WordCamp Boston 2011

The multisite feature of WordPress has been part of WordPress core since version 3.0. It allows site administrators to run several different websites off of a single codebase, and manage them through one dashboard.

In practical terms, this means that you, as a site administrator, can share plugins and themes across all the sites in your network. There is no need to download and install them on each site individually. And when it comes to updating your WordPress core, plugins and themes, you need only do it in one place.

In this presentation, we’ll learn the nuts and bolts of how to configure an out-of-the-box WordPress install for multisite functionality. We’ll discuss why you’d want to run your organization’s WordPress sites as a network (or why not). And finally, we’ll look at some real-life examples of WordPress multisite in action, focusing on sites in higher education.

This session is intended for site administrators, particularly those responsible for managing several WordPress sites within their organization or business.

You’re proud of your blog. It’s a labor of love or maybe the best, most insightful content to offer, but it’s not got the readership or results that you want just yet. Join WhatCounts Director of Strategy, Christopher Penn, as he walks you through digital marketing basics to bring the audience to your blog that you’re sure it deserves.

The world of marketing has changed. It’s not enough to create some banners ads or invest in PPC to get people to buy your product. You have to draw prospects and leads to you instead of interrupting them when they are trying to do other things.

The good news is that the heart and soul of any successful inbound marketing program is creating remarkable content. Studies show companies that blog have far better website traffic and marketing results than those that don’t. Blogging helps you build an online presence for your company, spawn brand loyalty, establish itself as a thought leader and generate leads, sales and measurable results.

We’ll use data to understand how to achieve Inbound Marketing success and explain why all your need is a WordPress blog to get started. We’ll cover,

• What Inbound Marketing really means
• Why creating content is so important
• How you can optimize and promote your content
• What you need to do to collect and manage your leads and prospects
• How you can measure your marketing results so you can determine what works best

This talk is designed for publishers, in-house developers, and consultants interested in learning about the WordPress.com VIP platform.

We will provide an overview of where WordPress.com VIP fits within the overall WordPress ecosystem and what types of publishers are well suited for the platform. We’ll cover the key benefits for publishers and developers, compare a typical self-hosted WordPress implementation to one on WordPress.com VIP, and take a surface-level look at some of the technical nuances for running a site in this incredibly flexible yet controlled environment.

Whether you are considering a migration to WordPress, exploring a switch to enterprise-level hosting, or just curious to learn more about what this VIP thing is all about, this talk should be a valuable resource.

Christopher Murray is the President of Oomph, Inc., a full-service web agency with extensive experience working with publishers on the WordPress.com VIP platform.

In my day-to-day work at the Berkman Center I don’t have the luxury of working primarily in one language or framework – this is a blessing and a curse.  That’s not the point of this post, though.

A specific blessing that fell out of the multi-language, multi-platform monstrosity that is my workload is a love of Cucumber, the excellent Behavior Driven Development testing framework gaining major traction in the ruby community.

BDD is a client-centric “outside in” agile development methodology that emphasizes “Scenarios” that implement valuable business logic. Your scenarios might read something like:

Scenario: Activate the plugin without errors. Given a "Deactivated" plugin in the row with the id "category-subscriptions" And a logged in user of type "administrator" When I visit "/wp-admin/plugins.php" And I click "Activate" within the row with the id "category-subscriptions" Then I should see "Plugin activated"

That is an actual testing scenario that Cucumber can execute and run, using Selenium to drive a browser like Google Chrome or Firefox. Look at it! You can read it! You could probably run this by a client and they’d understand most of it.

The promise of cucumber is that you’ll spend less time working on stuff that doesn’t actually provide specific business value to your clients, and end up with an app that provably does what it says on the can because your testing suite says so.

WordPress 3.0 expanded theme and plugin developer’s abilities to create Custom Post Types, representing data more complex than the average blog post. This functionality firmly establishes WordPress as a viable Content Management System, but it can be difficult to know how to use these new post types effectively in your themes.

Using a recent client project as a case study, this talk is a candid introduction to Custom Post Types for the intermediate theme developer. I will examine how creating your own post types can benefit you while developing a site, while also calling out some drawbacks and “gotchas” I found while designing a site heavily dependent on my own post types and taxonomies. If you have been developing your own themes and are beginning to need your content organized more clearly than categories allow, this talk may be for you!

We’ve all heard the stories of customer service legends like Zappos, Nordstrom, The Ritz Carlton, and similar companies. These are all companies that use customer service to set themselves apart from the competition.

Bloggers can learn from these best practices as well and can use some tactics of great customer service to help strengthen and grow their reader communities. In this interactive session, we’ll cover a number of ways ways that bloggers can help get make their readers feel like valued customers when they visit the blog and to ensure that they’re coming back and staying engaged with the blog community. We’ll go over what plugins you can use to make readers feel welcome, how you can encourage readers to feel loyal to your blog, and many other tips and tactics to make you and your blog known as a customer service leader.

Just like in business, blogging is competitive and having a great reader community is an excellent way to stay competitive. And perhaps most important of all, having a great reader community is an excellent way for you to get more out of your blogging experience.

Anyone who blogs can get something from this session, regardless of level of technical expertise or experience level. All blogs need repeat and loyal readers to really succeed and grow and treating those readers like your best customers is an excellent way to keep them coming back.

Douglas Hanna is the CEO of A Small Orange, a provider of shared, reseller, VPS, and dedicated web hosting services based in Durham, NC. He also blogs about customer service at Service Untitled, which he founded in 2006. You can learn more about Doug by visiting his personal site.

In this talk we will cover some basic user management principals and apply those principals to WordPress. We will give you the knowledge needed to determine what to let, and more importantly not let, your users have access too.

We will talk about each of the native contributor roles that WordPress offers and what those roles mean to you and your network. We will also introduce a few key plugins that are pivotal in managing hundreds of users across thousands of blogs and will cover some common gotchas in plugin selection.

Concepts from this presentation can be applied to any size network or single site install. User management is a fundamental and important piece of any project that has more than one contributor and should never be overlooked. Join me in exploring how to make your blog secure and your contributors productive.