more kids than she can count on her fingers and toes.

And you can blame her partner for her nickname. He introduced her to one of his daughters as the “crazy lady” and the name stuck.

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Running a Remote Team. Insights from a WordPress Startup and a 13-year-old Remote Agency

Rob Stinson

Remote work is not such a new thing anymore. It’s becoming more and more mainstream, with companies everywhere embracing the upside of a remotely empowered workforce. Well… at least some of the pieces.

Doing remote is one thing. Doing it well is another!

This talk will skip over the obvious stuff and get stuck straight into techniques and tools that make remote work truly awesome! Learn how you can empower your team to become far more than just a bunch of people connected via a backlog of tasks and a dodgy NBN connection.

Rob is one of the co-founders of Block Lab as well as a team member of X-Company, a 100% remote development company with over 300 employees across 30+ countries.

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How Elementor changed my life (for the better!)

Mel Telecican

Before Elementor was installed on my sites I was wary of doing very much in the backend of my website. As someone who loves to action things quickly (think MVP), not being able to iterate without handing it over to my web guy was super frustrating. When Elementor entered my life I felt significantly more confident to develop new pages, update content and get creative.

No more waiting days to implement my plans – now it gets done pronto and I can adjust for mobile and tablet as well as desktop. This session will include a live demonstration for how to use the Elementor elements so you can see for yourself how it works.

Mel Telecican helps people make sense of email marketing automation. She specialises in helping businesses implement high-quality marketing automations in a non-techy, straightforward way so they can get more customers and keep them.

As someone who started with very few skills in this space – she’s learned quickly with the help of user-friendly solutions like Elementor.

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And these awesome presentations aren’t all, we have the final 6 presentations that we’ll be announcing soon so make sure to keep your eye.

Even more speakers! Today we’re announcing another 4 awesome speakers and their talks.

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Blocks for Beginners

Luke Carbis

So by now you’ve had a chance to check out the new WordPress editor. You’ve created some posts using Paragraph Blocks, experimented with the Image Block, and maybe installed a plugin that adds some brand new Blocks.

Now it’s time to create your very own Custom Blocks. It’s easier than you might think. Using just a little basic HTML, CSS, and a simple helper plugin – Block Lab, we’ll create our very own Hero Block.

Luke Carbis is a self-deputised open-source emissary and plenipotentiary for WordPress proletariat affairs. He works closely with WordPress based startups (like Block Lab) to fast-track their growth and inspire beautifully written code.

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Think Like a Hacker and Secure WordPress in 30 minutes, live on stage

Stephen Rees-Carter

“What could I have done to avoid being hacked?” is a question you’ll often hear after a site is hacked. In some cases the answer is complicated, but a lot of the time it’s relatively simple and there are many checklists and guides online outlining the ways sites can be hacked, plus how to secure them. However, a lot of people learn better from seeing and doing than reading (often boring) checklists. So rather than look at checklists on slides for 30 minutes, we’re going to hack into WordPress instead!

We will target a vulnerable installation of WordPress and attack the usual weaknesses to compromise the site. After every attack we perform, we will make the required changes to block the attack, and then attempt to compromise the site again, hopefully unsuccessfully this time! The goal is to think like a hacker, learning what types of vulnerabilities exist and how they are exploited, so we can better protect our sites and block hackers before they get in. By the end of the talk, we should have a secure site and an incredibly frustrated hacker.

Stephen is a senior developer at Wordfence, where he tries to frustrate attackers by helping to secure WordPress sites. During his time cleaning infected websites, he gained an appreciation for clever malware, layered obfuscation, and Harry Potter passages. When he’s not writing code or looking at malware, he can be found practising lockpicking and studying for his ethical hacker certification.

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Generating Leads, Getting Clients and Winning Proposals

Wil Brown

You can’t run a business using WordPress if you don’t have a handle on generating qualified leads. Starting from client and niche selection to setting up landing pages and creating proposals, find out how to develop strong leads to keep you in business and getting paid.

Will is a Dad / WordPress Consultant / Developer / Conference Speaker and Organiser. Living in Sydney.

