Last weekend I headed to New Zealand to attend WordCamp Auckland. WordCamps are community driven conferences focused on people who use, create, and support WordPress.
It was a fantastic time – with great talks (check out my notes below), awesome people, and some fabulous food (mostly cooked by the family of the organisers).
Everyone was so relaxed (chill…) and welcoming – it was really just a fabulous experience. MASSIVE thanks to Tarei and Ralf, and all the other speakers and volunteers.
Oh yeah – I also spoke on How to troubleshoot your site like a Happiness Engineer. I’ll put the video up once it is ready.
Here are my notes from most of the talks. They’re a little rough and may sometimes be out of context – but there’s some nuggest of Gold in there…
How to make the most of your WordPress Experience: Sally Eberhart
Author of Pain Free Networking for Introverts – believes in the power of connection
The WordPress Community is awesome!
The learning can be done later, the opportunity to connect is here and now,
- Talks will be on WordPress.tv later.
- If you get caught in a great conversation that’s ok.
It’s not who you know, but who knows you
- When you connect with someone (after meeting them) don’t just touch base, but recall something notable from your conversation.
- The note/connection about what you talk about not only gives you something to mention to them, but helps you recall the person/conversation.
Gratitude
- It is powerful, but easy (and free) to give. Say thank you.
- It makes you memorable (not everyone says thanks).
- You can do it publicly/privately, verbally/on social media.
Happiness lies in connections with others
- Encourage you to build relationships today
- Be authentic, vulnerable, respectful, give before you ask for anything.
Self Care at WordCamps (especially for introverts)
- Socialising can be overwhelming
- Take mini-breaks for yourself
- Seek quality over quantity (when it comes to connections)
- Take time to recharge
The new rules of Online Writing – Bill Bennet
- Freelance Journalist
- Started Blogging to help his freelance work. He needed a higher profile.
- 3 or 4 years to kick in and become helpful (bring traffic and work).
- Has been a journalist for 40 years.
A Blogger
- Doesn’t like to introduce himself as a ‘Blogger’ because he’s not an ‘influencer’. People assume there might be some kind of payment for your opinion.
- He’s independent, not paid by companies/products to write.
Writing
- Writing is about getting your ideas across to other people.
- The zeroth law of good writing: Put your readers first.
- Good clear writing – readily understandable and unambiguous
What’s changed (with writing online)
- Most people will read on a phone. It’s different from reading in other mediums.
- Narrow measure, you don’t get lots of words on the phone.
- People flick through (on avg. 28% of pages are read).
- Everything comes down to the first paragraph. Let people know what you’re going to write about.
- Phone users have less patience – they hate waffling and will quickly switch away.
Ground Rules
- It is still easier to read from a book because your brain isn’t overloaded from interpreting from a screen’
- Forget what you were taught about writing (at school or University)
- Remember basic grammar rules
- Don’t try and use big words or long sentences to look smart
- If someone has to look up a word you used – you’ve failed.
- Keep it simple – simple words and sentences
- Speak in one tense (ideally the present tense).
- Avoid ‘be’ words (it makes your writing passive)
- Limit the number of adjectives and verbs. Not everything is ‘Awesome’ and ‘Amazing’
- Prefer Anglo-Saxon words to French or Latin ones.
- One idea at a time
- Avoid jargon and complex terms – even professionals in a certain industry (that might understand the terms) still prefer simplicity and clarity.
- If in doubt, leave it out.
- Use ‘Chunking’ (break it up into stackable bits using headings).
Gutenberg makes writing in ‘Chunks’ easier – because you can see how many paragraph blocks you have and that you need to break it up with a different kind of block.
“Don’t use Focus Keywords. It makes a crap piece of writing”
Story length
- Go Short (less than 300 words. 6 or 7 paragraphs), or
- Long (much longer) – don’t write an in-between length (2000-3000 words)
- 4:1 short to long stories.
‘Simple’ means that your words are less likely to be misinterpreted.
Your .nz domain name 101 – Maria Skatova
.nz second level domains
- Some are moderated (.govt.nz)
- Some are unmoderated (.nz)
- .nz registrations are open to all countries.
.co.nz or .nz?
- Up to you
- .co.nz is more popular
- .nz was added to simplify/shorten things.
- 16% of business register both
Research 2018/19
- .nz has the most positive associations with being trustworthy and secure
- .com is good for shopping
- .org is knowledgable
WordPress has 25% share in the .nz space (60% ‘no’ CMS).
Hosting: Ricky Blacker (WPEngine)
- Hosting used to be simple. CMSes added lots of power, but lots of headaches.
What do you need from hosting today?
Infrastructure
- You don’t get your own ‘box’. You get a little piece.
- Shared Hosting: Like staying at a Backpackers – it’s cheap but not ideal.
- Dedicated Hosting: Your own Hotel Room. Still in a shared environment – but you’ve got your own section of it. More control over what is going on, more secure,.
- Cloud Hosting. Your site may be stored in multiple locations (not necessarily global). Hosting that is fluid and able to be moved around.
