May 2–4, 2023

A virtual conference for WordPress professionals featuring hands-on workshops, incredible sessions, great swag, and an amazing community.

What's WordSesh?

WordSesh is a live, virtual conference for WordPress professionals. Each event is highly curated to provide you with the absolute best possible experience.

Every presenter has been hand-picked and each topic is selected to complement or build on the others.

Best yet, every presentation is recorded and published to WPSessions after the live event has ended. This means you can watch everything no matter when you're available.

Want to know more? Join to the mailing list and stay up-to-date about all future event details!

PS – You should follow @WordSesh on Mastodon and Twitter for announcements.

Meet Our 2022 Speakers

Enjoy the incredible speaker lineup for WordSesh 2022!

Portrait of Aaron Jorbin
Aaron Jorbin Senior Director of Editorial Technology, Penske Media Corporation

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Alex Nitu
Alex Nitu Product Manager / Technical Strategist, Crowd Favorite

Alex Nitu is a Product Manager and Technical Strategist for Crowd Favorite. Having worked in startups, government agencies, and large organizations, he is experienced in planning, managing, and executing technology projects. His expertise in accelerating development efforts and identifying pressure points comes from his passion for accessible, developer-friendly products aimed for the enterprise. Alex has a knack for all languages — he is a skilled communicator in Romanian, English, and French, and can fluently translate technical information for enterprise clients.

Portrait of Anil Gupta
Anil Gupta CEO & Co-Founder, Multidots

Anil Gupta is the co-founder and CEO of WordPress VIP Gold agency Multidots. Anil and his team at Multidots have helped and consulted big enterprises like PepsiCo, Ask.com, Accenture, etc., for their complex WordPress migration and customizations since 2009. Multidots group also released the famous WordPress plugin — Multicollab, a google doc-style editorial commenting for Gutenberg; and are the creator of the DotStore, a place for premium plugins for WooCommerce, focusing on scalability, performance, and security which 70,000+ users and customers love. Anil is also a thought leader at Forbes Technology Council. Anil ❤️ to read, travel, yoga, and meditation!

Portrait of Aurooba
Aurooba Ahmed Web Developer, Aurooba Makes

Aurooba Ahmed is a web developer and content creator who specializes in bespoke WordPress solutions, particularly using the WordPress Block Editor.

Potrait of Ben Ostrower
Ben Ostrower CEO/Founder, Wide Eye

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Bhavesh Radadiya
Bhavesh Radadiya UX, CRO Consultant, Dzine Interact

Bhavesh founded templatic – one of the pioneers in WP theme business in 2008. After exiting this business, Bhavesh now helps other design-challenged founders, agencies, and SaaS companies with result-focused design solutions, SEO, and strategy.

Portrait of Carl Alexander
Carl Alexander Founder, Ymir

Carl Alexander is a PHP developer from Montréal, Canada. He’s the solo founder of [Ymir](https://ymirapp.com), a serverless DevOps platform for WordPress.

He also has a [website](https://carlalexander.ca/) where he publishes articles regularly. It’s his way to help the WordPress community with these hard-to-learn topics. It’s also why he’s excited to speak at WordSesh. It’s another way for him to help the WordPress community.

Besides that, he’s been a [WordPress Montréal](https://montreal.wordcamp.org) organizer since 2010. He also helps organize other WordPress events during the year. You can find him on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/twigpress) and [GitHub](https://github.com/carlalexander).

Portrait of Chris Lema
Chris Lema General Manager, LearnDash

Chris Lema is a blogger, coach, product strategist and storyteller. He’s got a framework for everything, and today he’ll introduce one of them that has come from the more than 20 years he’s had leading product development teams.

Presenting: Eliminating Friction from Your Products, Customers and Your Life

Portrait of Chris
Chris Reynolds Software Engineer, Pantheon

Chris is a Software Engineer at Pantheon and technical lead of the Edge Integrations project. Before joining Pantheon, Chris was a Senior Engineer at Human Made, worked on Human Made’s Altis Digital Experience platform, was a Developer Lead for WebDevStudios, an author of online training videos for Pluralsight, a developer, project manager, and support technician at Event Espresso, a freelancer, and a Specialty Team member at Whole Foods. Though vegan, he can still be snobby about cheese and chocolate. Chris maintains a number of open-source plugins on GitHub and WordPress.org and has been involved in WordCamp Salt Lake City since 2011.

