WordCamp Boulder 2010

How to Create a Healthy Blog Community

From writing style to comment moderation strategies, guest blogging to advertising, it’s a lot harder to create a popular blog than to learn about the nuts and bolts of coding, style and SEO.

Caching in WordPress by Chris Scott

As a WordPress site owner you want your WordPress site to be fast, use less server resources, and be able to handle increases in traffic. As a theme designer or plugin developer, you want to do your part by avoiding repeatedly making expensive database or API calls. WordPress’ output and object caching are there to help everyone realize these goals. This talk covers the differences and interactions between these two types of caching, benchmarks of common caching plugins, and tips for ensuring your themes and plugins are taking advantage of caching.

Blogging for your Business

Listen to a panel of successful business bloggers discuss questions like: Is Business Blogging really a necessity for my company? How do I get the most out of business blogging? How can WordPress, specifically, help to Market our Products or Services? How can we make sure it actually reaches our target clients? What should we write about and/or how can we find content to include? What should we not write about or include on a business blog?

SEO Techniques: What Really Matters to Search Engines by Jeff Finkelstein

Research shows that 70% of business and consumer purchases begin with a search on Google, Yahoo or other search engines. In this section, we’ll delve into the fundamentals of how search engines work, what they look for, and what you can do both on your website and external to your site to enhance your search engine optimization efforts. You’ll learn key strategies for selecting keywords for your site. We’ll discuss page rank, keyword density analysis, RDFa microtagging, inbound links and much, much more. Learn about cutting-edge ways to personalize your site, based on a visitor’s inbound keywords, as well as a simple technique for images that often puts your pages to the #1 or #2 position on Google.

WordPress Development

Come see live WordPress development without a net. We will take you through the full process of creating a new feature/add-on/customization for WordPress; from concept to architecture to code. We will be taking suggestions from the audience for what to create, explaining in detail the steps we are taking to implement and why (including an overview of WordPress architecture and best practices) and will be taking questions at all points throughout the session.

BuddyPress 101 by Lisa Sabin-Wilson

A solid introduction into the use of BuddyPress on an existing WordPress powered web site. This session includes a comprehensive overview of the features found in BuddyPress, installing BuddyPress, setting up features and extended member profiles and digs into the mechanics of customizing your theme for BuddyPress by using its inherent Parent/Child theme framework. This session also dips into plugin recommendations for BuddyPress to help you further extend the platform, as well as a glimpse into how some bigger sites are using, and customizing, BuddyPress to run a full-featured social community on their domain.

DIY Usability Testing: No More Excuses! by Steve Martin

Usability is vital to website success; if people can’t use it, they won’t. Steve will show you that little usability changes can make a BIG difference and teach you how to run user testing sessions on your own. He’ll also be conducting a usability test LIVE before your eyes – without a safety net! You will be amazed!

WordPress as a CMS Discussion

Lead by Vasken Hauri, some talking points might include: Advantages and disadvantages vs. ‘traditional’ open-source CMS products like Joomla. Using new custom taxonomies available in 3.0 for CMS content management and searchability. Recommended or helpful plugins for CMS-related applications of WordPress. Leveraging BuddyPress for CMS and collaboration purposes. Authentication and authorization for Enterprise CMS (ECMS) applications of WordPress.

What’s Next for WordPress by Jane Wells

Jane Wells from WordPress will discuss the latest update. WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” has brought many new features to WordPress including menus, multiple site support, custom post-types and much more. Hear directly from Jane on the latest and get a sneak peak at what’s coming to the WordPress project, how you can get involved, and more. Afterwards, attendees can ask any questions during an official Q&A session.

Parsing Strange: From URL to SQL to HTML by Hal Stern

“Parsing Strange” delves into how WordPress dissects a URL and selects content from the underlying MySQL database. If you’ve wanted to change the default behavior, are trying to add your own custom database tables to the content selection equation, or just want to be able to use “Cartesian table product” in a sentence (properly), then you’ll find this session covers the basics with a minimum of SQL grammar.