Speaker: Wade Kwon
Twitter: @WadeOnTweets
Original Post: http://ihaveclarity.com/2013-wordcamp-atlanta-1/

Professional writer, editor, journalist, speaker, and blogger, Wade Kwon, was the first presenter on this WordCamp Atlanta Track. His blog, http://wadeonbirmingham.com, is a chronicle of all the things he finds interesting about Birmingham and Alabama. His latest offering, http://magiccitypost.com, covers news about passionate people who make a difference in Birmingham and has won multiple awards. Wade also is the founder of Birmingham Blogging Academy.

Wade talked about developing blog content. He said when developing a blog it is important to have an objective or direction for your work and not necessarily a step-by-step plan. Content flows from that direction, and Wade said, “You should cover everything on topic for that objective.” He said that sometimes a blog he thought would be popular was not; while, some blogs that he thought would have no audience, were his most popular work product. That’s why Wade encourages bloggers to experiment as they write.

In my view, one of Wade’s most impressive feats is bringing diversity to Birmingham journalism through his blogs. For example, he introduced ethnic restaurant reviews at a time when all thirty-two of the commonly listed restaurants in Birmingham were Southern eateries. This is just one example of how Wade’s commitment to diversity is reflected in his content.

Since WordCamp Atlanta, I’ve been following Wade on Twitter (@WadeOnTweets). It’s no wonder Poynter Institute said that Wade is one of the thirty-five most influential people in social media. Wade’s tweets are informative, funny, and show why he is one of the South’s best bloggers.

Speaker: Drew Morris
Twitter: @drewry
Slides: WordPress for Rapid Prototyping (pdf)

Here’s a link to download the latest version of Piklist that would have all the stuff in it that was demoed. They can download it here:

downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/piklist.zip

This is a very early release meant to be used in a Dev environment, if you encounter any bugs/have suggestions please post it on piklist.com/support.

Speaker: Reid Peifer
Original Post: Sidways8

The subtitle of this talk is “More Awesome. Less Suck.” for those that want to know.

A little history on the speaker and his company.

The speaker is the author of The Events Calendar plugin, found here.

When they got started with the plugin they started looking at their competitors. There are free plugins, your peers and a 15 year old kid living in his parents basement. So, how do they compete? They offer quality, support and longevity. That is what helps to set them apart from all the rest.

They realized that they need to compete on quality.

Notes on Quality

So what does quality mean? It can mean beautiful, stable, simple, and extensible.

Quality isn’t a state of being. It starts before you write your first line of code and continues long after you get paid for what you do.

Process Promotes Quality

Their process:

1. Spec – Write out what the thing you are going to build does. What problem will it solve? Who will use it?
2. Wireframe – Mock up what you want to build. There are probably 50 ways to solve the problem you are building something to solve, and your first idea is probably not the best.
3. Prototype – This is a wireframe in code. This helps to find the “gotchas” that didn’t get caught during wireframing. They use UX 4.
4. UX Test – This can be as simple as asking someone you know to test it and using join.me to see how the person testing goes through your app. This can be really simple.
5. Visual Design
6. Development
7. Documentation – You must document your work. Document for both developers and users.
8. QA – Time to test on as many devices as possible. Test everything, log everything, then go and fix the problems. chiliproject.org, redmine.org, basecamp.com
9. Security Audit – Its a good idea to find a security expert and pay them to look at your code.
10. Performance Audit – Stop developing for a minute and actually look at what you have done.
11. Beta – Ask people to check out your product. You can ask people from Meetups or through Twitter or whatever.
12. QA
13. Release

Keep in mind that once you ship your product to the public, that is the day that support starts.

Speaker: Doug Campbell
Original Post: Sideways8

I’m in the developers room at WordCamp ATL 2013 and listening to talk about security. Here are a few notes.

My favorite point so far is the speakers point that WordPress is usually not the weak point when a website is hacked. Its usually a plugin, javascript library, several or some other means of entry.

Keep in mind, shared hosting also means shared security. So, when you are on shared hosting the 100+ sites on that server can impact how secure your site is.

How do Hackers get in? Known exploits, brute force password hacking, network scanners, wifi vulnerabilities (be careful at coffee shops poeple!), automated tools, rootkits.

What do you do to keep your site safe? 3 Words. Update. Update. Update. In other words, keep your stuff up to date! Update the core, Update plugins, Update Themes.

