WordCamp Boston 2016 Recap

WordCampBos2016

Photo courtesy of Wayne Kurtzman

WordCamp Boston – 7 years and going strong! We are fortunate to have such a great community of WordPressers, such a great history of awesome WordCamps in Boston, Rhode Island and Maine, and dedicated organizers since 2010.

All the continued success would not be possible without the great team of organizers and volunteers for 2016. Our 2016 organizers: Tom Beach, Moira Ashleigh, Mel Choyce, Kelly Dwan, K.Adam White, John Eckman, Jim Reevior, Duane Mitchell, Steve Word all contributed, showed their strengths, time and devotion to #WCBOS.

The WordPress community in the North East is strong and growing. Our attendance this year was strong, we are getting closer to our 600+ that we had a few years ago. The amount of submissions for speaking was impressive, we just wish we had room for more. Our thanks go out to the speakers that donated their time and shared their expertise, and a big thanks to those that submitted and didn’t get chosen. Hope you will all apply next year!

Our goal this year was to have a wide variety of tracks and to make our camp Accessible as possible. Hopefully we touched everyone with our schedule: Higher Ed, WordPress 101, Users, Designers, Developers, and a Contributors Day [whew, just thinking about all of that makes me excited to see the videos of the sessions I missed!]

This was our first year with Communication Access Realtime Tranlation or CART services, a big thank you Norma and White Coat Captioning, and Stanley, Amanda and Stacey for the great technical transcripts – everyone enjoys seeing the accurate live captioning.

And a great big thanks to all our sponsors, because without your support, we could not do any of the things we did over the weekend – The location- at Boston University, CART Services, Happiness Bar support, Awesome Swag, After party, Contributors Day, lunch, snacks and of course…COFFEE!!

The IS&T APPLICATIONS department at Boston University supported WordCamp Boston this year helping us secure the location and helping us get together a higher ed track.

Looking forward to a bigger and better 2017 WordCamp Boston.

Our videos have all been submitted to WordPress.tv  some of them are up already – look for them all of them to be up shortly. Slides can be found here.

 

 

Presentation Slides

This is a WIP! We’ll be updating this post with slide links throughout the weekend as speakers tweet them on #wcbos. If you’re a speaker, be sure to post your slides!

Saturday Sessions

Creating Intuitive Editing Workflows That Clients Love
Erik Bernskiold

Slick Websites with Custom API Endpoints
Meeky Hwang

Picture This: Working with Images in WordPress
Elizabeth B. Thomsen

Designing For Integrated Experiences Across Campus
Travis Totz

Building a Large-Scale, Sustainable, and Efficient WordPress Site
Ellen Biewald, Greg Opperman

The Frustration with Website Security
Krystle Herbrandson

Designing & Theming for Perfomance
Matthew Dorman

A Better User Experience With The WordPress Customizer
Andrew Taylor

WordPress Upgrade Anxiety No More: 5 Steps to Having a No Surprise Upgrade
Dustin Meza

JavaScript 2099: The Future and Present of JS
Christopher Plummer

Keynote: 2016 Trends in Communication and Design
Diane Danielson

Page Builder Showdown
Gina Deaton

Ready! Filter! Action!
Amanda Giles

WPaaS: A Centralized Approach to Managing WordPress At Boston University
Inderpreet Singh, Andrew Bauer

Why Design Matters
Andrea Trew

The Power of Templates
Daniel Miller

add_action (‘wp’, ‘for_higher_ed’);
Mike Burns

Organizing Your First Website Usability Test
Anthony D Paul

Writing Testable Plugins
Payton Swick

WordPress for NonProfit Organizations: An Open Source journey
Kevin Cristiano

Introduction to Wireframing
Karalyn Thayer

Learn to Love Documentation
Ashley Kolodziej

Getting Classroom Blogging Up and Running in Higher-Education
Joshua Eaton, Adrienne Debigare

Sunday Sessions

Cain & Obenland in the Morning!
Konstantin Obenland, Michael Cain

101 Ways to Rock as a Freelancer
Troy Dean, Kristina Romero

How to Get 100 Content Ideas in an Hour
Nicole Kohler

Empowering your Clients and Being an Advocate for You
Aaron Ware

5 Ways to Contribute to WordPress (If You’re Not a Developer)
Adam Warner

From Blog to Business: Running a WordPress Membership Site
Brian Krogsgard

Passionate Podcasting with WordPress
Amy Felman

Power SEO for Your WordPress Website
Tom Shapiro

Machine Learning with WordPress
K.Adam White

Setting Up Monthly WordPress Care Plans for Predicable Income
Kristina Romero

Thanks to all our Gold Sponsors!

WordCamp Boston can’t happen without the help of our sponsors. Here are the fine folks who make up our Gold Level sponsors:

Sucuri Inc.

Sucuri

Cyber security is a mile wide, and a mile deep. Hacked websites are only becoming more common as global hacker communities continue to grow, share their evil tools, and automate attacks using bots. You might never know if your website was vulnerable, or if the attacker took steps to hide their tracks. It’s enough to drive a webmaster crazy. How do you keep up?

At Sucuri, our labs are dedicated to researching and thwarting the latest and emerging threats to websites like yours. Our team handles your website security needs, so that you can get back to what you’re best at: running your online presence. Passion is at the heart of everything we do, and we cut through the noise to provide you with complete security solutions. Our services are built around three defining principles – People. Process. Technology – the three founding elements of information security.

Team up with Sucuri and gain the peace you are looking for with your website security. We secure websites, so you don’t have to.


Pantheon

Pantheon_Tag_Color_clear

The website management platform for Drupal & WordPress, Pantheon provides web teams with the hosting, cloud-based developer tools, and scalable infrastructure needed to run awesome websites. Serving billions of pageviews a month for over 100,000 websites, Pantheon’s container-based infrastructure allows you to launch websites faster, without worrying about traffic spikes, security or performance. It’s free in development. Create your free account now!


GoDaddy

GoDaddy_Pro_transparent

GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

Getting to WordCamp Boston 2016

George Sherman Union
775 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, MA 02215

The venue is accessible via the MBTA Green Line “B” Branch at the “BU Central” stop. We encourage you to take public transportation if possible. For information about the T, including accessibility of stations, visit the MBTA website.

If you are driving, parking will be available but not free. Attendees can park in the Granby lot or the the Warren Towers lot at BU. This is about a 5 minute walk to the venue. There are Red Sox games both Sat and Sun, which does affect parking prices. The daily rate is $12, but goes up to $30 during Red Sox times.

Check our location page for more info.

Sessions for WordPress Users and Writers

Of course one of the best things about WordPress is to use your site! So if you are a user or writer we have scheduled a complete track of sessions all day Sunday. You can just park yourself in the Metcalf Small Ballroom for 5 great sessions designed for you.

Of course if there are other areas of WordPress you want to learn about, there are 5 other tracks you can go to over the weekend! You can see the full schedule here.