Speaker Spotlight: Dwayne McDaniel

Dwayne has been working in tech and open source sales since 2005.

He knew as soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. He first started building in Drupal and WordPress when he needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. He fell in the love the community of developers and then found my position at Pantheon at the end of 2013.

As a Community and Agency Success Manager, he has had the privilege of presenting at MidCamp (Drupal), WordCamp Milwaukee, WordCamp Baltimore, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), Stanford DrupalCamp and other conferences.

Outside of tech I love producing and performing improv theater. I also love comic books and karaoke!!!

Dwayne will be giving a workshop titled “Let’s learn git. No more excuses.“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

The inclusion of the WP-CLI as part of the core project. While this didn’t directly add any additional new functionality immediately it paved the path for many more improvements by getting more folks involved from the make.wordpress.org community.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I love speaking in public and sharing what I have learned over the years from this awesome community. I see it as a way of giving back.

What is your talk going to be about?

Git, which is version control for not only code, but anything. It is really the best revisioning system we have invented yet and has a lot of practical applications.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

How to do the basics and understand conceptually what Git can do.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Wow, this would be a long list if I listed everyone. Bridget Willard (@YouTooCanBeGuru) jumps to mind as well as Adam Warner (@wpmodder) and Matt Cromwell (@learnwithmattc) and Rachel Cherry (@bamadesigner). Leaving out a lot, the whole dang community is pretty inspirational.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I would like to see better role management in core, with the ability to change capabilities for a role or invent a new role directly within the admin. There are plugins and you can accomplish this with tools like WP-CLI but having a way in core to do this would allow for larger publishing organizations to more easily adopt WP as their enterprise solution.

Speaker Spotlight: Lisa Ghisolf

Lisa Ghisolf is Gizmo Creative Factory, with 20 years in print, web & email design, and 14 years in business. She’s worked with big and small companies, publications and organizations alike, creating print and digital for Kraft, the National Retail Foundation, Bridgestone, the National Safety Council & many others. Aside from putting out fires, she has designed and built robust WordPress sites since 2008, starting nostalgically with HTML back in 1996. Lisa also offers training and maintenance and likes to work as a technology and design partner to her clients.

Lisa will be giving a talk titled “From zero to launch: A walk-through of the website process“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

JetPack UI overhaul; hoping for the best on the text editor…

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

Want to go to Montreal (duh) and meet Canadian WP nerds!

What is your talk going to be about?

A roadmap for working with clients that touches on the important pieces to creating a lasting site rather than a “get ‘er done” mentality. Also for potential clients to know what they should be looking for in a project.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

New ideas to incorporate into their workflow or touchpoints for working with developers.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

Everybody! Vladimir Prelovac, John James Jacoby, Joost de Valk, Mika Epstein, Boone Gorges

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

Not so much a feature but… make BuddyPress less buggy? Please?

Speaker Spotlight: Michelle Frechette Ames

Overextended, overcommitted, entrepreneur, volunteer, and social butterfly. Avid Scrabble player. Tea snob. Mom (to an adult!). School board member. Marketing fanatic. 11th hour expert. Michelle is the owner and marketing diva at Marketed by Michelle.

Michelle will be giving a talk titled “Little Things Make a Big Difference“.


What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I think the changes in the widget editors are extremely helpful for WordPress users who aren’t comfortable with any code (HTML, for example). When I teach a WordPress class now, I don’t also have to do a quick HTML lesson. It’s a win!

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

My speciality is marketing. I think it’s important to think about how your site appeals to your visitors, and how they will use it. My talk is all about those things.

What is your talk going to be about?

My talk is about the “little things” you can do to your site that will make it more appealing to your site visitors and easier for them to use.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

I hope that people who attend my talk look at their sites with fresh eyes, seeing it from a visitor’s perspective. Only then can a site best serve the client.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

He’s now a friend, but I used to have a WordPress “celebrity crush” on Brian Rotsztein. His approach to using WordPress with the end user in mind is awesome, but his sense of the WordPress community is inspiring. #wplife

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

It would be great to be able to set the login page to something other than /wp-admin without using code or a plugin. Making that inherent to WordPress would help increase security.

