We’re already starting to plan WordCamp for Publishers 2019, which means we have one very important thing to do first – pick a new city!
Unlike most WordCamps, our organizing team is distributed across the US, so it’s important for us to have a local organizer to help facilitate venue coordination, event logistics, swag delivery, and much more.
If you (as an individual, or a group of individuals) are interested in helping with this and have a great suggestion for a city, please fill out our application form. We have a preference for cities that are underrepresented media markets so we can bring them an amazing event they might not normally experience.
We’ve left most fields optional, but please fill out as much information as you have. If you have any questions or other supporting materials that don’t fit here, don’t hesitate to contact us here: https://2018-chicago.publishers.wordcamp.org/contact/.
If you missed WordCamp for Publishers 2018 or want to rewatch it, videos of all our our main track sessions and lightning talks are now available on WordPress.TV. They will also be on our YouTube channel in the coming weeks.
You can also watch the videos right on this site by visiting our schedule and clicking through to any of the sessions that interest you.
A big thank you to our Gold Sponsors who are helping to make this amazing event possible!
WordPress.com VIP
WordPress.com VIP offers a scalable and secure managed platform, expert support, and end-to-end guidance on running content applications at scale. We provide hosting and support throughout the digital media landscape, from focused outlets like Mother Jones, FiveThirtyEight, and Foreign Policy to some of the biggest publishing groups, like News Corp, Meredith, PMC, Digital First Media, and Abril. We’re proud to support the intersection of journalism and open source technology all over the world and participate in communities and events like ONA, Poynter, WAN-IFRA, and WordCamp for Publishers.
Cloudinary
Cloudinary enables organizations to optimize their sites and applications with cloud-based image and video management. By reducing page load times and improving the user experience across both web and mobile, Cloudinary improves SEO, conversion rates, and long-term revenue growth. Cloudinary works with thousands of customers, managing nearly 20 billion images and videos.
Alley
Alley is a seasoned team of strategists, researchers, designers, and developers who craft custom digital experiences for publishers, nonprofit institutions, museums, and brands. Our expertise and years of experience in these areas allow us to provide industry-leading software development, user experience, visual design, data visualization, editorial workflow, and accessibility consultation. We look at our work in terms of products, not projects. We partner with you for the long term and continuously iterate and improve based on what we learn together about your audience. At Alley, we empower you to succeed amidst the challenges of an ever-changing landscape of new initiatives, new technologies, and new distribution channels. Let’s do launch.
Google
At Google we believe that WordPress is one of the key drivers and enablers of an open, thriving, and rich open web ecosystem; and our goal is to enable a better web by helping improve performance, security, and capabilities of millions of WordPress powered sites. We are partnering with experts in the WordPress ecosystem such as Automattic, XWP, and core contributors in the WP developers community, to work on several areas related to bringing performance and speed to every aspect of WordPress.
Join us to learn about new tools to help automate WordPress plugin and theme audits, how to accelerate your site with the AMP plugin for WordPress, and how to unlock the rich power of Progressive Web Apps in WordPress.
WooCommerce
28% of all online stores are powered by WooCommerce. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce is a fully customizable, open source eCommerce solution.
Whether you’re selling a few handcrafted items to a niche market, taking an existing business online, or going global with an enterprise level eCommerce business – WooCommerce will get you set up and selling fast and scale securely as you grow. Plus your content will be forever yours and customizable down to the finest button color.
Developed and supported by a distributed team, WooCommerce is powered by Automattic, the creators of WordPress.com.
Jetpack
Transform how you work with your WordPress sites and rest easy knowing they’re always firing on all cylinders. Jetpack connects your site to the global services, community, and support provided by WordPress.com so you can focus on the stuff that matters.
Jetpack automatically shields your site from the unwanted attention of spammers, hackers, and malware, while real-time sync and backup means you don’t have to worry about data loss. Straightforward traffic-building tools help you attract the attention of readers and search engines. Pages and videos are delivered at high speed from a global, ad-free content delivery network.