When not coding, he can most likely be found planning for his next Dungeons & Dragons session.

Portrait of Daisy
Daisy Olsen Developer Advocate, Automattic

​​Daisy has worked in and around the WordPress community since 2007. She has spoken at WordCamps around the world. She also helped to organize the first WordCamp Boston in 2010. Currently, Daisy works for Automattic as a Developer Advocate with a special focus on helping WordPress developers do more with the Block Editor. In her spare time, you’ll often find Daisy listening to audio books while knitting. She loves to travel with her family and has often spent many weeks throughout the year visiting different places.

Portrait of Ebonie Butler
Ebonie Butler Senior Software Engineer, Penske Media Corporation

Ebonie, also known as Metal & Coffee, is a full-time WordPress developer with Yikes Inc. in Philadelphia and is the founder of the WordPress Women of Color community. She is also a Metal DJ, having been featured on various radio streaming platforms. Eager to share her knowledge and uplift other underrepresented groups, Ebonie also does livestreams on Twitch where she codes and works on various projects live while answering viewer questions about the code she is working on and what they can do to get into the tech industry. And of course, she plays video games too. 😉

Presenting: How Live Streaming Transformed My Career

Portrait of Ellen Bauer
Ellen Bauer Frontend Developer, Elma Studio

Ellen has been building WordPress themes since 2011. She is active in the WordPress community and is currently building blocks and block themes for the new WordPress Full Site Editing experience.

Portrait of Erica Comfort
Erica Comfort Engineering Manager for LocalWP, WP Engine

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Helen Hou-Sandí
Helen Hou-Sandí Senior EM, Special Projects, Github

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Henri Helvetica
Henri Helvetica Lead, Developer Community, WebPageTest By Catchpoint

Henri is a developer who has turned his interests to a passionate mix of site performance engineering and pinches of user experience, which led to his joining Catchpoint Systems on the WebPageTest Team. When not reading the deluge of daily research docs and case studies, streaming, or profiling sites in his favourite tools, Henri can be found contributing back to the community with the Toronto Web Performance Group meetup + as Jamstack Toronto organizer, curating conference content or volunteering his time for lunch and learns at various bootcamps. Otherwise, Henri is focusing on running the fastest 5k possible (surprise surprise), encouraging a healthy lifestyle via #devsWhoRun.

Presenting: Pressing for Performance

Portrait of Jeff Paul
Jeffrey Paul Director of Open Source Initiatives, 10up

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Jen Perrone
Jen Perrone Managing Director, Wide Eye

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Josh
Josh Palmeri Senior Web Developer, Suffolk County Community College

Josh Palmeri is a Senior Web Developer at Suffolk County Community College. He has a passion for creating really great user experiences for website visitors, students and faculty alike. His main focus at work is the innovation of existing systems to improve the experience of both users and admins alike.

Josh worked several years as a web developer for Nikon Inc. where he developed a passion for photography. Since then, He has worked at SUNY Stony Brook and SUNY Suffolk on Long Island, NY, where he and his family live. He loves to play music (guitar and piano) and enjoy time with his family and friends.

Portrait of Justin Nealey
Justin Nealey Senior Product Manager, GoDaddy

I am a product manager at GoDaddy for the Hub by day and a freelance web designer by night. My mission is to make it easier for the everyday website designer to get their projects finished so they can get paid.

Presenting: How to Use the Hub to Streamline Your Web Design Workflow

Portrait of Leonardo Losoviz
Leonardo Losoviz Developer

Leonardo Losoviz is an open-source developer and technical writer, working at the intersection of GraphQL and WordPress.

Portrait of Lesley Sim
Lesley Sim Founder, Newsletter Glue

Lesley Sim has been a government employee, an ad agency suit, and a freediving instructor… and then she found WordPress. She built sites on WordPress as part of her digital marketing agency and moved on to building plugins last year. Now, she focuses on Newsletter Glue, a plugin that connects your email service provider to WordPress and turns the block editor into a newsletter builder so you can build and send newsletters directly from WordPress.

Matthew Haines-Young Engineering Manager, Human Made

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Developing and Defending a Free Press

Portrait of Melissa Love
Melissa Love CEO, The Design Space Co

Melissa is a website designer and brand specialist for creative businesses and entrepreneurs.