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Cool stuff inside Gutenberg: build the perfect UI with @wordpress/components

Rua Haszard Morris

Take a dive into the component library built into WordPress / Gutenberg demo with Rua. Learn how powerful Gutenberg is and how it can make it easier to build the perfect authoring interface for your custom content and more.

The demo will focus on audio/music examples, to illustrate the variety of things you can do in WordPress. For example, a “page soundtrack” block for adding dynamic background audio to your posts.

Rua loves crafting audio, code, and celebrating nice user experiences. Working as a software engineer throughout life, Rua is passionate about web tech and open source along the way. What he loves about WordPress, code, or other tech is when it opens up new possibilities, and provides a platform for experimentation. 

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We still have a few more speakers to announce, so subscribe or follow us on social media to know when the next round of speakers will be announced.

With WordCamp Brisbane fast approaching, here are the next 4 presentations that shouldn’t be missed! Make sure you don’t miss out on these awesome presentations and more by getting your ticket today.

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How WordPress can ease your business admin by using 4 zones of power

Korryn Haines

Most business owners are using WordPress websites but have no idea of its potential power. More than a mere vessel where you display what you do to the online world, a well planned and set out WordPress site can help you put business processes in place that will save you tonnes of wasted time on admin. Learn how to set up your back of house systems to make your business run smoother with Korryn.

Korryn Haines is an administration ninja with over 10 years of administrative experience in a wide range of industries. Based in Brisbane and founder of Encore Admin Consulting, she provides virtual assistant and administration consulting services to micro and small businesses. She loves a nice big pot of tea, smashing out a BodyPump class and spending time with her young children, husband and lovable Cocker Spaniel. 

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The Day the Hackers Came: What Happened When 80% of my Client’s Sites Were Hacked in One Day

Ingrid Moyle

On the 19th March 2019, 80% of all of Ingrid’s website clients from the previous 5 years was hacked. They were all on the one server of a boutique hosting company, and the hackers got in through the server and not the front door (and they deleted all backups including all the offsite ones from Updraft Plus in the process).

Ingrid will share why WordPress sites get hacked, how you know you have been hacked, and what are your options if you have been hacked.

Ingrid Moyle is the Chief Web Wizard at Heart Harmony Communications. A self-confessed multipotentialite, Ingrid shamelessly blends her passions of human resources, psychology, web design and copywriting. When not hardwired to her computer, she quests for the perfect coffee while chasing virtual reality creatures across the backstreets of Brisbane.

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How to Make Your Site Load 5 Times Faster in 10 Minutes (for FREE)

Gal Baras

Page loading speed is critical these days for user experience, particularly on mobile phones, and therefore for SEO. Research shows that a 1-second difference in loading time can have a huge impact on site conversions.

Luckily, there are some awesome plugins that make speeding up your site light work. Using them, you can get 95% of the possible performance boost using only FREE plugins.

Learn how to get the best performance possible in as little as 10 minutes without any special skills or coding with Gal.

Gal Baras is a WordPress-loving online marketing consultant working with small businesses in Brisbane, who has extensive experience and experiments with many websites.

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A Quickstart Guide to React Development

Ryan Kienstra

Know Javascript, but don’t know how React? Learn what you’ll need with Ryan Kienstra to get started with React, develop your own blocks and extend Gutenberg.

You’ll see the most important parts of ES6 and JSX and developing in the new paradigm for WordPress, without getting caught in the details.

Ryan Kienstra is a developer at XWP and Block Lab, focusing on large plugins and enterprise sites. His team at XWP has been working on the AMP Plugin for WordPress. And at Block Lab, his team is building a UI for custom Gutenberg blocks. Ryan also has 7 of his own plugins on WordPress.org.

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There’s still so much more to be announced about WordCamp Brisbane 2019, so subscribe for updates or follow us on social media.

We know you’re excited for WordCamp Brisbane 2019, so here are the next 3 speakers. Love the sound of these speakers? Make sure to pick up your ticket today.

