Author: Steph Yiu

For six years now, I’ve worked closely with publishers as they implement WordPress in their newsroom. I know how excited journalists get when they can publish content quickly and effortlessly with WordPress, and how flexible the platform can be for development teams.

In 2016, a group of us in the WordPress and journalism community came together and decided we wanted to host the first ever WordCamp for Publishers, to help empower anyone who uses WordPress to manage publications, big or small.

It all came together the fall of 2017, when Digital First Media hosted the first ever WordCamp for Publishers in The Denver Post building. It was a unique experience to create a brand new community event from the ground up.

The material that came out of the conference was incredible – we learned so much from publishers trying to solve problems using WordPress. As we get excited for this year’s conference, here’s a look back at the incredible content from 2017.

And, we look forward to seeing you in Chicago this fall! You can see our schedule, and buy your tickets now.

Why We Ditched WYSIWYG and Built Our Newsletter Tools in WordPress

Rebekah Monson, WhereBy.Us

WhereBy.Us creates stories, experiences, and daily local newsletters to help people plug into their cities — all powered by WordPress. This year, we moved to a WordPress Multisite instance, added a build process for multiple developers, built an app to sell newsletter advertising and moved newsletter creation from MailChimp’s UI into WordPress using a plug-in. We’ll walk you through why and how we made the switch, addressing all the benefits, drawbacks and solutions we found along the way.

Making Everyone Happy: Managing a Large Network of Sites

Meagan Ball, Tribune Broadcasting

Managing a large network of WordPress sites doesn’t have to be herding cats or playing favorites. In this session, we’ll talk about how at Tribune Media we manage more than 30 sites on WordPress.com VIP, with content produced by hundreds of producers across the nation. We’ll touch on how we manage breaking news, editorial workflow, author and content management, as well as communication, at scale. We’ll share what and how we borrowed from community plugins, and what we had to build ourselves to satisfy the needs of product and editorial, across a wide range of needs and wants.

Make a Statement: Using React to Create Content-rich Articles on WordPress

Andres Escobar, Interactive One

This session will cover the process IOne Digital uses to bring to life interactive layouts created by design teams using stackable and reusable React components.

Destructive Ad Tech and Practical Solutions

Ben Ilfeld, 10up

For better or worse, advertising is the lifeblood of the modern media ecosystem. Yet ads increasingly: 1) undermine publisher values and audience trust (advertorial native ads); 2) interrupt, compromise, and abuse our audiences (interstitials, mal-advertising, autoplay videos). Yet an overhaul is financially impractical for publishers at scale. In this session, you’ll learn about two strategies for us to change tack. Plus, you’ll learn how to leverage new capabilities to implement these strategies with WordPress. First, you will learn how to increase the value of direct sold advertising with content sponsorship opportunities using taxonomies in WordPress and “native styles” ads in DoubleClick for Publishers. Second, you’ll learn how to leverage custom post types in WordPress to build a successful, scalable and manageable affiliate link program. It is our responsibility to build better solutions and improve the media ecosystem.

Navigating the Censored Web

John Gamboa, WP Engine

As WordPress continues to represent a larger portion of the global Internet landscape, issues relating to web censorship, internet sovereignty and access for all people are becoming more common. With his experience working behind the Great Firewall of China, John will discuss how sites are often affected by web censorship in all corners of the world.

Integrating print and digital / print workflow tools in WordPress

Gabriel Koen, PMC

At Penske Media Corporation (PMC) we have been through several iterations of trying to integrate print and digital workflows. This talk will be showcasing the challenges and solutions we have come across.

Hiring and Career Roundtable

Aimee Gonzalez-Cameron, Consultant
Julia Smith, Institute of Nonprofit News
Paul Olund, USA Today
Libby Barker, Human Made

This panel discussion will focus on how publishing teams can leverage their long-term technology goals to better inform their hiring practices, build stronger teams, and promote professional development practices that will allow them to support that product vision.

Distribute All The Things: WordPress & The Era of Multiple Content Channels

Jake Goldman, 10up

In the era of Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, mobile apps, Flipboard, and RESTful APIs, creating and distributing digital content is no longer just a conversation about a website.

