Featured Speaker: Dale Mugford

Co-Founder of BraveNewCode, Dale Mugford, has been working with the web since 1994 and WordPress since 1.0. His company BraveNewCode has been building WordPress-only websites and plugins for the past 5 years. BraveNewCode has become a leader in the WordPress community demonstrating the awesomeness of WordPress and how to build a business on it.

Presentation: Go Mobile on WordPress

Which approach is right for you? This session explores different methods to deliver a mobile version of your WordPress-based website.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

WordPress is powerful, extensible, flexible, and extremely easy-to-use. This combination of attributes makes it the leading CMS/publishing software for websites.

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Featured Speaker: Kathryn Presner

Kathryn Presner is a web designer turned Automattic Happiness Engineer, who gets to meld her background in crafting WordPress sites with a love of helping people and troubleshooting. She gives back to the open-source community by answering questions as a volunteer WordPress.org support-forum moderator and presenting at events like WordCamp, Podcamp, and Girl Geek Dinners.

Non-web pastimes include cooking healthy and delicious food, cavorting with her three cats, and marvelling at her first crop of homegrown organic garlic. Follow @zoonini on Twitter.

Presentations: A Beginner’s Guide to WordPress & Passionate About Plugins

A Beginners Guide to WordPress is geared to 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 plugins. We go spelunking in the admin panel and show real-world examples of what WordPress can do. Questions are welcome, and no query is too basic, so don’t be shy!

Passionate About Plugins looks at how to make an informed decision about which plugin to use and how to troubleshoot any conflicts that may crop up, exploring factors including the likelihood of getting support if something goes amiss. We’ll review some recommended plugins, from common types to a few of the lesser known, including security tools and SEO plugins.

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Featured Speaker: Victor Granic

Victor Granic is part owner of a WordPress development, hosting and training company called SwitchWP. He built and manages their hosting environment as well as helping with the development of customer websites. SwitchWP places a strong emphasis on content strategy and gets a real kick out of helping people organize and manage their data which leads to easy to use, intuitive websites.

Presentation: Steps to Securing WordPress

My presentation is about how to better protect a WordPress installation from being hacked. There are lots of steps that can be taken to turn WordPress into a veritable bank vault and I plan on providing those in a clear and concise talk.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

The main thing I want people to get from my talk is that securing a WordPress installation environment should be approached using a layered strategy where each step adds some protection. Also, I hope to make it clear that the best defense is vigilance along with some best practices that apply to most software, including WordPress.

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Featured Speaker: Joe Rozsa

An award winning creative director, designer and owner of Trailer Trash Design, Joe thumbs his nose at the stuffed-shirt, smoke and mirrors approach to providing creative communication services.

Operating under the sometimes unheard of adage that work can be fun, Joe, with his off-the-cuff approach, offers his clients full service creative consulting, graphic design, advertising and production for print media collateral, websites, internet marketing and multi-media presentations.

Presentation: You want to stick that where?

In this case size does matter. This will be an informative review on sizing photos and graphic elements for WP blog posts and site pages. Attendees will learn that sizing photos and graphics doesn’t have to be complicated or scary.

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Featured Speaker: Shannon Smith

Shannon Smith is the founder of Café Noir Design, a boutique Montreal web design company specializing in multilingual web development. She builds beautiful, functional websites that her clients can update themselves and that are easy for search engines to find. She support things like making the web accessible for everyone, using open source software, helping organizations find greener more sustainable ways to operate through online technology and helping non-profits with online community organizing. Also foodie and mother of four.

Presentation: Taking WordPress to the World: Options for a Multilingual Site

About 2/3 of the world population speak more than one language and most of the world doesn’t use the Internet in English. This presentation will cover what components are needed for a successful multilingual WordPress site. We’ll compare different set-ups, review key plugins and examine common pitfalls. Then we’ll look at advanced features like e-commerce and email marketing.

This presentation will be accessible to anyone with a basic understanding of WordPress. No coding necessary.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Yes! It is possible to use WordPress in multiple languages!

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Clarification: Moo Business Cards

Update: We’ve just been told by our contact at Moo.com that there are no Moo watermarks on these card orders! That means you’re getting 100 watermark-free mini cards from Moo, and you’re only paying $4.00 for shipping. Quite a deal!