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Why no one is reading your blog posts (and how to change that)

Kate Toon

Most blogs written these days need some serious love. With as many 10 million blog posts are published a day, it’s vital your content is rubbed and scrubbed into perfect shape. Kate will show how to build your brand and boost your website’s profile with seriously shareable content.

Based in Sydney where she loves wandering on the beach with her son and her CFO (Chief Furry Office-dog) Pomplemousse, Kate Toon is a writing entrepreneur, as well as a popular coach, speaker, author and podcaster.

Her digital education businesses The Recipe for SEO Success and The Clever Copywriting School have helped more than 8000 small business owners grapple the Google beast and write better content.

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Why WordPress works for the technically challenged among us 

Katie Tilden

The idea of starting and managing a website can be truly terrifying for many business owners and writers, Katie included.  

Katie will share her experience of WordPress, the support and resources and how it too can be used by business owners, bloggers and writers, who aren’t IT experts (or even tech-savvy) or website developers, to build their business. 

Specialising in content and communications and running the consultancy, Two Sprouts Communications, Kate Tilden is a strategic thinker with a passion for communications.

When she’s not imparting her strategic & communication wisdom, she likes to bake, read, and spend time with her favourite people including her girls and husband (and partner in crime). 

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Think Before You Submit Themes on WP.Org

Ganga Kafle

As a Theme Review team lead, Ganga will encourage WordPress developers and company owners about the importance of giving back towards the community.  Learn about the theme guidelines, requirements and recommendations for developing themes for WP.Org.

Ganga Kafle is the Co-Founder of Template Sell based in Nepal. Volunteering as a theme review lead in the WordPress Theme Review team, he has contributed to the WordPress community in Nepal and around the world in many areas including sponsoring, WordCamp speaking, lead organizing, volunteering and contributing to core.

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That’s it for our second round of speaker announcements. Subscribe or follow us on social media to find out about the next round of announcements.

With just about 2 months to go until WordCamp Brisbane 2019, we’re happy to announce the first 3 presentations!

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What goes in to $50K+ WordPress website

Jen Jeavons

How much is a website worth? Isn’t WordPress just templates??  Jen Jeavons will showcase just how much you can do with a custom WordPress site. She’ll show you how the team at Pixel Palace build premium custom WordPress websites that are worth every cent to clients and how to escape the race to the bottom in terms of price.

Jen Jeavons is the founder and Managing Director of Pixel Palace (a digital design agency here in Brisbane specialising in custom WordPress and Strategic Marketing) in 2009. With a successful creative career path spanning the music industry, fashion, web & digital design and budding coffee empire, Jen’s colourful lifepath has given her valuable insights that she’s passionate about sharing.

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WordPress, GatsbyJS and Splendour in the Grass

Phillip Johnson

In 2018 Splendour in the grass approached Phillip’s team at Bolster to rebuild their website for 2019. Their approach was to create a headless WordPress instance that used GatsbyJS to compile down to a hybrid static website.

He’ll share the benefits and challenges of using headless WordPress with ReactJS + GatsbyJS, dive into 3 areas of the site development, frontend development, backend development and the share the result for the end user.

Phillip is the Head of Client Web Development at Bolster. Working in web development for 10 years and now specialises on music, festival and event websites, and has recently moved back to Brisbane to start up a Bolster Brisbane team.

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30 WordPress website audits in 30 days. The lessons I learned

Tony Cosentino

We all know how to build a WordPress website right?
Wrong.

Tony recently reviewed 30 websites in 30 days and found it was a journey of discovery. He saw the good, the bad, the ugly and a site with over 100 plugins. He’ll share the 10 main problems that he saw in all these websites. 10 issues to avoid. 10 fixes to fix. And get a checklist to ensure every site is everything it can be and more.

Tony has been a WordPress developer since 2008, and his latest passion is doing website health checks to give any WordPress website a thorough checkup for the owner or even a developer for a 2nd set of eyes sanity check. 

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These are just 3 of the amazing talks that we have lined up for WordCamp Brisbane 2019. Subscribe or follow us on social media to be the first to know when the next round of speakers will be announced.