For years BuddyPress was tied to a specific theme and creating a custom theme had a steep learning curve.

Many just used the default theme not pushing the boundaries of what could be done.

BuddyPress now has theme independence and with this comes the chance to push ahead BuddyPress design.

Lets ban the bland and start thinking about how we can innovate not just about how we create a theme.

I’ll encourage in this talk to look beyond the default, to new UI’s, new possibilities, to design for the community not to the default.

I’ll also give some consideration to what the ‘new default’ should be that BuddyPress offers up when you load it.

Tammie Lister

Tammie Lister is a designer who specialises in creating communities using BuddyPress.

She’s passionate about community design and mixing in psychology with design and development to create these communities.

Over the years she’s been lucky enough to create varied projects with great clients under her own company at logicalbinary.com.

She is a contributor to BuddyPress and has written a soon to be published book on BuddyPress theme development.

Keen to explore new design possibilities, she has a sketchbook site exploring BuddyPress UI’s at buddydesignlabs.com.

It’s been ten years since the first release of WordPress, and even longer since its predecessor, b2, caught the eye of a small group of bloggers.

Thousands of lines of code have been written, hundreds of hours have been spent in online discussions, and many, many itches have been scratched.

This presentation is the story of the itch.

It will travel back through time to trace the itch, from the very first scratcher, to the people who caught the itch, until it became contagious and hundreds of people were scratching furiously and somehow they solved a problem for millions of people all over the world.

wordpress.tv

Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan McKeown is a Word Ninja at Audrey Capital where she writes about WordPress, deals with documentation, and has nightmares about the Codex.

She’s currently working on an open source book about the history of WordPress.

She spends her days delving into the brains of its early developers and community members.

When she’s not worrying about the finer details of forking and the GPL, she’s helping out with the project’s future by wrangling WordPress’ documentation.

In her spare time, she writes and edits for Smashing Magazine, eats, reads, and creates huge amounts of mess and chaos.

You’re a WordPress professional.

It’s time that your WordPress coding and deployment practices moved beyond manual backups and editing files on the server.

Mistakes happen.

You need a workflow that is ordered towards minimizing and recovering from mistakes, rather than one that embarasses you and makes changes stressful.

This talk will examine the pitfalls of “winging it” when it comes to changing and deploying code, and will showcase multiple paths to the promised land of confident commits and delightful deploys.

wordpress.tv

Mark Jaquith

Mark Jaquith has been working with and contributing to WordPress since 2004.

He is one of the lead developers of the WordPress core and offers freelance WordPress consulting services through Covered Web Services with a focus on scaling, security, and custom functionality.

Mark likes patches that have more red than green, and his favorite WordPress features are the ones that you’re not even aware of.

He eagerly looks forward to shooting down your feature suggestions with, “No, but it would make a great plugin!”

So often, we think the first steps in setting up a new WordPress site are to install WordPress, choose a theme, and start writing.

But the secret first step to a successful site is planning.

When you’ve mapped out the crucial 5 W’s and 1 H, you can focus on what’s important, avoid procrastination, and dodge mistakes that can be hard to recover from later on.

Learn how to get it right the first time by witnessing six examples of total wins and epic fails.

Natalie MacLees

Natalie MacLees is a front-end web developer and UI designer and is founder + principal of the interactive agency, Purple Pen Productions.

In 2012 she published jQuery for Designers with Packt Publishing.

She founded and runs the jQuery LA Users’ Group and together with Noel Saw she heads up theSouthern California WordPress User’s Group, organizing WordPress meetups, help sessions, and workshops.

She’s currently has two big events in the works: WordCamp Los Angeles 2013 and the first annual Website Weekend LA.

She makes her online home at nataliemac.com.