The Schedule is Live

We’ve confirmed all our speakers and we’ve just released the tentative schedule for WordCamp Montreal 2017. You can read all about our sessions and speakers and start planning your WordCamp weekend. If you don’t have your ticket yet, there is still time!

How Our Talks Are Organized

This year our talks are divided into several streams: code, general, marketing, design, and business. We hope there will be something for everyone. All our speakers have provided descriptions for their talks, so please read these if you want to know if a particular talk is geared towards beginners or a more advanced crowd.

Please note that the schedule is subject to change. Please double check the schedule the day of the event.

Call for Speakers

The deadline for speaker submissions has passed. Thank you to everyone who applied. We’ll be in touch soon.

Each year WordCamp Montreal strives to offer a wide variety of talks and discussions about WordPress. We are looking for people who are excited about WordPress to entertain our attendees and teach them new things.

Deadline: Sunday, June 4th, 2017

Why speak?

Presenting at WordCamp takes some work but is very rewarding. You get to share your passion, convince people you’re worth hiring and help everyone learn about WordPress, all at the same time. Speakers also receive free admission to WordCamp.

What we’re looking for

Presentations

The ideal speaker has a WordPress-related topic they are passionate about and that they can present in 10 or 45 minutes with attractive slides and detailed, coherent explanations. Designers, bloggers, businesses and developers are all welcome to apply! Talks can be in English or French. Your topic should be specific to WordPress.

Show us what you’ve made with WordPress and explain how you did it, or what you learned in the process. Give us concrete examples: code snippets, 10 important lessons you learned, specific advice on how to avoid problems, etc. Nothing is too hardcore, advanced, simple or beginner-level. We’re looking for diversity.

We reserve the right to refuse any submissions.

Workshops

We are also looking for workshop leaders for WordPress-related workshops. We’d like to offer workshops in the evenings, the week before WordCamp (August 7-11), and during the day, the weekend before (August 5-6). Workshops should last 2-3 hours. Workshops can be in English or French. Your topic should be specific to WordPress.

Please let us know your preferred date, how many people you would feel comfortable leading, what equipment you would need, and if you would need teaching assistants.

Unconference Sessions

Have a great idea for WordPress-related activity that doesn’t fit into the above categories? Unconference sessions should last 45 or 90 minutes. Unconference sessions can be in English or French. Your topic should be specific to WordPress.

Lightning Talks

We’re seeking talk submissions for 10-min short presentations. These are bite-sized formats great for short demos, quick tips, and inspirational stories.

General Areas

The general fields we are hoping to cover include:

  • Using WordPress to blog and write.
  • Using WordPress to design and build websites.
  • WordPress plugin and core development and systems administration.
  • Primers on underlying web technologies (HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript) that are needed for WordPress development.

Please view last year’s schedule for example topics.

Topic Ideas

Here’s a list of topics we’d love to see at WordCamp. These are just examples!

User/Blogger Track

  • Finding the perfect themes/plugins
  • HTML for bloggers
  • Using child themes
  • Monetizing your website
  • Attracting readers
  • Writing for the web
  • Case studies of large projects

Designer/Developer Track

  • Creating Bilingual sites
  • Design advice for WordPress
  • CSS tips for WordPress
  • Editing themes and using template tags
  • Creating plugins (intro or in-depth)
  • Releasing and/or selling themes
  • GPL/Free Software and what it means for WP Plugins and themes
  • Intro to Apache/MySQL optimization

Welcome to WordCamp Montreal

We’re happy to announce that WordCamp Montréal is officially on the calendar!

WordCamp Montréal will be August 12 – 13 at John Molson School of Business in downtown Montréal.

Subscribe using the form in the footer 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!

WordCamp Montréal 2017 is over. Check out the next edition!