Some good plugins and tools to think about using:

• Hotfix Plugin
• WP Security Scanner
• Login Lockdown
• BulletProof Security
• Scuri.net

Delete plugins and themes that you are not using, even if it is disabled.

What do you do when your site is hacked:

Now every PHP file on your site is suspect. So you need to nuke the site and start over. Download WordPress core and re-build the site. Same with your plugins and same with your themes.

Reinstall your database from backups. If a database has been hacked, then cleaning up your files will only help temporarily The hacker will just get back in and mess stuff up again.

About Site backups:

What do I need to have backed up?

• Database – your content is your most valuable thing.
• Uploaded media
• Custom themes and plugins
• wp-config.php
• keep a list of your installed third party plugins

Make sure you have a history of backups. If your site has been hacked and then backed up you have just backed up your hacked site.

Other Good Plugins and whatnot:

• Backup Buddy
• VaultPress
• WordPress backup to dropbox
• WordFence

Other Notes:

Make sure to have secure passwords.

Make your passwords long. A longer password of just simple dictionary words is actually harder for a hacker to crack, for example “correct horse battery staple” is better than “Tr0ub4dor &3″ because it is longer and therefore harder for a computer to guess with a brute force attack.

Speaker: James Dalman
Twitter: @jamesdalman
Presenter Slides: http://jamesdalman.com/wordcampatl/

Focus on strengths – It’s very rare that you can be good at design and development.
Don’t try to become the jack of all trades.
Build your confidence – If you don’t have confidence in yourself, how do you expect your clients to be confident in you? Sometimes people will sign-up because you believe in yourself.
Invest in relationships – Invest in your clients, if you truly care then you’ll do great work.
Invest in other designers/developers, it’s important to give back to the next generation.
Find great clients – Respond to your emails, respond to your phone calls.
Sell true value – Don’t charge hourly, charge per project. Give them great value and they won’t care about the price.
Price for profit – Make money on your services.
Do Awesome work – Just because you aren’t the greatest designer/developer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your hardest. Always thrive to do better.
Final thoughts – Act on your ideas or they’ll never get done. Strive to be successful, but keep in mind that money isn’t the most important thing. Just get out there and do it!

Speaker: Cliff Seal
Twitter: @cliffseal
Presentation Slides: logos-creative.com/wcatl

What is the transients API

• simple way to store cached data in the database temporarily by giving it a name and timeframe after which it will expire
• like options API, but with expiration
• uses fast memory (if configured)
• uses database otherwise

What can you do with it?

• external APIs – tweets, friends, scrobbles
• cache expensive queries – tag cloud, ratings, custom queries

set_transient

• $transient
  • (string) a unique identifiedr for your cached data
  • 45 characters or less in length
  • For multi-site transients, 40 characters or less in length
• $value
  • (array|object) Data to save, either a regular variable or an array/object
  • Handles serialization for you
• $expiration
  • (integer) number of seconds to keep the data before refreshing
  • built in wordpress time functions
• get_transient($transient);
  • if the transient does not exist, or has expired, returns false
  • an integer value of zero/empty or could be the stored data
  • should not be used to hold plain boolean values; array or integers instead
• delete_transient($transient);
• multi-site
  • set_site_transient
  • get_site_transient
  • delete_site_transient
• warnings
  • everything works on request
  • expired != deleted, unless requested
  • unrequested, undeleted transients stay until you remove them explicitly
• scalar
  • accepts scalar values (integer, float, string or boolean) & non-scalar serializable values (arrays, some objects)
  • SimpleXMLElement will FREAK OUT, so convert it to a string or array of objects (i.e. simplexml_load_string)
• infinite
  • transients set without an expiration time are autoloaded
  • if you don’t need it on every page, set an expiration (even if it’s a year)
  • consider the Options API for non-transient data
• caching
  • in some shared hosting environments, object caching can be slower than using the database; check your host’s recommended settings
  • always use the Transients API to access transients; don’t assume they’re in the database (or vice versa)
• 3 useful tools
  • TLC Transients – supports soft-expiration, background updating
  • Debug Bar Transients – adds panel to debug bar with transient info
  • Artiss Transient Cleaner – Deletes expired transients and optimizes table

Lots of code examples, be sure to checkout the presenter slides!