Widgetize Everything: Building smarter WordPress themes with Widgets and Templates (WordCamp Montreal 2010)

We all know the value of using widgets to customize “the sidebar” of WordPress themes, but the underlying system is rarely used to its full potential. By creating many specialized and contextual sidebars any part of a theme can quickly be made customizable and extensible. This talk will cover all aspects of widgetizing themes, including how to register sidebars, problems to watch out for and tons of ideas for how to make the most of them. Theming and PHP/HTML knowledge definitely a plus, but not necessarily required.

Beginners Guide to WordPress WordCamp Montreal 2010

This introductory session is geared for bloggers, web designers and programmers who are new to WordPress. Even those who don’t know a Codex from a Cadillac will feel comfortable here. Delving into WordPress from a beginner’s point of view, we use unintimidating plain language to explain the fundamental concepts of WordPress, from themes, to widgets, to plug-ins. We go spelunking in the admin panel and show real-world examples of what WordPress can do.

Shannon Smith is the founder of Café Noir Design Inc. a small boutique web design company in the Montreal area specializing in bilingual web design. She supports web standards, semantic markup, microformats, open source products, and sustainable business practices. Shannon works with a number of PHP/MySQL content management systems to create clean, minimalist designs, that adhere to W3C standards.

Kathryn Presner of Zoonini Web Services does a lot more than simply create attractive websites – she delivers custom-designed solutions tailored to her clients’ goals. Coming from a communications background, Kathryn takes a holistic approach to web design and development, building unique sites that work well, look fabulous, and are easily found in search-engine results. She is passionate about helping people avoid common website pitfalls and enjoys speaking to entrepreneurs on the topic.

WordPress beyond the blog

WordPress today Not just blogs anymore – WordPress is a CMS Powers social networks and membership sites Used for editorial group planning and management

What about security?

WordPress has a lot of users, that means bugs will be found – that’s a good thing!
Security updates are fairly frequent, fixing everything from issues with the code, to PHP security breaches
Can you say the same of your closed source CMS?

A few words about blogs

Anyone can blog, they are straight forward and easy
With WordPress, blogging is no harder than writing in a word processor
The content flow of blogs have changed how text is treated online
Anyone can expand their WordPress blog with plugins and themes at the click of a button

WordPress as a CMS • Still easy to update and manage • Still easy to expand feature-wise thanks to plugins • Widget areas makes most sites a breeze to manage

Anyone can blog with WordPress, so anyone can use it as a CMS

The WordPress CMS setup
Using static Pages for static content (about page, contact us)
Using categories for often updated sections (news section, blog)
Using Page Templates to gain more design control when needed

CMS with benefits
WordPress is SEO friendly from the start
Tagging is hot, and WordPress got it out of the bo
x The huge amount of plugins means that someone probably already solved your problem – no more waiting for deployment of a simple Tweet button
Huge choice of developers