As mentioned previously, we’ve partnered with Moo to offer free mini business cards to all WordCamp Toronto 2012 attendees. What we haven’t mentioned is that there is a $4.00 shipping fee for the cards.

This was an oversight on our part, not Moo’s. We were told by Moo in advance that shipping costs would be reduced, but we didn’t look into the specific amount.

From now on, all reminders will make note of the shipping fee, so nobody feels tricked when they go through the ordering process.

To get your own mini-cards cards, go to http://moo.com/link/h8vh and choose “WordCamp Toronto 2012” as the direct shipping location for your order. Check the box to confirm your attendance.

Cards will be available for pick-up at the registration desk on Sept. 29th.

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Featured Speaker: Christopher Ross

Christopher has spoken at WordCamp events in Toronto and Montreal in the past, taught community college courses in web design, and run a successful WordPress based consulting business since 2005.

For the past three years, he has been focussed on delivering network based WordPress communities using WordPress multisite and WordPress VIP based solutions for business and government organizations.

Presentation: Building a Newspaper Website with WordPress

A complete overview of creating a newspaper website using WordPress. This presentation will cover common newspaper, and magazine concepts, starter themes, advertising integration, helpful plugins and solutions for newspapers from startups to national publications.

This talk will be focused on bloggers with limited technical knowledge. In 45 minutes, users will be brought though the steps required to implement a fully functional, WordPress powered news website.

What do you want folks to learn from your presentation?

Building a successful newspaper (or magazine) website using WordPress can be both fun and easy.

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Featured Speaker: Jonathan Davis

Jonathan is the lead developer of the Shopp e-commerce plugin for WordPress and owner of Ingenesis Limited. He is a designer of code solutions. He enjoys typography, good design, UX, solving e-commerce problems and helping people with WordPress. Back in Ohio, he helps organize WordPress meetups and WordCamp Columbus.

Presentation: WordPress and E-commerce: Navigating the Minefield

An overview of essential e-commerce concepts with some getting started tips for things to think about when setting up an e-commerce site. We’ll touch on payment gateways, how credit card processing really works, merchant accounts, SSL certificates, PCI compliance, basic WordPress security tips and a lighting review of popular e-commerce solutions for WordPress.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

Understanding the challenges everyone faces launching an e-commerce project and being armed to face them head-on with WordPress tools.

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Speakers, accommodations, and more!

Good afternoon, WordCampers! We’ve got another big round of updates for you this week:

Speakers, sessions, and schedule are finalized!
We’re in the process of adding the last few names to our lists. Hit the Speakers page and Sessions page for full details. We’re also pulling a page from the WordCamp Montreal playbook, and using Google Calendar to manage the schedule. You can grab your copy of the calendar on our Schedule page.

Business Cards from Moo!
We’ve teamed up with the folks at Moo to offer all WordCamp attendees 100 free mini business cards. To get your cards, visit this link and choose WordCamp Toronto as your shipping location. Your cards will be waiting for you at the college when you arrive on September 29th!

Room Discounts from Holiday Inn
We’re pleased to announce that Holiday Inn Express is offering group discounts for all WCTO attendees. Single and double rooms at their Lombard St. location can be booked for only $119 per night. To get it, you must call the hotel directly at 416-367-5555 and request the discount group rate for WordCamp Toronto.

Habanero’s is back as the official WordCamp Toronto party zone
Following the presentations on Saturday, we’ll be heading to Habanero’s on Wellington Street for a drinks and food. This is a great chance for you to sit down and chat with other attendees and speakers!

Updated Google Map now available
We’ve added a new public Google Map for WordCamp Toronto 2012, highlighting transit routes and points of interest for September’s event. Check our Location & Venues page for more details.

Get your badges!
Coming to WordCamp Toronto, and want to let others know? Here’s our first batch of badges for you to spread the word on your site! Feel free to hotlink the images – just click on the badge and copy the URL from your address bar.

 

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First wave of speakers and sessions are in!

Microphone headWe’ve just added our first batch of confirmed speakers and sessions to the site!

This update includes the vast majority of presenters for September, but we’re still waiting on some final confirmations to finish things off.

A roundup of what’s been added today:

We’ve taken down the Be A Speaker and Session Suggestions pages. Thanks to everyone that sent in their presentation suggestions, and an extra big thank you to everyone that applied to speak!

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