With Jetpack’s Affiliate program you can earn 20% for every sale of Jetpack to your customers and clients. And with unlimited referrals, the sky’s the limit! Refer as many clients and contacts as you can, and get paid for every sale you generate.
Make your site work for you. Get your Jetpack today at Jetpack.com
Bluehost
Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over 1 million WordPress sites worldwide. Their objective is to help customers, whether novice or pro, create a thriving online presence at an affordable price. With a team of in-house tech experts available 24/7, Bluehost dedicates time and resources to providing the best support and services in the industry. Join millions of other site owners and see what Bluehost can do for you and your online presence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 excited to announce the second batch of speakers for WordCamp for Publishers 2018. More will be coming soon along with a complete schedule. Check out the links below for more information on each session.
In-person events like WordCamp for Publishers are a great way to build skills and connect with people who truly understand the projects and problems you’re working on every day. But we know that conference travel costs can be a burden, particularly for people just starting out in publishing or working for an organization where training dollars are scarce. So we’re excited to announce our 2018 scholarship program, designed to help you join us in Chicago this August.
WordCamp for Publishers is a community-organized event, and it works best when our entire community is represented. If travel support would help you attend, we hope you’ll apply for a scholarship — and we hope everyone will help us spread the word to colleagues and friends who should be there. Here’s what you need to know:
What we’re offering
We have a small number of scholarships that provide $500 toward the costs of attending WordCamp for Publishers, this Aug. 8-10 in Chicago. You can use these funds in whatever way best fits your needs: ticket and registration, lodging, meals, airfare or transit, or any other travel costs.
When applications are open
Our applications are open now through 5pm Eastern on Monday, June 18. We’ll notify all applicants by Wednesday, June 20.
How you can describe this event to your organization
WordCamp for Publishers is a community-organized event that brings together people who use WordPress to manage publications, big or small. It coaches participants on best practices, and encourages collaboration in building open-source tools for publishers. Here are some of the sessions we’ll have this year.
Who should apply
Anyone who is part of the publishing & technology community, whether your work is primarily technical, editorial, or somewhere in between.
People working at smaller or regional publishers, who are looking to build skills and bring new resources back to their organizations.
Students working in college publishing, or preparing for a career in digital publishing.
Developers and allies interested in open-source software and protecting the open web.
People of color, women, and other underrepresented groups in publishing and technology are strongly encouraged to apply.
What happens after you apply
WordCamp for Publishers will review all applications, and all applicants will hear back from us by June 20.
We’re excited to announce the first batch of sessions and speakers for WordCamp for Publishers 2018. More will be coming soon along with a complete schedule. Check out the links below for more information on each session and the speakers.
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!
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WordCamp for Publishers - Chicago is over. Check out the next edition!
WordPress.com VIP offers a scalable and secure managed platform, expert support, and end-to-end guidance on running content applications at scale. We provide hosting and support throughout the digital media landscape, from focused outlets like Mother Jones, FiveThirtyEight, and Foreign Policy to some of the biggest publishing groups, like News Corp, Meredith, PMC, Digital First Media, and Abril. We’re proud to support the intersection of journalism and open source technology all over the world and participate in communities and events like ONA, Poynter, WAN-IFRA, and WordCamp for Publishers.
Cloudinary enables organizations to optimize their sites and applications with cloud-based image and video management. By reducing page load times and improving the user experience across both web and mobile, Cloudinary improves SEO, conversion rates, and long-term revenue growth. Cloudinary works with thousands of customers, managing nearly 20 billion images and videos.
At 
28% of all online stores are powered by WooCommerce. Built on WordPress, WooCommerce is a fully customizable, open source eCommerce solution.
Transform how you work with your WordPress sites and rest easy knowing they’re always firing on all cylinders. Jetpack connects your site to the global services, community, and support provided by WordPress.com so you can focus on the stuff that matters.
