I discussed my experience at Seattle WordCamp 2012 in a previous post. This one is simply to serve as a collecting point for all the presentation slides from the event, or as many as I could find in any case. Feast below, there’s some great info to be had….

END USER/ BLOGGER TRACK

Using WordPress as Your Company’s Website
Kelli Wise
See the slides

SEO for Bloggers
Justin Briggs
See the slides

WYSI-WHA!?! Taming the WordPress Editor
Mark Root-Wiley & Christine Winckler
See the slides

How to Promote Your Blog Without Losing Your Soul
Laura Kimball
See the checklist

Copyright Craziness: Reality, The Law and the Future
Aaron Hockley
Resources

POWER USERS / DESIGNERS

Going Beyond The Basics of WordPress
Lucy Beer
See the slides

How to Build a Custom Portfolio Feature Slider
Christine Rondeau
See the tutorial

Underscoring Theme development
Michael Fields
_s theme on Github
Monster Widget

DEVELOPER TRACK

WordPress at the Command Line – An Introduction to wpshell and wp-cli
Daniel Bachhuber
See the slides

The Capitalist in the Co-Op: The Art & Science of the Premium WordPress Business
Shane Pearlman
See the slides

Integrating WordPress with External APIs
Eric Mann
See the slides

There’s a Function for That: More for Less with Core Functions
Zack Tollman
See the slides 

Performance, Optimization and Scaling
Pete Mall
See the slides 

This weekend I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at Seattle’s WordCamp. I have never attended a WordCamp outside of Southern California before and was pleased to experience the same feeling of community there that I have at other events.

My topic was “WordPress – Going Beyond The Basics: An Adventure Behind the Scenes of your WordPress Site!”

The goal was to introduce some key files, concepts and best practices for WordPress users who are not developers but are ready to take their knowledge of WordPress further than the dashboard. The presentation included a quick live demo of how to make a CSS tweak using Chrome Developer Tools, by way of a child theme.

I think the presentation went fairly well. Public speaking is not something that comes naturally, but I do it to challenge myself as well as to give back to the community by sharing what I have learned. The more I do it, the easier it becomes, but there’s always much improvement to be made! That said, I received good feedback from quite a few folks who came and chatted to me afterwards and throughout the day, and saw quite a few nice comments on Twitter. Thanks to all those people – your encouragement always helps!!

The event as a whole was rather awesome. The organizers did a great job, making sure everything ran smoothly all day long. Not to mention the fact that it was held at the beautiful Seattle Art Museum, and they provided a great lunch! I saw some great talks. Amongst the highlights, Scott Berkun gave the keynote and was engaging and insightful. Christine Rondeau’s presentation demonstrating how to make a custom feature slider without using a plugin was really cool! I met lots of lovely people that I hope to keep in touch with in some way, and had many stimulating conversations. As I always say, look out for your local WordCamp event – they are absolutely worth attending!

Were you at WordCamp Seattle? Or have you attended a WordCamp recently? Share your experiences in the comments!

So here’s a few of my favorite examples of custom WordPress sites that break the mold.

Twisted Sista

A slick showcase of hair products :: Visit Site

Moment Church

A beautiful design and unique layout defy all WordPress expectations :: Visit Site

Wolverine Worldwide

Wolverine represents some major, worldwide shoe brands such as Cat footwear, Merrell, Harley-Davidson Footwear and more. If WordPress is good enough for these guys…. :: Visit Site

Think Space Gallery

A brand new WordPress site for Culver City’s Thinkspace art gallery provides a fitting showcase for great art :: Visit Site

Trevor Hoehne

Awesome portfolio site :: Visit Site

GETideas

WordPress site featuring a BuddyPress communit of over 2700 members. Check out the AWESOME rolloevers on the navigation as a way of presenting a lot of information in an organized way. :: Visit Site

The Kitchen Community

Beautiful full screen site featuring sticking photography for a Colorado-based restaurant :: Visit Site

If you have come across any ground-breaking WordPress sites, please leave them in the comments!

One of the most important factors in off-site Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is backlinks. A backlink is simply a link from another website, to your website. Search engines see links as “votes”, so the more links, and quality, relevant links at that –  you have pointing to your site, the better. All else being equal, if you can get better backlinks than your competitors, you can outrank them. Given its importance to SEO, it’s frustrating that there isn’t one solidly reliable (free) tool with which to do backlink research. Backlink research can help you :

• Find out what your website’s link profile is looking like, and what progress you’ve made
• Do some competitive analysis in your niche – how well are competitors’ sites performing
• Assess how much better you have to do in order to outrank your competitors.

