Author: Rhys Wynne

I am a freeelance WordPress Developer based in Manchester, UK at Dwi'n Rhys. I write my blogs at rhyswynne.co.uk and Wrestling Betting. I wrote bbPress Complete which was released in 2013. I have released some premium plugins such as WP Email Capture under the brand Winwar Media, which contains my free plugins. I'm happy to chat on Twitter - (@rhyswynne, @winwaruk, @dwinrhys & @wpemailcapture).

WordCamp Manchester 2015 – That’s a Wrap!

The final call has been had, invoices have been submitted and the organisers have just about caught up on sleep. As such, thank you so much to everybody who made WordCamp Manchester a great success!

So this blog post is a huge thank you to everybody who attended, sponsored, or spoke at WordCamp Manchester, as well as highlighting some of the feedback.

Speaker Slides/Blog Posts

Blog Post Roundups

If you have a round up/slides, that we haven’t linked here, please let me know so I can add them!

Thanks again for everybody who made it a success! We’re currently in the process of sending out surveys, and finishing the last things off.

See you in 2016!

Contributor Day Tickets are Now Available

We are pleased to announce that Contributor Day tickets are now available on our “Tickets” page.

Tickets are free, but we are putting them on the site as we can get a rough idea for numbers attending, so we can handle the catering at the event.

Anybody can contribute to WordPress, so if you’re a writer, an organiser or just looking to help out, we’d love to see you there!

Tickets are limited so please make sure that you register your place. Please only register if you can make it, as because places are limited we’d hate to have anybody miss out should tickets be registered to those who can’t come.

More information is available at our contributor day page.

Announcing the Remaining Speakers….

Steven Jones

Steve is a freelance web developer based in Newcastle upon Tyne with the web presence of Stomp (www.stomptheweb.co.uk). He has been using WordPress for 9 years and hates slow websites.

The Ultimate Guide to Image Optimisation

On average images comprise over 2/3rds of the size of a page request. This gives us a wide birth in order to look at different ways in order to optimise images and potentially reduce this proportion and decrease the total page size.

Tom de Bruin

Tom is senior developer at Label Media, an agency in Leeds, developing on various platforms including WordPress and WooCommerce. He wrestles with client data, coding front and back end, and provision servers. Tom love process and being efficient to make coding as smooth a ride as possible. Tom’s been using WordPress since it had that horizontal admin bar. Riding bikes, music, and his son keep him busy when not staring at a computer.

Using Composer to manage WP

I’ve been looking into using a more modern approaching to deploying and managing WordPress. Composer, dependency management, has taken the PHP world by storm and is a fantastic way to quickly set up a site and lock down versions of plugins as well as opening up an entire world of code repositories for use in your own plugins. Once you’ve tasted the power of Composer you can never go back.

Introducing Our Third Round of Speakers at WordCamp Manchester

It’s now time to introduce our latest speakers to WordCamp Manchester! Tickets for food and t-shirts close in a few days, so if you want to be fed and stylish as well as inspired, please pick up a ticket before this Friday!

Elliot Taylor

Elliot runs WooCommerce agency called Raison based in Brighton, UK. Working client side and client-facing has given Elliot a unique look at how we run our ecommerce operations and the hurdles that are met along the way. Recently his team have been focusing their direction on product ideas and consultancy to help overcome these snagging points.

Building our Product – from a client agency to a product agency

We have just finished developing our first ‘proper’ product. I say ‘proper’ because although as a 3 person agency we’ve built many a plugin, they are often treated like mistresses; only worked on in the evenings and weekends. This product we wanted to treat like a client. I’d like to talk about the process of creating a product, how we built up a financial buffer from client work, the reasons why decided to move from being a client facing agency to a product building agency, whether it is working and the lessons learnt along the way.

David Murphy

Prior to joining Automattic a year ago David was a engineering manager for Canonical for over seven years, and have over 20 years experience in the industry. David has authored two technical books, numerous articles, and participated in various projects. David is a husband, a father of four, and he helps run two schools a as Governor.