Location
- Location of servers matter.
- Have a server as close as possible to your customers/viewers
- Know where your traffic is coming from.
Availability
- No on a can offer 100% uptime. Things happen.
- 99.9% uptime is 1m 24.6s a day. 8hr 45m a year
- But you need to monitor your uptime, and check your SLA to see whether your host will compensate you if they go outside that time.
Security
- Threat Detection and Blocking
- Proactive Security and Maintenance
- Managed Patching and Updates
- Free SSL? Same as $120 SSL (Let’s Encrypt).
Maintenance
- If you haven’t tested your backup – you haven’t got one.
- Constant
- Reliable
- Offsite
- Easy Restore
Support
- What kind of support do you get?
- Free/Paid?
- Email/Chat/Phone?
- What does it cover?
- When is it available.
Budget
- You get what you pay for, but make sure you get what you pay for.
- Particularly if you are making money/relying on your website.
Performance
- Speed vs Speed (comes down to a variety of factors – not just a single value).
- PHP Versions
- Database versions…
- Server Side Caching
eCommerce and Membership
- If you’re making money from site – invest in your hosting.
- Resources for Seasonal Traffic and Spikes
How Elementor Changed my life for the better – Mel Telecican
- Loyalest
- Course on Marketing Automation with ActiveCampaign
What is Elementor?
- Drag and Drop page builder
- Free/Pro version
- Incredibly user friendly for non-coders – but also good for handing off sites to users.
Demo videos were good examples of Elementor – but not many notes taken…
Mistakes in Digital Marketing – Darren Craig
Digital Growth Speicalist – Fully Charged Media
- Clients think Digital Marketing is Snake Oil.
- “You can’t go back and get the data if you want it later”. Start tracking now.
- The info from this would be REALLY helpful for our users…
- Check talks from WCBNE:
Who builds your house?
- Not just a builder. A bunch of people.
- Iceberg marketing. The client sees the nice website at the top – but there’s a LOT going on underneath.
Tracking and Analytics
- Clickable Phone number links (means they can be clicked and tracked)
- Specific thank you pages for forms (instead of success messages).
- GA, GTM, Google Search Console. (GTM tracks events without having to manually add events).
- Cross-domain tracking and frames…
- Migrations. Usually Digital Marketing sites are a rebuild/redo – you want to respect the previous site. Make sure you redirect old URLS to new ones
Structure
- Permalinks
- Ease of Remarketing
- Site Content and SEO ‘Silos’
Speed & Functionality
When your site is slow:
- Your search engine optimisation suffers
- Conversion rate drops
- Your average Sale value drops
- Cost of advertising goes up.
Check Waterfall view in GTMetrix
Search Engine Optimisation
- Watch out for themes that do a bad job of SEO
- Cut excess content (useful content vs useless content)
- Watch custom post types (can manage SEO for them in YOAST)
- “Don’t confuse design elements for SEO”
Take aways.
- Deliver a better product
- Lower the total cost of ownership
- Beautiful websites don’t get found (the stuff behind them does)
- Challenge and Educate
- Create a better industry together.
How Literally anyone can become an open source contributor – Jo Minney
Becoming part of the WordPress community
Why Contribute?
- You become better at what you do
- You get to shape the World’s most popular CMS
- You can give back to the WordPress Community
- It’s fun
Where do I start
- Become a Meetup organiser before you’ve attended one? Winging it, but no-one will notice
- Core: Building, testing, fixes
- Design: User interface and User Testing
- Mobile:
- Accessibility
- Polyglots (one of the fastest and easiest ways to contribute)
- Support (IRC!!)
- Documentation
- Theme
- Plugins
- Meta – (WordPress.org, Make.Wordpress.org, learn.WordPress.org)
- Community
- Testing (Super easy – get involved in half an hour)
- Training
- TV
- Marketing
- Hosting
- Tide
- CLI
Do Action – https://doaction.org/about/
Getting Started
- WordPress.com
- WordPress.Slack.com
Triage
Effective Triaging is moving a ticket one step closer to resolution every time the ticket is touched
Jonathan Desrosiers
Release Testing:
- Don’t do it on a client site
- Don’t do it on a site with sensitive data
- Can roll up a site on Jurassic.Ninja and install the Beta Testing plugin
Usability Testing
- Every Test Matters
- Three different ‘tests’ you can run people through
- Use screen capture software to record the session
- Not helping them, or figuring out the bugs – it’s finding out what their experience was like.
- make.wordpress.org/test/gutenberg-testing/
Documentation and Training
- Teaching people how to teach people about WordPress
- Can contribute without any coding.
GIT amongst it
- Fork
- Clone
- Commit
- Change (Staging = “I’m ready to do the thing!”
- Commit
- Push
- Pull Request
Check out Git Kraken
Kia Ora, Polyglots
- translate.wordpress.org
- Search where you want to translate to
- Shows you how many untranslated strings (bits of text) there are.