She is the founder of WordPress theme company, The Design Space, which makes excellent design affordable, and she’s a WordPress nerd who has taught thousands of business owners how to build their own beautiful websites. Through her online membership, The Marketing Fix, she and her team coach members through building ethical sales funnels.

She also owns several WordPress plugins.

She lives in Cornwall, UK, with her family, where she spends her spare time surfing.

Nestor
Néstor Angulo de Ugarte Security Analyst, GoDaddy

I’m a Technology enthusiast, Computer Science Engineer and WebSecurity geek. I also love to travel, although I’m based in Spain, you can find me learning from other cultures and meeting people where an Internet connection is available always with my mug of coffee. I’ve been working in Sucuri and GoDaddy WebSecurity since 2015 and is there where I’m getting tons of Knowledge about hackers, malware, and strange cases to study like a CSI, AKA Security Analyst.

Presenting: Incident Response: What Happens After the Worst Case Scenario

Portrait of Pippin Williamson
Pippin Williamson Managing Director, Sandhills Development, LLC

Pippin is a nature loving farm boy that somehow found his way into computers, Internet, and business. He is a PHP developer, craft beer lover and brewer, cyclist, and founder and Managing Director of Sandhills Development, LLC.

Presenting: Buying and Selling WP Businesses: An interview with Pippin Williamson

Portrait of Reavens Fenelon
Reavens Fenelon Senior Front End/UI Developer, Wide Eye

Details coming soon!

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Rich Tabor
Rich Tabor Head of Product, Extendify

As a WordPress entrepreneur, designer and developer all wrapped up in one, Rich Tabor is recognized as one of the top leaders in this Gutenberg era of WordPress. His ever-precise design chops have topped the 2018 Automattic Design Awards and led him to co-found CoBlocks, ThemeBeans, and Iceberg – a markdown editor for Gutenberg.

Now Rich leads the Extendify team as the Head of Product, extending the best of WordPress through innovative, Gutenberg-first solutions.

Portrait of Sumant Lohar
Sumant Lohar Tech blogger/Podcaster, Blogospedia

Sumant is a dedicated tech-blogger based in Ahmedabad. He also specializes in crafting content/social media strategies for various brands as well as startups. His core strength lies in Instagram marketing, video editing, and apart from that podcasting is his new skill set. WordPress is a true inspiration for him that encouraged him to help businesses through creative content. He has also been a volunteer, Organizer at WordCamp Ahmedabad 2018, do_action Hackathon organizer, featured as a WordFest 2021/2022 edition speaker, WordCamp India 2021 Speaker, GoDaddy EMEA Event Speaker 2021, WordPress Meetup Speaker, and always an active WordPress community member since 2017.

Susan Enners Senior Account Manager, Human Made

As a Senior Account Manager in APAC, Susan is a custodian to the clients at Human Made. Susan lives in Sydney, Australia with her husband and 2 daughters. Susan originally comes from Canada.

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Developing and Defending a Free Press

Portrait of Tiffany Bridge
Tiffany Bridge Product Manager, WordPress eCommerce, Nexcess

Tiffany Bridge is a local rabble-rouser, a holder of strong opinions, a damn good cook, and the person you call first when your friend moves to her town.
Currently, she is applying her talents to helping small businesses grow with WordPress as the Product Manager for WordPress eCommerce at Nexcess, part of the Liquid Web family of brands.
She lives in Washington, DC with her spouse, child, and cat. You can find her on Twitter or very sporadically at her neglected blog, https://tiff.is.

Portrait of Vikas Singhal
Vikas Singhal Founder, ExpressTech/InstaWP

Vikas has a background in programming, networking & cyber security. He has been building side projects since he was 14. He came to know about WordPress 4 years ago while setting up an ecommerce store for his brother.

He heads the team at ExpressTech, serving over 150,000 in the WP ecosystem. He has started working on InstaWP with which he wants to make WordPress easier to launch and play with. He enjoy bike rides and learning new languages.

Presenting: 5 Easy Ways to Fix your WordPress Workflow

Wisdom Hambolu Cloud Engineer, Altis

Wisdom is a Cloud Engineer based in Lagos, Nigeria. His focus is designing, implementing, and managing the cloud infrastructure.

Presenting: KEYNOTE: Developing and Defending a Free Press

Schedule


This year we have 20 sessions, 3 keynotes, plus 2 in-depth workshops that touch on topics like custom block development, headless WordPress, hacking, client services, performance, accessibility, and user experience.

