Marty is a freelance WordPress developer based in Los Angeles. He has been working with WordPress for over 8 years now and from the start has been drawn to pushing the boundaries of what is possible with WordPress. Starting with hacking around on Kubrick, growing to plugin and theme development, Marty finally took the leap of using MultiSite to build PhotographyBlogSites.com, a Website-as-a-Service for photographers.

Marty will be speaking about Integrating WordPress with External APIs.

External APIs open the doors to a lot of possibilities and potential problems. Fortunately WordPress provides many tools to make life easier. Marty will look at some of the ways to make use of external APIs, including using the WordPress HTTP API to connect and pull in data and using transients, options and post meta to store it.

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Konstantin is a WordPress developer, and Core contributor based in Southern California. After contributing to Twenty Twelve, he was the backup lead and main developer for Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Fourteen, the most recent default themes. At Automattic he’s is part of a team that contributes back to WordPress full time. He enjoys craft beers and good food — sometimes so much that he blogs about it.

Panel Participant: Writing Code for Other Developers

If you ask a WordPress developer what they spend their time doing, they’ll tell you that they spend most of their time writing code. However, if you actually observe what they spend their time doing, you’ll find that they spend most of their time trying to understand code. How can WordPress developers write code that’s more readable, scalable and adopted?

Pippin Williamson is an avid WordPress plugin developer from Hutchinson, Kansas and the lead developer for several large WordPress plugins, including AffiliateWP, Easy Digital Downloads, and Restrict Content Pro.

Beyond the world of WordPress, Pippin is a devoted father and husband. He thoroughly enjoys brewing coffee varieties from around the world, indulging in craft beers, and riding his bicycle from point A to point B whenever possible.

WCSD Session Preview: Best Practices in Plugin Development

This session will cover some of the general best practices that all plugin developers should be following while also looking at some of the more advanced development techniques that can help propel you from a good plugin developer to a great one.

Tabby works at the University of California in Irvine as an Academic Applications Developer where she has the joy of working with WordPress for the School of Biological Science’s website. She has worked with WordPress since WordPress 1.5 was a shiny play-thing, developing both plugins and themes; Tabby is always chasing after the latest and greatest standards and best practices. She spends her free time, often, creating complex applications and websites using WordPress. And when she’s not doing that, she desperately trying to catch up on all the things she’s missed out on like “TV” and “Books” and “Friends”.

WCSD 15′ Session: What You Can do with the Heartbeat API

In a world of waterfalls made of your data and information, sometimes it’s a little challenging finding creative ways to capture and display this data from your own perspective. Or perhaps you want to find ways of updating yourself on the latest happenings on your blog while kicking back with your beer hat, without having to deal with hitting refresh all the time. Whatever problem you encounter that requires real-time information, Heartbeat API just might be the solution for you. A beautiful silent conversation between your client and your server can result in some of the most useful and or beautiful work you’ve pretty much ever created. This session is a developer session designed to introduce the beginning to mid-level developer to the concept of the “Heartbeat” and give a working example of how it can be applied in a useful context, as well as some things to think about regarding server performance as you ‘tick’ away on your site.

As an outdoor enthusiast, Mendel loves backpacking, camping, hiking, and tuning his outdoor survival skills. His technology interests include machine insights, data patterns, structured data, and scaled database infrastructure. After learning Pascal in high school, Mendel went on to work in various roles programming in Python, Perl, C++, ASP .NET, and PHP. When he’s not working, you can find Mendel at a local Austin eatery, sipping on gourmet coffee, and/or prototyping new web apps.

From scrappy beginnings as an entrepreneur and Web consultant for local businesses in Iowa, he found his way to corporate America as a developer, marketer, and inventor. These days, Mendel works as the head GoDaddy Evangelist and spends his time hanging out with developers, designers, entrepreneurs, and web pros around the world and making sure their opinions and suggestions are heard. His job is to bring actionable feedback to the GoDaddy organization to help inform innovation within products, services, documentation, and procedures within the company.

As a WordCamp veteran, Mendel has attended twelve WordCamps on two continents and is responsible for creating the “Pretty Pre” plugin. He’s spoken in numerous places including Tippe Strategic Innovation Academy, National SBDC Conference, and WordCamp Toronto just to name a few.

Summary of Session

Get ready for an engaging and interactive presentation where you’ll learn the value of structured data and how it impacts the appearance of your search results. ‘Making sense of structured data’, will teach you the fundamentals of structured data, show multiple use-cases for its use, and leave you with a clear actionable strategy on how to implement structured data on your own WordPress website.

Google and other search engines use schema.org formatted structured data to power rich snippets in search results, and data crawlers use standardized data to build machine learning muscle. These rich snippets make a search listing stand out, and effect the way someone might interactive with your website based on the listing. This talk focuses on understanding what a schema and markup is, and how you can use the PODS framework to easily add schema.org structured data information to your WordPress content to improve the Google search listing for your content.

Specifically, you’ll take away:

• An understanding of the value of structured data, and how it can increase or decrease the search traffic to your website.
• A solid conceptual knowledge of structured data, and how it relates to other real-world systems.
• The fundamentals of how to use structured data schema entities, and how to implement them on your WordPress site.
• How to leverage PODS framework to easily create re-usable structured data widgets for specific post categories.