- Make a suggestion for a translation
Last night I managed to do my first translation and first PR at 3am when I was horribly jet lagged, so you can do it too
Community
- Organise a Meetup or WordCamp
- Become a WordCamp Mentor
- Become a Community Deputy
facebook.com/groups/womenwhowp – talk about WordPress without getting mansplained.
My Year with Blocks – Jeffry Ghazally
This is one way to work with blocks (it might not be the right way).
Working for Timely (bookings and appointments for Salons)
- Works on the Marketing Site
- Lead Generator
- Content Publishing
- Personalization
- A/B Testing
Why do this talk?
- Gutenberg has been around 12 months
- Can be tricky – this was how he was able to hit the ground running and make the most of it (without making himself cry).
- If you’re wanting to dip your toe into the world of blocks – this is one way to do it.
Their old way of working:
- Design Brief and design – High fidelity mockups at different breakpoints
- Development – break the design into Elements, use a CPT along with Advanced Custom Fields + a custom template
- Mix of hard coded content and ACF fields
- It worked. But…. Template is rigid and locked down – but any customisations or ordering of items required a developer and a new release of the theme.
The question of having all your content in post meta fields instead of the_content() ?
December 2018 – WordPress 5.0 is released
- Everyone was worried.
- It turned out to be as drastic as the Y2K bug – nothing happened.
- “But what are blocks?”
- Liked that Blocks were bringing the focus back on the content – opened up a Whole New World.
How did this change the process?
- Design stage was still the same.
- Rather than ACF + Template – Blocks could be created for each element (type). So those blocks could then be shared with other pages and layouts.
How can I build blocks?
Hand Rolled Blocks:
- Huge learning curve
- Lots of breaking changes – with things still getting finalised
- Maintenance of code was hard
- BYO Editor experience (code your own forms)
CGB
- Create Guten Blocks
- Huge Learning Curve – but a bit of a headstart
- BYO Editor experience (code your own forms)
Advanced Custom Fields
- ‘The Devil I know’
- Minimal maintenance of code
- ACF fields assigned to a specific block – no need to create the editor experience.
- ACF/Block has a preview – that’s kinda cool.
Benefits of the new way
- Build is based on blocks – so content can be reordered
- Customisations which don’t require an editor
- Template is fluid (changes are easier)
- Blocks can be used on multiple pages
- Marketing team can create new A/B test pages themselves
Problems with the new way
- Site Editors get free reign (YOLO)
- Blocks are hard
- There starts to be ambiguity about what a page template means?
- Restyling a block for one page can have unexpected impact on other pages
- ACF doesn’t do inner blocks.
Serverless WordPress – Quintin Russ
- Technical Director at SiteHost (made the mistake of starting a hosting company).
- Started as a web developer – but has had GIT access revoked.
- Working on getting WordPress to be able to install WordPress natively on serverless..
What is server less?
- Servers that roll up when they are needed. Also called event-based hosting
- Pay just for the time you use. (Allows you to scale to 0)
- Can scale up more easily.
- Perfect for sites that have spikes in weekly traffic, or things that only get used at regular times.
Neopolitan Ice Cream
- Memory
- Storage
- CPU
How can we decouple the scaling of these things? Make sure there is always enough chocolate?
History of hosting
- Bare metal (servers in boxes)
- Virtual machines (decoupled a little from a server in a box)
- Containers – multiple different environments in a virtual machine (decoupling environments from the virtual machine)
- Serverless – don’t think about the server at all (it’s not there when you’re not using it)
These things aren’t competing – they are an evolution
Costs
- Cost is not the key driver
- Focus on customers, not costs
- When you provision for your peak – you’ve got too many resources for most of the time.
BetaMax vs VHS
- Still aspects of cloud/serverless hosting that is built in proprietary systems
- We don’t know what will become standard.
- Lambda vs Azure
- At the moment you need to customise things to run on each – this seems unreasonable. It makes the technology inaccessible.
- Propietary CMSes that do target/allow for Serverless can give them an unfair advantage over WordPress.
A way to run WordPress natively in AWS Lambda
- The future of what hosting looks like.
- Sitehost is building a product based on it
- Anything that involves making changes to the file system (uploading images, updating plugins) is challenging.
Cold Starts
- Cold Starts: If the website hasn’t run for a while, there is a small delay in running it.
- At the moment you can notice some small lag, but it is improving rapidly.
- Only a matter of time till it is really performant
PHP on Serverless?
- Definitely possible – but not as simple as it needs to be
- Bref – OS project to deploy PHP on Serverless. Targeted at Developers
- JAMSTACK (Javascript, API, Markup) – sometimes used for HeadLess CMSes
WebSlice
- Looking to launch internationally. Think they are a bit ahead of the game
- Initially launched as a platform.
- “cPanel for Servers”. Make AWS easy and cost effective to use.
- Utility building model
Live Demo!
- No servers harmed in the making of this demo
- Created a site
- Upload a (slightly) modified ZIP of WordPress core (collapsed the directory 1 step).
- Have set it so the wp-config.php file can be generated even though it is serverless
- Upload images
- Awesome!!!