Each day features a mixture of talks across all categories and has been timed to support viewers from around the globe.

Find the day that works best for your location and schedule and make time to attend those talks live. Then, for the other days, watch the recordings whenever is most convenient for you!

17 May 2022

Day 01 – Designed for attendees across Asia and the Pacific.
03:00 UTC

How to Use the Hub to Streamline Your Web Design Workflow

Portrait of Justin Nealey Justin Nealey Senior Product Manager, GoDaddy

Learn how to use the Hub by GoDaddy Pro to streamline your web design workflow from the start of the project to the handoff of the website to the client. Best of all, the Hub is a free tool you can start using instantly.

03:30 UTC

Designing Mobile UX the Right Way

Portrait of Bhavesh Radadiya Bhavesh Radadiya UX, CRO Consultant, Dzine Interact

Most of the global population is now using smartphones. And visitors to mobile version of your site are increasing every year.

Sure, you are making your website “responsive”. But are you doing it right? You will forever change the way you do responsive design after this session.

04:00 UTC

From Agency Owner to Plugin Shop

Portrait of Lesley Sim Lesley Sim Founder, Newsletter Glue

There are tens of thousands of plugins out there and not many make money. In this presentation, I share my journey launching Newsletter Glue, the mistakes I made and the lessons I’ve learnt.

04:30 UTC

5 Easy Ways to Fix your WordPress Workflow

Portrait of Vikas Singhal Vikas Singhal Founder, ExpressTech/InstaWP

If you are service provider, you will learn how to quickly launch a WordPress instance from scratch or from “pre-configured” template, to cut hours of work.

As a developer, you will learn about how to showcase your product demo in a sandbox environment and speed up your development work flow by auto spawning new WP instances on every PR merge.

As an agency, you will be able to quickly scale and coordinate projects amongst a distributed team after the talk is over.

05:00 UTC

Can Developers Prepare the Best Project Presentations?

Portrait of Sumant Lohar Sumant Lohar Tech blogger/Podcaster, Blogospedia

Developers can prepare and deliver rock-solid project presentations. In this talk, Sumant will highlight the importance of designing a project presentation, how to present your project, and key elements to include in the project presentation. Learn how to stand out like a Pro with effective storytelling while using his presentation design tools and resources.

05:30 UTC

Will WordPress be Better with the Block Protocol?

Portrait of Leonardo Losoviz Leonardo Losoviz Developer

WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has expressed interest in joining forces with the team behind the Block Protocol, a new specification which aims to have “blocks” be portable across applications. This talk presents the benefits and costs for WordPress if it were to adopt this new protocol, and then, based on this information, it draws conclusions on how desirable it is to happen.

06:00 UTC

KEYNOTE: Developing and Defending a Free Press

Matthew Haines-Young Engineering Manager, Human Made
Susan Enners Senior Account Manager, Human Made
Wisdom Hambolu Cloud Engineer, Altis

Access to unbiased information is fundamental for the proper functioning of democracy. But it isn’t always a given…

This closing keynote case study finds Human Made and Altis DXP at the center of an intense and controversial national news cycle, helping defend a free press, and working to repel sophisticated and sustained DDoS attacks that brought down websites across the region.

While the stages of the project sound familiar – a large content migration, a complex site build and custom code delivery – the background to the project, the importance of the work being carried out, and the incredible pressures the team were under during delivery, set this project apart.

18 May 2022

Day 02 – Designed for attendees across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.
11:00 UTC

Accelerate Your Development Timeline Today

Portrait of Alex Nitu Alex Nitu Product Manager / Technical Strategist, Crowd Favorite

Are you struggling to meet your deadlines? Is your creativity being stymied by repeating tasks? Do you consistently wrestle with efficient time management?

In this talk I will share my insights on how to maximize efficiency in web development and hopefully by the end arm you with the tools needed to set yourself up for success.

Together, we will break this subject down into bite-size sections, as I walk you through my most used tools, insights and general headspace when tackling new projects.

Our journey will take us through a myriad of subjects, starting with efficiency and time management — spoiler, the 80/20 rule applies even more so in web development — and ending with my personal approach to identifying opportunities for workflow automation.

Along the way, we’ll pass waymarks such as your local environment setup — development or otherwise, how you write and more importantly read code, requirement gathering as well as team and project structure, to name a few. All of these subjects will be accompanied by real life examples pulled from my experience working with WordPress.

