January WordPress London Meetup

Happy New Year to you all! The next #wpldn is going to be a busy one with four speakers for the night. (The building entrance is still the temporary one to the left.)

WordCamp London 2016 will be closing the Call for Papers this Monday, 18th January 2016!

Get your submissions (https://2016.london.wordcamp.org/wordcamp-london-opens-call-for-papers/) in now or get in touch with the organising team who can help you settle on a topic: london@wordcamp.org

If you've got questions about speaking or applying to speak, take a look at their FAQ (https://2016.london.wordcamp.org/faq-questions-you-want-to-ask-about-speaking-at-wcldn/)

Ticket sales open on the 25th January 2016 - so keep your eyes peeled for announcements!

Missed a #wpldn recently? Catch up at http://wpldn.uk

Tidy Up Your WordPress Site for the New Year!

Now is the perfect time to give your WordPress website some quick housekeeping and get it into shape for the New Year. Do you need that new Twenty Sixteen theme? Have you updated the copyright date in your footer? When did you last optimise your database to remove old saved revisions? Have you recently checked your SEO keyword rankings? This presentation will give you a basic checklist of some practical things you can do on your own WordPress website.

Presented by Mike Pead (https://twitter.com/mikepead). Mike runs Primary Image (http://www.primaryimage.com), based in Westcliff-on-Sea in Essex, which predominantly specialises in WordPress web design, support and hosting. Mike has a particular interest in WordPress security and speed optimisation. Follow @primaryimage (https://twitter.com/primaryimage) for business and web design tips.

Preparing Your Plugin for a .org Release

How do you get a plugin onto the WordPress.org repository (https://wordpress.org/plugins/)? What steps do you need to take? Are there any specific requirements?

These are just some of the questions this talk, aimed at anyone who wants to push a plugin to the WordPress.org repository will answer. We will go through the steps you need to take in order to prepare your plugin, some best practices in the plugin code and how to submit it to .org.

Presented by Mark Wilkinson (https://twitter.com/wpmark). 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 (http://markwilkinson.me/). Mark is particularly interested in using WordPress in different ways, getting away from a CMS or blog. Follow him @wpmark (https://twitter.com/wpmark)

10 Step Guide to doing your own thing (with WordPress)

I'll share the 10 most important things I've learned since I started to use WordPress and the experiences faced in starting a WordPress-focused web development agency.

I'll share stuff on how focusing on a single path and managing your ideas, risks, fears and failures will make you better at what you do. I'll also include my own personal mantra about why I chose to go 100% WordPress, quite simply: “You’re either a genius or an idiot if you build your own CMS, choose wisely”.

My hope is that everyone can take something away from this talk. In the spirit of open-source and WordPress I feel that we should always be open and share our career paths if only to inspire the next generation not to make the same mistakes!

Presented by Kimb Jones (https://twitter.com/mkjones). Kimb is the co-founder of UK-based WordPress agency Make Do (http://www.makedo.net). In a previous life he worked in the corporate surroundings of the NHS for over 10 years working in both IT and Marketing. He promises it wasn’t as boring as it sounds (mostly).

He’s been running a local WordPress meetup in Sheffield (UK) for over 5 years and is the main co-ordinator of WordCamp Sheffield and was on the WordCamp Europe 2014 (Sofia) organising team and has been speaking & involved with WordCamp’s since 2009.

You can find out more about Kimb at his site: http://kimb.me or follow him @mkjones (https://twitter.com/mkjones)

Building themes with the WP Customizer API

If you’re not already using the customizer 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 customizer 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.

Presented by Dave Green (https://twitter.com/davetgreen). Dave 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 (http://www.makedo.net/): a team of engineers and designers specialising in WordPress development. Follow him @davetgreen (https://twitter.com/davetgreen)

Follow #wpldn (https://twitter.com/wpldn) on Twitter for all the latest and like us on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/wpldn) to take the conversation further. Have a talk you'd like to present? We'd love to hear from you: speakers@wpldn.co.uk