There are several different tools available, some free and some requiring a paid subscription. You will probably need to consult a couple of sources to get a well-rounded concept of any site’s link profile.

Here’s three of my current favorite, free,  tools for this:

Blekko.com

You have to set up a free account, but it’s worth the couple of minutes that will take. Blekko provides quite a bit of helpful data on websites’ SEO profiles, including information on inbound links, crawl stats and more.

BackLinkWatch.com

This is quite an awesome tool for listing backlinks to a site. It will also indicated if a link is ‘nofollow’ and provide the anchor text for each link.

OpenSite Explorer.org

This tool is run by the mighty SEOmoz. As such, over time, the amount of info you can get for free has significantly decreased as they try and push their paid memberships. Still, when used in conjunction with other tools, it can still help flesh out your research.

Do you have any fave  SEO tools? Share in the comments!

Header image :: “The Right Tool” 

Backing up your WordPress site is a necessity, but it can be hard to find an affordable, easy-to-implement solution that covers all the bases. I’m always on the hunt for the best solution, and the method presented here is just one of several possible solutions.

Here are some of my ideal criteria for a backup solution:

1. Ability to back up both database and files
2. Ability to schedule these backups separately – I haven’t found too many situations where a full file backup is needed as frequently as the database backup
3. Offers backup to an off-site 3rd party. You don’t want to keep backups on your server because if something goes wrong with the server, your backups could be screwed.Backups sent via email are usually only realistic for the database, full site backups tend to get too large to email.

One of my newest favorite solutions is to backup to a free DropBox account. With Dropbox you can get 2GB of storage for free which will keep you going for a while, and should you run out, you can easily delete old backups.

I’ve been using a free plugin called Back WP Up  to accomplish this. It meets all three of my criteria above. The options panel may look a bit overwhelming to newbies so here’s a brief walk through it.

So first of all go to Jobs > Add New

This is a bit of a scary looking screen, but do not fear – the main things to pay attention to are:

1) Job Type, most importantly “Database Backup” and “File Backup” – these are the 2 core areas you want to include in your backup. If you want them both to be backed up at the same time, on the same schedule, you can create one “Job” that will cover both, in which case you want to keep both these boxes checked.

If you want to schedule them separately you will create 2 Jobs – one where the database is checked and another where only the files are checked. You can name your jobs appropriately so it’s easy to identify which is which in your dashboard.

2) When first setting up your jobs, you will need to allow the plugin to connect with your Dropbox account. This plugin also offers numerous other 3rd party cloud storage providers so you can use any of them, but I’m using Dropbox because it’s probably the easiest for newbies to get up and running with. So you’ll go create your Dropbox account then press authenticate to connect the accounts.

3) Job Schedule – select how often you want the backup to run. If you blog frequently you may want to do a daily database backup. if you don’t blog that much, weekly may be more appropriate. the hours/minutes are on a 24 hour clock system. Don’t forget to click “activate scheduling”.

4) Backup File – I like to add a prefix to the filename so that I can differentiate in my dropbox which are the database backups and which are the files backup so I use: file_backwpup_   or db_backwpup_

5) Send Log – I recommend you UNCHECK the “only send an email if there are errors” box at the beginning so that you get the logs emailed to you and you can make sure it’s running smoothly. Once you know it works you can then select to only get errors. Generally speaking, if backup plugins of any kind don’t work properly, it’s GENERALLY due to a server issue, so you want to know right away if it’s not working so you can talk to your webhosting company and see if it can be resolved. Once there’s a track record of the plugin working, you only need to be notified if there is a problem.

6) File Backup – The plugin can also backup other folders you may have on your server besides core wp folders so you can use this area to specify which folders you want to backup, such as only your current theme folder. You may want to exclude theme folders of inactive themes because it may be a waste of space to back them up. If you’re not using them, for secuirty purposes I’d recommend deleting old themes you’re not using.

Once you’ve configured these options you can click “save changes” and you should be good to go!

If you are not averse to paying a little money for a backup solution there are a couple of really good paid options.

Automattic’s VaultPress is an awesome solution for corporate or enterprise sites. It’s like running time machine for your WordPress site – it backs up incrementally as you change things and has other awesome features. However for $15/month for one site, it might be overkill for small sites or non-money-making bloggers.

My other recommended backup system is Locker by CodeGarage. They do daily site backups as well as security scans and uptime monitoring. You get a better bang for your buck here especially if you have multiple sites.

What is your preferred WordPress backup method? Share it in the comments!