Managing WordPress with Ansible

How to deploy and manage your own WordPress hosts using Ansible, from local virtual machines for development to single host instances to multi-host stacks that scale all using the same tools. Despite the varied and plentiful choices for WordPress hosting that are available, there is still something liberating about running your own servers. Providers like Digital Ocean, Linode, and Amazon Web Services have reduced or removed most of the barriers for those that want to take the leap, but Systems Administration remains an art of its own. Ansible allows us to build on the best practices of others as well as inventing our own to create reproducible environments for local development, private staging, and public instances. My session will introduce Ansible, touch on vagrant and cloud hosting, show how to deploy WordPress using Ansible, and demonstrate how we can re-use these tools across multiple environments.

Michael Cropper

Michael is the Managing Director of Contrado Digital who works with ambitious organisations and tech startups to boost revenue online through effective digital marketing and website development. Working at a strategic level with business owners and directors, he bridges the gap between what businesses need next to fulfill their ambitions and the finer technical implementations of how this is going to be achieved. Michael has a wide background working with large brands and organisations helping them grow internationally all the way down to helping startup businesses make the right decisions early on. Being heavily involved with the WordPress community he is a strong believer of utilising open source technologies within business to help them succeed. Key specialties include website development, SEO, PPC and Google Analytics. He can be found on Twitter @Contrado Digital / @MickCropper, LinkedIn at /MichaelCropper86 and regularly publishing useful resources on digital topics for businesses over on the company blog.

Tracking Your Content Marketing Results Accurately

Without a clear tracking strategy you should not be investing time in content marketing. Tracking your digital marketing activities accurately will enable you to justify the time you are investing, see a clear return on your investment and direct you efforts in the future based on past results. Reviewing the core tools to track your digital marketing activities accurately, how to integrate these tools into a effective process and how to deal with the growing Google Analytics referral spam problem.

We’ve one more round of speakers to go, but we advise you to get your tickets in soon to avoid disappointment.

Announcing The Second Group of Speakers at WordCamp Manchester

With confirmations coming in thick and fast we’re able to announce the second group of speakers who will be speaking at WordCamp Manchester on October 10th. As speakers are being announced, we’re expecting tickets to be picked up quickly. As such, bag your ticket now and be sure to see some amazing speakers.

Mike Little

Co-founder of WordPress, founder and director of Zed1.com Mike is a WordPress specialist: he build sites, custom plugins, and themes; he provide consultation, training, and much more.

VPS hosting for speed and security

In his talk, Mike will detail setting up a secure, performant, VPS using modern up to date techniques. Covering WordPress, Nginx, caching, DNS, email, and security.

Dave Green

Dave Green is a Yorkshire tea drinking web developer from sunny Manchester specialising in front-end development, WordPress and WooCommerce. He has been developing websites using WordPress for the last five years and is one of the main cogs in the machine known as Make Do: a team of engineers and designers specialising in WordPress development.

Building themes using the WP Customizer

If you’re not already using the customiser to add custom ‘options’ into your themes, then this talk will help you get started! Dave will cover the fundamentals of getting your theme ready for customiser action before showing you how to add settings, controls, sections and panels. Then the talk will touch on more advanced topics such as enabling live updates to preview your changes, exercising control over your website’s colours and finally how to add your own custom controls for more advanced input options.

Konstantinos Kouratoras

Konstantinos Kouratoras is a web developer based on Crete, Greece. He took a MSc in Computer Science with specialization in User Experience and Web Standards. He is a WordPress lover and currently working for OnTheGoSystems, the makers of WPML and Toolset plugins. His main tasks include in-development testing and technical writing. He is also an associate author of WordPress section on Smashing Magazine.

Testing in WordPress: Building High Quality Products

Testing process is very important as it helps to speed up your development workflow, keep your source code away from bugs, improve user experience and build high quality products.

In this session Konstantinos will talk about:

  • Testing tips and tools
  • Automated tests
  • Usability tests and how to get the most out of users feedback

Edmund Turbin

Edmund Turbin is a London based Solutions Engineer at WP Engine originally from New York. He has been developing web sites for over 15 years and has experience with various CMS platforms at media, publishing and ad tech companies. Some milestone development initiatives that Edmund has been a key part of are the University of Surrey, shape.com, manhattan.de and the upcoming WP Engine Partner Portal. When the laptop is closed, Edmund enjoys music technology, cycling and spending time with his family.

Working in Harmony – Optimize Your WordPress Development Workflow

Development process is a critical part of making a WordPress project a success. Defining a workflow and establishing development tools can help you code more efficiently. This session is intended for developers looking to fine tune the tools they use to code more efficiently.

