Ansel Taft is a San Diego front end developer. He’s still in love with his entry point into web development, CSS, and is currently winning the battle to learn JavaScript as fast as possible. ‘As possible’ is a relative term though. Ansel juggles a schedule around his beloved family of three (soon to be four), full-time employment, SaaS side business, personal projects, and the occasional bit of help for a friend to squash a website issue.

In his free time Ansel helps administer a handful of Facebook groups including Advanced WordPress and WordPress Hosting. It’s a constant challenge to keep thousands of members happy. Some days it’s easy breezy in the neighborhood. Other days would sour professional cat wranglers. Through it all he learned that an admin needs to be patient, empathetic, mindful of members’ interests, and to abstain from injecting one’s feelings into replies as often as humanly as possible. It’s Facebook for crying out loud; let’s have a bit of fun while we chat about WordPress.

WCSD 2015 Panelist – HELP ME! How to Help Others Help You

This panel-style discussion will cover the following topics and is an open forum through which we encourage our attendees to ask questions.

We will cover:

• The basics of letting people know what info they need to provide in order to get the best support possible – whether in the WP.org forums or from their designer/developer.
• How to get your “Helper” the details they need related to your hosting environment, WordPress version, browser, etc.
• Tips on what to try on your own, before even asking for help.

Pamela Bey is the founder of Be Brilliant Media, a web design and tech curriculum development agency. She is a WordPress trainer, UX designer and mentor for women and children. After working as a WordPress teaching assistant for Girl Develop It Philly, she started a new chapter of Girl Develop It South Jersey. In 2013 she started mentoring high school students in WordPress and since then has help lead her students to win hackathons using WordPress. She is currently developing WordPress curricula for the Comcast and Techgirlz high school pilot program. When not working, she’s trying to teach herself Spanish, French, and Italian, simultaneously.

WCSD 2015 Session – Migrating Websites to/from WordPress

Do you have a website built with an outdated CMS, or not using a CMS at all and you wished it were on WordPress? Moving to WordPress doesn’t have to mean starting over from scratch. Depending on the current format of your site, whether it’s basic HTML/CC or using another CMS like Joomla or Drupal, the process for migration will be different…but not impossible.

This session will cover:

• Analyzing functionality of your existing site
• Planning the migration process to WordPress
• Finding a WordPress theme vs Building a new theme
• Importing content manually and using plugins for importing content

Matt is the Support Guru at WordImpress. He’s the author of FooThumbnails for Galleries and many other free WordPress plugins, a popular blogger at his website, an admin of the Advanced WordPress Facebook group, co-organizer of the San Diego WordPress Meetup, and a WordCamp speaker and frequent attender.

WCSD 2015 Panelist – HELP ME! How to Help Others Help You

This panel-style discussion will cover the following topics and is an open forum through which we encourage our attendees to ask questions.

We will cover:

• The basics of letting people know what info they need to provide in order to get the best support possible – whether in the WP.org forums or from their designer/developer.
• How to get your “Helper” the details they need related to your hosting environment, WordPress version, browser, etc.
• Tips on what to try on your own, before even asking for help.

Hristo is a WordPress enthusiast who’s done it all: supported WordPress clients, built websites, designed WordPress themes, wrote tutorials, dug deeper into SEO and developed his own WordPress SEO plugin.

He’s been fortunate to have his passion for all things WordPress and his job overlap at SiteGround, where he develops and implements various in-house performance boost solutions to help make WordPress websites faster and more secure.

WCSD 2015 Session – Why Is My Website Slow?

Chris is the developer of iThemes Security (formerly Better WP Security) and has been working on WordPress security for over 5 years. Previously a captain for a small airline Chris’ interest in security began on his first day as an employed pilot, 9/11 and gradually evolved over the years to helping individuals and smaller organizations protect their websites from many of the common methods attackers use to compromise their victims.

When not coding Chris loves to teach and has taught computer security for St. Edward’s University as well as other courses ranging from computers to aviation.

WCSD 2015 Session – Vetting A Plugin

This session is for less-experienced WordPress users and will cover the ins and outs of selecting the right plugins for your site with particular emphasis on the following:

• An overview of the WordPress plugin repository and its function
• How plugins are approved or denied in the plugin repository
• An overview of other plugin sources and why some plugins are not in the WordPress.org repository
• How to choose what plugin(s) to use on your site
• The security implications of plugin choices
• How to keep your plugins up to date