In an ever changing landscape of tools, frameworks and flavor-of-the-day technologies, it’s easy to feel like you’re standing on quicksand. So why not make sure you have a solid foundation for your professional development? Let’s do that together!

11:30 UTC

Building a Feel Good Marketing Funnel Using WordPress

Portrait of Melissa Love Melissa Love CEO, The Design Space Co

In this entertaining session, Melissa will show you how to build a sales funnel that *whispers* real humans can actually enjoy.

Even the words ‘sales funnel’ sound like they were invented by an evil robot. (No one minds an evil robot in a disaster movie, but you don’t want one in your inbox).

She’ll show you her funnel building strategy, explore the moving parts and tell you the story of how she lost £30k in her first business venture (yes, she should have built a funnel!)

Even better, Melissa’s funnel-building strategy uses only two tools – WordPress and an email marketing platform.

This session is for anyone who has hit the limit of where their time and talent alone can take them and wants to generate a steady stream of new leads by building an automated system that doesn’t feel salesy or ‘sleazy’.

12:00 UTC

Incident Response: What Happens After the Worst Case Scenario

Nestor Néstor Angulo de Ugarte Security Analyst, GoDaddy

OK, you’ve got hacked and have hired a cleanup service. It is not magic, let me share with you what happens inside the black box, using a couple of examples to guide you about how this process works. You also will learn some tricks you can apply by yourself!

In Cybersecurity, the term Blue Team refers to white hat hackers (security analysts) teams that are working every day to discover vulnerabilities exploited by black hat hackers (cyberterrorists), to understand the underneath intentions and to fix hacked scenarios, between other tasks.

12:30 UTC

Pressing for Performance

Portrait of Henri Helvetica Henri Helvetica Lead, Developer Community, WebPageTest By Catchpoint

The wonderful world of WordPress has been around a near two decades. In that time, we have seen so much change on the web. Web performance was once about raw timing, but today user experience and several metrics share the stage. We now have core web vitals and Lighthouse scores to contend with.

For example:

  • only 19% of WordPress sites have good core web vitals, ranking it 3rd last among the top 10 CMSs.
  • 28% of WordPress sites have good largest contentful paint – tied for last in top 10 CMSs.
  • WordPress sites also have a median Lighthouse score of 26, ranking below the median average across the web, but also loads 24 resources under the /plugins/ path.

Could these figures be related? Pressing for Performance is a talk about using these data points to help make well researched decisions along with best practices in order to improve WordPress’s web performance and provide the best user experience possible.

13:00 UTC

Eliminating Friction from Your Products, Customers and Your Life

Portrait of Chris Lema Chris Lema General Manager, LearnDash

Nobody likes friction. But here’s the problem – familiarity doesn’t always breed contempt, sometimes it breeds acceptance. We get used to the friction we see and experience regularly.

But your life doesn’t have to be that way. Neither do the lives of your prospects. And your product, ordering and customer onboarding all can do without friction.

In this talk I’ll show you a simple way to manage friction audits and how to eliminate most of the friction in your life.

13:30 UTC

Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: How to Prepare for a High Traffic Event

Portrait of Tiffany Bridge Tiffany Bridge Product Manager, WordPress eCommerce, Nexcess

When Christine Clauder created a website to help Hank, a rescue dog, get adopted, a basic hosting plan seemed like the right choice. Then, she went viral. Her story was broadcast on television and drove an insane amount of traffic to her site.

That’s a good problem to have, no? Well… not if your site keeps crashing. Join us to hear Christine’s tips and what you can (and should!) do to prepare for traffic spikes, and how to know if your hosting plan is really “unlimited.”

14:00 UTC

KEYNOTE: How do Big Enterprises Use WordPress for Publishing?

Portrait of Anil Gupta Anil Gupta CEO & Co-Founder, Multidots

Big enterprises like Ask.com and PepsiCo use the same open-source WordPress as any high-school blogger. However, there is a huge difference in workflow, plugins, and implementation of WordPress for enterprises. In this talk, I’ll share some of those tools, techniques, and workflows in WordPress being used by large enterprises worldwide.

— What matters most to enterprises when they use WordPress?
— How do enterprises assess a WordPress plugin?
— How publishing workflow for enterprises works in WordPress?