Announcing The First Group of Speakers at WordCamp Manchester!

So with a little over a month or so to go we’re delighted to announce the first group of speakers to WordCamp Manchester 2015!

Liz Hannaford

Liz teaches Multimedia Journalism at Manchester Metropolitan University and before that was a news journalist at BBC World Service radio for 15 years. Liz founded and co-organises Hacks/Hackers Manchester and ran a Code Club at her local primary school. She’s fascinated by the intersection between technology and journalism and has contributed a chapter on computational journalism to the book, Data Journalism: Mapping the Future (2013) edited by John Mair and Richard Lance Keeble.

Developing your Content Strategy

So you’ve got a blog, chosen a great-looking theme, added some plug-ins. Now you “just” need to write some content that people are going to want to read and share with their network. That means having a content strategy. It doesn’t have to be complicated but you need to think about that strategy every time you sit down to write a blog post. She’ll be drawing on journalistic skills to help you devise your own content strategy including:- – Deciding what to write about. And when. And where. And how. – Making it easier for people to find your content. – Engaging with your target audience

Mark Wilkinson

Mark is a Freelance WordPress developer working from home in Lancashire and a former secondary school teacher of Computing. He builds both large and small WordPress sites for clients and agencies across the UK and blogs about WordPress at markwilkinson.me. Mark is particularly interested in using WordPress in different ways, getting away from a CMS or blog.

A Year in Freelancing – Lessons Learned, Tips and Tricks

After freelancing for just over a year now and having left a well paid job this talk outlines lessons he has learned from taking the plunge to being a freelancer and some tips and tricks he’s learned along the way. This talk will benefit anyone looking to become a freelancer or any current freelancers that are looking for some tips and tricks on getting by.

Chelsea Louise Haden

Freelance content writer, blog trainer and social marketer of seven years specialising in working with WordPress agencies. She loves to take on projects that are related to education and training, conservation, outdoor living, food and hospitality.

Top tips for web agencies to collaborate with freelance content writers more efficiently

As a content writer who has collaborated with various web agencies on a freelance basis, Chelsea’s experienced some issues that have made her role harder than it should be and problematic for the client. She will talk about how web agencies can work with content writers more efficiently to assist with speedier projects and happier clients. In her talk, she’ll cover these main areas: attitudes towards content writing / content writers, communication and the systems to put in place to aid it positively and how your client and content writer can work together to assist a successful project.

Tim Nash

Tim is a consultant and trainer, probably best known for his work with WordPress (though he has a eclectic background covering a broad range of subjects). When asked what he does for a living the usual reaction is “Stuff” so Tim is probably one of the few “Stuff” Consultants out there. A regular speaker at tech events and one of organisers of WPLeeds. He also blogs at timnash.co.uk.

A Very Modern WordPress Stack

WordPress doesn’t live in isolation but’s sits as part of a stack. From the operating system, to the web server each aspect of the stack should be carefully chosen. In addition WordPress can be enhanced by using other application in tandem. Tim takes a look at the eco-system that WordPress lives in, to help people create a very modern WordPress stack.

Jason King

Ex-librarian who builds WordPress websites for non-profit organisations. Co-organiser for NetSquared London, putting on monthly talks about tech and social good.

20 ways to improve the experience of content editing in WordPress

How can you improve on the default WordPress dashboard; and make the post editing toolbar less cluttered, more intuitive and relevant for your users? All it takes is a bit of forethought and a sprinking of code in functions.php. Why do this? To make life easier for content editors, help them avoid some common mistakes, and put some useful new options on the editing toolbar.

We’re looking to announce more speakers in the next few days. With speakers being announced tickets are sure to go, so if you want to come, you can bag your ticket here!

WordCamp Manchester Tickets on Sale!

WordCamp Manchester tickets for October 2015 are now available!

For £30, you will get all the following:-

  • A ticket to the two track conference at the MMU on the Saturday.
  • A fabulous t-shirt that will make you envious of all your work colleagues when you wear it into work on the Monday after the conference.
  • A lunch (we have lots of dietary options that will hopefully accommodate everybody, but if we have missed you, please speak to us and we’ll get something sorted).
  • An afterparty in one of the newest venues in Manchester.

When they’re gone they’re gone, so go to the ticketing page and grab yours now.

WordCamp Manchester is over. Check out the next edition!