From design to monetization, publishers need a strategy to thrive on the modern, multichannel web. That means that forward looking content management systems can no longer be thought of or marketed as “website makers” – template systems for spitting out content in HTML. The modern CMS must be the digital hub that enables distribution to the various channels where audiences are finding and consuming content, including new and different ways of making a “website,” sometimes outside of the CMS.

Monetize All The Things: How Condé Nast Profits From Multiple Channels

Jake Spurlock, WIRED

With the rise of third-party publishing in mobile platforms, publishers are increasingly worried about how to generate profit. WIRED has taken a proactive approach to these platforms and has led WordPress development efforts around these products. At the same time, WIRED has worked within Condé Nast to create tests around the profitability of these platforms, and looks to share insight gained, and the future roadmaps for their products.

Conquering Continuous Integration & Deployment

Tessa Kriesel, Pantheon

You know that Continuous something-or-other exists. Maybe you have even heard the terms Continuous Integration or Continuous Deployment, but not much more than that. I was in your shoes just a few short months ago. I came, I coded, I conquered. Now I am breaking it all down so you too can feel confident with the basics of continuous integration and deployment. I will cover the basics of how to setup Github and Circle CI with WordPress and configure deployment to a staging environment. We will cover continuous-jargon and break down YML and script files to better understand how it works and how you can start to use it with your projects. Attend. Absorb. And you too can conquer.

Admins Are Users Too

Linda Gorman, Upstatement

A great end-user experience starts with a great experience for web admins. Editor interfaces shouldn’t be an afterthought—the most sophisticated tooling quickly becomes useless if it’s counterintuitive. Let’s talk through principles behind developing editor interfaces, as well as concrete tips about how to leverage core and plugin functionality to build on top of the WordPress admin.

Alternative Hacks: WordPress Security From the Outside Looking In

Daniel Olson, DigitalCube

From plugins that promise a layer of security to lofty opinions about file permissions, it’s hard to tell what works. Simply put, a security plan that aims to slow down someone who’s already in your house isn’t really a plan.

I’d like to discuss security as the foundation of a site rather than an add-on and approach this idea from the outside looking in. We’ll cover a high-level process on how to enhance security with version control, hosting and access management, 3rd party integrations and more. My goal is to highlight flaws in common practices and present alternative ones to create more secure WordPress sites.

Location Aware Content Discovery

Deepti Boddapati, Crowd Favorite

It’s 2017, cell phones are old news. Everywhere you look, people are looking at their phone. And everywhere we go, we depend on our phones to give us just in time information. However, in the web publishing world, websites that allow you to discover content based on your location seem far and few between. We read food blogs for fun but rely on Yelp for restaurant recommendations. We browse news sites for information but rely on Twitter to know what’s happening in town. We visit museum websites to find the details, but we Google for interpretation. Websites everywhere are being developed without location aware content discovery features. As a result, they are giving up their audiences to goliaths. What can you do to include these features into a CMS based website? How do you add this into our website planning strategy? What are the technical and publishing workflow challenges inherent to location aware content discovery? This talk will tackle those questions by breaking down the fundamentals behind location aware content discovery. We will also look at a few real-world implementations to explore some common ‘gotchas’ that implementers should be aware of.

The Care and Feeding of Open-Source-Skeptical Colleagues

Kevin Koehler, Automattic

The idea of building a business on open source software may be old hat for most technologists, but for many people in more traditional industries, the concepts around using and contributing to WordPress may seem quite strange. Can a program you get for free be any good? How does the licensing work and what the heck is a GPL? Who do we call if it breaks? Who’s in charge of this thing? Sharing technology with everyone, is that safe? Wait, you wrote some code for us, and now you want to publish it for anyone to use, for free? We’ll answer these questions and more in a discussion of how to get OSS buy-in from the whole newsroom — lawyers, executives, and IT departments included. Along the way, you’ll get a refresher on making the most of the open WordPress ecosystem, whether you’ve been a part of this community for 13 years or 13 hours.

We’re happy to announce that WordCamp for Publishers 2018 is officially on the calendar!

WordCamp for Publishers will be August 8-10, 2018 at the Northwestern Pritzker School of Law in Chicago.

Subscribe using the form in the sidebar to stay up to date on the most recent news. We’ll be keeping you posted on all the details over the coming months, including speaker submissions, ticket sales and more!