19 May 2022

Day 03 – Designed for attendees in the Americas, Iceland, and Greenland.
16:00 UTC

Admins are Users, Too! — Building Great Experiences for WordPress Admins

Portrait of Josh Josh Palmeri Senior Web Developer, Suffolk County Community College

As WordPress Developers, we should all know that user experience is a fundamental key to success. People matter more than websites, right? But often times, we forget that Admins are users, too, and their experience matters. In this session, Josh will discuss essential principles and practical tools we can all use to empower WordPress admins and dashboard users to work more effectively, and enjoy their work a bit more in the process!

16:30 UTC

How Live Streaming Transformed My Career

Portrait of Ebonie Butler Ebonie Butler Senior Software Engineer, Penske Media Corporation

Are you a developer looking for a way to have more fun with your work? Let’s dig in to how I got started as a webdev streamer, how it enhanced my life, and how it can do the same for you and other developers. In our time together, I’ll share my personal experience as a streamer, the things I’ve tried, the lessons I learned, the ways I’ve grown, and how you can build on these lessons yourself.

17:00 UTC

Buying and Selling WP Businesses: An interview with Pippin Williamson

Portrait of Pippin Williamson Pippin Williamson Managing Director, Sandhills Development, LLC

In 2009, Pippin Williamson started selling WordPress plugins under the moniker Pippin’s Plugins. In the 12 years that followed he grew the business into Sandhills Development and expanded to a team of 27, acquiring dozens of other WordPress products along the way.

In 2021, Pippin sold his entire suite of WordPress plugins and services to AwesomeMotive, and the full business operations and team along with them. Then he quietly made an exit from the entire WordPress scene.

In this exclusive interview session, we’ll hear more of this story along with actionable advice you can use if you ever acquire or sell a business.

17:30 UTC

QuickPost: Hacking the Block Editor for Faster Content Creation

Portrait of Aurooba Aurooba Ahmed Web Developer, Aurooba Makes

This talk explores how the plugin QuickPost came into service of agencies using WordPress and professional end-users in the small business and non-profit space. It also covers some high-level technical details on how the plugin works.

18:00 UTC

Block Theme Adoption: A Gradual Approach

Portrait of Daisy Daisy Olsen Developer Advocate, Automattic

An entirely new way to think about theme development was introduced in WordPress 5.9 with the addition of Block Themes. Changing the way your existing and future themes are built, however, can be a daunting and time-prohibitive process.

Join me as I share some ways you can begin taking advantage of Block Theme features today, without a complete code overhaul. Tapping into exciting new features of the block editor can be added to almost any theme. By incorporating Global Styles via theme.json or templates and template parts made entirely of block markup you can see immediate benefits with gradual block theme adoption.

18:30 UTC

Bodacious Block Themes: An in-depth Look at this New Era of Theming

Portrait of Rich Tabor Rich Tabor Head of Product, Extendify

We all knew the landscape of WordPress themes was shifting with the introduction of Gutenberg. What we didn’t know, was by how much.

Block themes are the catalyst by which the full block editing experience comes to fruition. With block templates, template parts (i.e. headers and footers), patterns, style variants, template editing and more — there’s much to unpack on this new era of block themes.

So let’s dive in and take an in-depth look at what a block theme consists of, and how you can build and share them with others.

19:00 UTC

Getting Started with Continuous Integration and WordPress

Portrait of Carl Alexander Carl Alexander Founder, Ymir

Writing high-quality WordPress code is hard to do. It requires constant effort on our part and good self-awareness to know when we slipped up. But, if your business has any sort of success (which we all want!), you’re going to work with more and more people. And many of them are likely to touch with your code.

This is going to put a strain on your development processes. It becomes harder to maintain a certain level of code quality. And you’re no longer the only person pushing code. You’re now part of a team and you need a way to standardize all of the things you once did on your own.

That’s the goal of continuous integration. It lets you automate your different development workflows from testing to deployment. This ensures that the quality of your code stays consistent.

This talk will go over the basics of continuous integration. We’ll also go over some of the tools that are available. And then we’ll finish by looking at how you put these tools together to create your own continuous integration environment.

19:30 UTC

Developing an SDK for Personalization at the Edge

Portrait of Chris Chris Reynolds Software Engineer, Pantheon

The Edge. The final…frontier? What even is “the edge” beyond just another tech buzzword? And how can I actually use the edge for something actually useful for my site and visitors?

