Schedule

Saturday, November 12th
8:00am Registration Opens
9:00am Opening Remarks and Special Guest Introduction
Good Morning and a perfect opportunity to meet our special guests.
9:45am Setting Up Your WordPress Locally, Remotely, or Loca-motely!
by Sam Cohen
You can build your web presence on wordpress.com, but a stand-alone version of WordPress has more functionality to offer aspiring and experienced bloggers, web developers, and designers.

Do you want to:

  • Design custom WordPress templates?
  • Build your WordPress site with no Internet connection?
  • Enable your clients to see your WordPress work in real-time?

You can do all these things and more, and I will show you how!
10:30am How to make a living, giving it away for free
by Christopher Ross
A look at how to make a living working with a free product like WordPress. The presentation looks at how bloggers, designers and developers can build authority, revenue and opportunities by supporting open source development.
11:15am She Said, He Said
by Jim Raffel and Shelby Sapusek
Jim Raffel and Shelby Sapusek debate WordPress related topics including blogging, networks and new technology and how they pertain to personal and business use. Their disagreements are sometimes minor and sometimes major but the debate is always lively and entertaining. In a live forum, Jim and Shelby will encourage audience participation to help fuel the conversation.
12:00am Lunch Break
1:30pm Treating Your Readers Like Customers
by Douglas Hanna
There are many examples of companies that use customer service to set themselves apart from the competition. In this interactive session, we’ll cover a number of ways that bloggers can help get make their readers feel like valued customers when they visit the blog and to ensure that they’re coming back and staying engaged with the blog community. We’ll go over what plugins you can use to make readers feel welcome, how you can encourage readers to feel loyal to your blog, and get your best visitors coming back more often and engaging more.
2:15pm WordPress Tools and Tips for Any Niche
by Nile Flores
WordPress as a content management system just makes sense for any purpose. That is why 15% of the Internet today is powered by WordPress. So, why should you use it for your business, blog, or in fact, any type of site? I will be sharing both tools and tips for any niche to help you on your way. Let me help you think outside the box, whether you are brand new to WordPress, or used WordPress enough, but not sure how to get your site over the next plateau.
3:00pm Speaker Panel
We’re putting a set of our speakers on stage for you to fire questions at. What do you want to ask them that they haven’t already said? Bring your questions, because they got answers.
3:45pm Building a community around your content
by Matt Lincoln Russell
Enabling comments doesn’t make a community. Chris Brogan said the difference between an audience and community is which way the chairs are facing. We’ll talk about how to turn those chairs on your WordPress site, why you would want to do that (or not!), and the perils and rewards you’ll find along the way. We’ll discuss basic strategies for community building, and then end with how to quickly integrate an open-source Vanilla forum to jump-start your efforts.
4:30pm Can you commercialize your plugin?
by Garth Koyle
Many successful businesses began in the WordPress plugin repository. If you’re like most developers, you’ve wondered if your development could make enough money to support yourself and possibly a small business. Garth from Event Espresso will teach you how to evaluate whether there is a market for your code and if it’s worth the effort. Learn how to answer these important questions: Who is my target customer and what do they really need?, How big is my target market?, How do I determine what price I should charge?, How profitable will I be or how much money can I make?
5:15pm The WordPress Game Show
How much do you know about WordPress? Or should I ask, how much DON’T you know? Join us in a trivia game show about WordPress. Share your WordPress knowledge, learn fun facts about WordPress, and win some amazing WordPress prizes!
6:00pm Closing Remarks

Sunday, November 13th
9:00am In the beginning was the Word
by Wally Metts
Even though WordPress is constantly adding new tools and modalities, content is still king. And good content requires concrete, concise and credible writing. Whether you are writing long form or short form blog posts, the basics never change. And we aren’t talking about grammar here—we’re talking about passion, purpose and personality. Review some things you forgot, renew some energy you’ve lost, and reclaim some content you own with a fresh vision and a clear voice.
9:45am Custom Post Types – What, Why, and How
by Heather Acton
With WordPress 3.0 came the power of custom post types (CPTs). They can be rather intimidating to implement for the first time, but I’ll attempt to make your learning curve less steep than mine was.
In this discussion we’ll cover:

  • what are CPTs
  • CPT applications
  • how to implement CPTs on your project

We’ll touch on related topics including custom taxonomies, custom metaboxes, and custom page templates for the archives and single post pages for your CPT.
10:30am WordPress Show-n-Tell
by You
Here’s your opportunity to share what you’re doing with WordPress. We’re opening the stage up to anyone to share their WordPress story. Working on a cool plugin or theme? Have an awesome success story about what WordPress has done for you? Get up on stage for 5 minutes and share! (We will open up submissions the week of the event for you to apply.)
11:15am An Introduction to WordPress Security
by David Wilemski
In security circles, WordPress may have a stigma of being insecure however, the community has made great progress in improving the security around WordPress. In this talk, we’ll discuss what you can do as a user or maintainer of a WordPress site to improve the security beyond relying on the default settings. We’ll also take a look at why it is important to pay attention to the security of your sites and cover recent security incidents and the community response.
12:00am 21 Quick and Simple WordPress Tips
by WordCamp Detroit Organizers
If you haven’t learned enough by this point, each of your WordCamp Detroit organizers are going to share 3 WordPress tips that you should know. Get ready for a fast shuffle of 7 speakers in 30 minutes, and 21 quick and simple WordPress tips!
12:30pm Lunch Break
2:00pm WordPress Community Workshop
We’ve blocked off 3 hours of “you” time. Have burning WordPress questions? Need help with a plugin or theme? Want to know the possibilities of what WordPress can do? We’re going to make it easier to answer all of these questions. Get questions answered and answer others’ questions. WordPress would exist without it’s community and neither would this event. Let’s talk WordPress.
5:00pm End of WordCamp Detroit