Since I’ve had a few clients that have been using the Thesis theme, I’ve learned a thing or two about it, and have written a couple posts in the past. On one of those posts I received a question about changing the color of the comment box in Thesis and thought I would respond with a screencast. You’ll find the code snippets mentioned in the video,at the bottom of the post.

/* This changes the background color of the comments box */

.custom #comment_list {
background-color: #ccc;
}

/* This changes the text of the comments themselves */

.custom #comment_list .format_text p {
color: red;
}

I used “red” as a shorthand here just for ease and simplicity. But you can use one of many websites to find the exact color and hex code you need.

Do you have any other customization questions regarding Thesis or other WordPress themes? Post them in the comments!

Many WordPress themes do not yet provide a way to have totally different sidebar content on different pages of your site. Some may provide a little flexibility with, for example a sidebar for the blog and a different sidebar for static pages, but sometimes you need more comprehensive control – for example you may need an additional set of navigation on a certain set of sub-pages. There’s several different plugins that help you gain this type of flexibility with your site.

Display Widgets

The Display Widgets plugin is perhaps the simplest and most user-friendly option. After activating the plugin you will notice that when you add a widget to your sidebar, there is a system of checkboxes whereby you can easily tell the widget to show up, or not to show up on certain pages/posts or types of pages/posts. In addition you can choose to display a widget based on whether a user is logged in or not, which would be handy if you have any kind of membership site or protected content pages. This plugin is easy enough for beginners to use!

Dynamic Widgets

The Dynamic Widgets plugin does a very similar job to Display Widgets, but  adds a couple of extra controls for widgets which you may find useful. The interface is perhaps not as immediately easy to use as Display Widgets, becuase it actually takes you to a separate page to control the settings for each widget, but the extra features, provided by checkboxes are:

• Display widget according to the user’s role, including any custom roles you have created
• Display according to date – this could be really handy if you want to run a promotion of some kind – you can specify the dates a widget can be shown
• Display according to browser – not sure how you might use this (other than telling people on Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade…) but it sure is cool!

Widget Logic Plugin

This was one of the original plugins I used for controlling widgets and I’m including it in the list for more advanced users who don’t want to deal with checkboxes and are comfortable with WordPress conditional tags. This plugin adds a simple field to each widget which requires you use a conditional tag to control where the widget displays.  It’s not too hard once you understand it, but definitely not user-friendly off the bat.

For example, to make the widget show up only on single post pages, you would enter the tag:  is_single()

To make it show up on a specific post or page you need the ID number of the page which is not readily available on any admin screen. You need to actually look in the url when editing a post/page to look for the id number. Or you can install this handy plugin called Reveal IDs which will conveniently show the IDs in a column inside the admin area. So you identify a page/post that you want a widget to display on, locate the ID and use the following tag:  is_single( ’106′ )
where 106 is the ID of that page/post.

You can do all sorts of combinations to test for things like sub-pages etc. Anything you can do with a conditional tag, you can apply to a widget.

These three plugins so far have given you control over where and how individual widgets show up in the existing sidebars your theme already provides. So this means that when in your Widgets screen, you’ll see a sidebar are with several widgets inside, some of which show throughout the site, and some that show only on certain pages. There’s nothing wrong with this set up, although if you have a lot of widgets it could be confusing to keep things organized and to determine at a glance which widget is going to show up in which sidebar.

So another approach is to use a plugin that enables you to create entirely new sidebar areas that appear on your Widgets screen.

Custom Sidebars Plugin

With this plugin you can create new sidebars to use in your theme and you can then designate which sidebar shows up on which page. The interface is not particularly user-friendly, but once you get how it works, it does do the job nicely. It’s a 4-step process.

1. You have to specify which of your current sidebars are “replaceable”. This means you can choose to replace one of your theme’s default sidebars with a custom one.
2. After you have selected one that can be replaced, you can then make a new sidebar.
3. Now when you are on your page editing screen you’ll have a box and drop down where you can specify which sidebar will show up on that page.
4. You add widgets to that particular sidebar on the Appearance > Widgets screen as usual.

So now when you go to your Widgets screen you will see a dedicated area for the new sidebar you have created:

Per Page Sidebars Plugin

This plugin does the same job as custom sidebars but has a little better workflow. On your page editing screen you will now see a box where you can enable a custom sidebar for that page, and choose which of your current sidebars you would replace.After you make your selection and save the page, when you head over to the widgets screen you’ll see a new widget area labelled with your page name.