In this talk, I will answer all of these questions and talk about how we at Pantheon have built a software development kit for Drupal and WordPress to enable personalized content by integrating with our edge layer.

We’ll talk about what personalization means for site owners, and get into some of the technical implementation details of how we’ve built our SDKs and how they can be used for personalized content creation.

20:00 UTC

KEYNOTE: Rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov in Six Weeks

Portrait of Aaron Jorbin Aaron Jorbin Senior Director of Editorial Technology, Penske Media Corporation
Potrait of Ben Ostrower Ben Ostrower CEO/Founder, Wide Eye
Portrait of Erica Comfort Erica Comfort Engineering Manager for LocalWP, WP Engine
Portrait of Helen Hou-Sandí Helen Hou-Sandí Senior EM, Special Projects, Github
Portrait of Jeff Paul Jeffrey Paul Director of Open Source Initiatives, 10up
Portrait of Jen Perrone Jen Perrone Managing Director, Wide Eye
Portrait of Reavens Fenelon Reavens Fenelon Senior Front End/UI Developer, Wide Eye

A case study more than a year in the making, this keynote follows seven team members, from different agencies, who were responsible for key aspects of rebuilding WhiteHouse.gov for the Biden-Harris administration.

Due to several unprecedented constraints, the team had a total of six weeks to design, develop, test, and launch the entire project ahead of an immovable deadline of 12:01pm Eastern Time on Inauguration Day.

Despite the compressed timeline, the team sought to create an online home grounded in inclusivity, accessibility, performance, and security.

They prioritized WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility, carefully crafted custom toggles for contrast and enlarging tex, and partnered with technical specialists who are blind and visually impaired. Additionally, the team recruited translators who ensured every piece of content was thoughtfully translated into Spanish.

Under the hood, a highly customized Gutenberg editing experience was built on a flexible, user-centric publishing framework designed to adapt with the Administration as their digital communication needs grow and change.

And all of this is on top of an entirely new brand, design, and UX strategy – produced expressly for the new administration – to help govern the enormous number of decisions that had to be made quickly.

Come and learn how a cross-functional team from multiple different agencies pulled off the incredible!

Hands-on Workshops

This year we have 2 in-depth workshops to provide you hands-on practice to what you're learning.

Each workshop is anticipated to last roughly 90 minutes inclusive of all instruction, activities, discussions, and breaks. All times shown in your local timezone.

Convert a Classic Theme to a Block Theme

Portrait of Ellen Bauer Ellen Bauer Front-end Developer, Elma Studio 20 May 2022, 00:00 (UTC)

Together, we will set up the header and footer in a block theme, learn to work with Templates and Template Parts, set up page contents, and dive into how Styles work.

Throughout the workshop we'll discuss which website projects can benefit from the new FSE features the most, what limitations we are still facing, and how the future of WordPress themes will most likely look like.

Growing Traffic, Growing Problem: How to Prepare for a High Traffic Event

Portrait of Tiffany Bridge Tiffany Bridge Product Manager, Nexcess 20 May 2022, 14:00 (UTC)

Discover new ways to prepare for and prevent the multitude of problems that arise from traffic spikes and increased website popularity.

Tiffany will teach you how to measure and monitor the web properties you're developing along with important hosting resources you can take advantage of to ensure every day is a smooth day of production.

Kind Words about WordSesh

Hallway Track

No good conference is complete without the opportunity to chat and network with your peers. This year, WordSesh has multiple built-in opportunities for you to connect with other attendees, talk shop, swap notes, and make new friends from around the globe.

swag

Event Swag

No, we won't have any stickers, pins, or t-shirts, but we will have plenty of useful gifts for every WordSesh attendee! We've made special arrangements with many awesome companies in the WordPress space to provide exclusive digital swag.

Watch Past Events

There have been so many great presentations on WordSesh that it would be criminal to make a list of favorites. Instead, here are just a few recent sessions.

You can watch the recordings from all past WordSesh events right now on WPSessions.

WordSesh, a WPSessions Event

For the past nine years, WPSessions has been recruiting remarkable presenters to teach what they know.

WPSessions is home to nearly 200 hours of exclusive content to help you write better code, find better clients, and deliver better projects.

If you're hungry for WordPress training, and one full day of WordSesh just isn't enough for you, WPSessions is ready feed that desire year-round.

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