Both plugins seem to work equally fine – the only difference would be your preference for which workflow you prefer.

END USER TRACK:

Start-Ups and WordPress
Chris Lema
WordPress can be used for more than just your Blog or your Web Site. It can just as easily power a variety of other parts of your business model – including validating your product concepts, supporting existing customers, capturing feedback, and more. Here’s the scoop on how to use WordPress for landing pages, project hubs, support systems, video membership sites, and surveys.
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SEO With WordPress
Gary Magnone
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Custom Goals and Custom Themes
Cody Landefeld
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WordPress as your Publishing Hub
Andrew Spittle
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Formula For a Successful WordPress Project
Wes Chyrchel
If you build WordPress websites for a living, this presentation is for you. We go through why you are in business and then steps through the process of handling your project Before, During and After. A great compliment to any developers reference materials.
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WordPress MultiSite
Brad Williams
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Planning & Prepping A Design For Development
Robert Nienhuis
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How To Fix Broken UI
Steve Zehngut
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Information Architecture for WordPress
Chris Ford
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DEVELOPER TRACK:

Accomplish It With Core: Galleries, Sliders & More
Andy Stratton
“Building custom theme/plugin functionality using powerful built-in core API’s / libraries. Thinking about things in terms of core functionality and rolling your own.”
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Premium Plugins & Adhering To The GPL
Brandon Dove
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Playing Hooky with Actions and Filters
Jeffrey Zinn
Basic to intermediate skills for WordPress hooks (actions and filters).
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Integration of WordPress With External APIs
Aaron Campbell
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Custom Post Types and Taxonomies
Jared Atchison
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Using Git: Case Studies & Workflow
Joachim Kudish
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Theme Busters “R” Us
Lance Willett
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Stay Classy, WordPress
Andrew Norcross
Get the code
Slides will be posted here

Caching for Coders
Zack Tollman
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Facebook is getting ready to complete the rollout of Timeline to all business Pages on March 30th. So no matter what, your page will have Timeline on March 30th, whether you like it or not!! As with all things Facebook, there’s good and bad to these changes. My personal biggest peeves are that the huge image space at the top, while pretty,  clearly favors creative types and puts us regular, creatively-inept types at a disadvantage. Secondly, I also find the layout hard to read. The traditional stream reads easily from top to bottom in a straight line. The Timeline stream jumps back and forth from left to right, which is pretty unnatural to the eye.

From a business point of view, since switching my personal profile Timeline, I’m noticing that when I, as an individual, “like” a Facebook Page, it seems to get very little exposure on my Timeline which is a bit unfortunate.

In any case, instead of re-hashing the wisdom that already exists, here are a couple of great resources you should read and bookmark that will help you understand the changes that are coming, as well help you make the most of your new Timeline Page.

HyperArts is one of the best resources for all things Facebook and they have a great “Frequently Asked Questions” post that gives you all the juicy details on the changes.

KissMetrics has an extensive guide to the new changes.

To get your creative juices flowing about how you might use your new Timeline page, here’s some examples of brands/businesses currently using Timeline:
Florence and the Machine
Starbucks - not a fan of their coffee but their clever choice of image manages to give them an ‘artisan’ feel – clever, if misleading…
Toyota – another great cover photo

How do you feel about Timeline? Will this help or hinder your business? Let me know in the comments below. 

Many WordPress users like to use a custom permalink structure  which includes the blog post category in their url for additional SEO value. If you create relevant, keyword-rich category names for your blog, having them in the permalink can be useful. If you are one of these people, you NEED this plugin in your life!

If you want to utilize the category name in your urls, you would use this custom structure in your Permalink settings:

So your url for a blog post would look something like this:

www.yoursite.com/seo-tips/how-to-rank-in-google

Where Seo Tips is the category assigned to that post.

However, if you’ve been using this structure you may have noticed that if you select multiple categories for a blog post, WordPress does not give you a way to select which category shows up in the url, therefore potentially foiling your SEO wizadry. According to the Codex:

When you assign multiple categories to a post, only one can show up in the permalink. This will be the lowest numbered category

This is not very helpful. But what is helpful is a nifty little plugin called Hikari Category Permalink

This is a very simple plugin with the sole purpose of letting you choose which category appears in the permalink when you are using multiple categories. After installing it, you will see that when editing a post, as you mouse over your categories, the word ‘permalink’ will appear next to each category (see below).

Simply click that link to designate the permalink category for that post. That category will then appear in bold after you update the post.

Voila! You may now proceed with your SEO wizadry.

*header image courtesy: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stickergiant/3769771267/