Featured Speaker – Al Davis

Al is one of our local speakers. He is speaking Sunday morning at 10am in Rm 147. His topic is about structured data. Let’s get to know him…

When not working with WordPress you can find me reading up on NFL football, trying to play bass guitar and attending concerts

My presentation will help you understand how best to organize your content using pages, posts categories and tags

This is a great presentation for those just starting out as well as  a refresher for those who have been using WordPress for a while.

WordCamp Toronto is my home WordCamp, so I always enjoy attending it.

connect with Al through his speaker profile.

John Centofanti – Featured Speaker

John is travelling to us from Youngstown, OH. He is speaking Sunday morning at 10 am in Room 149. His topic is on brand positioning. Let’s get to know John…

John is a marketing strategist, graphic designer and writer by day, and the same by night.

He serves as a marketing consultant and content developer for B2B, Technology and Retail clients throughout the US. In 2006, John founded Creative Stream Marketing (www.creativestreammarketing.com), serving national retailers, tech companies, and B2B companies across the US. John has worked with numerous start ups, early stage, and established companies both strategically and in providing tactical marketing services, developing brands and increasing response to their businesses. #WCTO profile: https://2017.toronto.wordcamp.org/speaker/john-centofanti/”

BRAND POSITIONING: GROWING YOUR BUSINESS BY FINDING YOUR NICHE. If your marketing isn’t working, it might be because you haven’t properly branded your business. This session will cover how to develop your own brand, how to position it in the marketplace and attract the right clients. We’ll also cover ways to develop messaging for your business.

This session is interactive. We’ll test the branding principles presented with a volunteer to help a real business. This session will be a condensed version of the work we do with all new clients to prepare their business for effective marketing. This will be easy to understand and practical, regardless of your business size or your expertise.

As a US citizen, I’ve had the privilege of visiting Toronto many times. I love that it never gets old and I discover something new and amazing each time. The diversity, food and architecture are always a nice surprise. Plus, I’ve never met a person I didn’t like at a WordCamp!

Connect with John through his speaker profile.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Mike Pun – Featured Speaker

Mike Pun is one of our local speakers. He is also responsible for the digital platform we’re using at WordCamp this year. Mike is speaking Saturday morning in Room 147. His topic is about the coming extinction of the local business. Let’s get to know him…

I am a technologist and product builder who has done work for large and small companies. Technology is my passion. Right now I am alarmed at the changes that technology is bringing, and the way it will hurt local businesses

My presentation talks about how new technologies will be impacting local businesses in the very near future. How many small business could well be extinct if not prepared. We discuss how local businesses can act to protect themselves better, and how they can join communities to work together.

This is an important and timely issue. Local businesses need to face up to this issue really really really soon.

Toronto is great place to live and work. It has a great variety of businesses and opportunities, and lots of people who want to make things happen.

You can connect with Mike through his speaker profile.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Ben Moore – Featured Speaker

Ben is coming to us from Austin, TX. Ben is speaking Sunday afternoon at 2:30 in Room 129. Let’s get to know Ben…

Outside of my professional life with WP Engine and SkyPress, you can find me hanging out with my lovely wife of 6 years or spending a night out and about with good friends and good food. I’ve also recently gotten into craftsmanship, building our dining room and console tables.

From this presentation, the audience will take away a deeper understanding of the trending solutions around the WordPress Rest API and Javascript by examining Limbless, Headless, and Brainless development styles. The audience will walk away with inspiration for using these technologies in their own web application projects.

Those who want to explore the possibilities of WordPress as a web application platform should come to this presentation. Ever since the WordPress Rest API was announced, even just as a plugin, I’ve been fascinated with its potential to interact with other technologies. This presentation will help developers understand how the different technologies work together when designing an application.

This will be my second time in Toronto, and I absolutely loved the diversity of people, culture, and food. Toronto is very similar to what I also love about WordCamps, the diversity of people, culture, and ideas.

Connect with Ben through his speaker profile.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Sponsor Spotlight – Hover

Hover logo

Hover offers domain names, custom email and simple integrations with other online services and website builders. Our mission is simple – to enable every passion, by providing access to the best domain names and the best support. Whether your passion is baking or you’re the next start-up about to change the world as we know it, our team is here to help you build your online identity.

As your idea evolves, we help your domain evolve with you. Our control panel allows you to manage all of your domains in one place. The Hover Connect feature lets you to connect your domain to your website builder in a few simple steps. If you need any help along the way, our awesome support team is standing by to guide you.

Our customers rave about our support team and we wouldn’t want it any other way. Our team goes over the moon to help you bring your passion to life.

We are pumped to be surrounded by such a large community of creative and passionate people. But most importantly, we are looking forward to hearing your personal stories behind your WordPress creations! We love to see the stories behind a domain name. Make sure you drop by our booth to tell us about how you’ve put your passion online.

WordPress enables anyone to share their passion online – and we are all about that at Hover! Whether you’re just building your first website or you’re a seasoned developer managing hundreds of domains, we support you.

Hover is part of Tucows Inc. and we’re always looking for intelligent and driven tech-enthusiasts to join our teams. Make sure you look for open positions at the Tucows Inc. website.

We want each WordCamp Toronto 2017 attendee to have a free domain name from Hover. All you need to do is drop by the Hover booth and we’ll hook you up!”

Visit Hover


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Paul Bearne – Featured Speaker

Even though Paul recently moved to Kingston, we still think of him as a local speaker. Paul (with Peter Toi and Andrew Grant) helped us assemble our Dev Track this year.

Paul is speaking Saturday morning at 11:00 am in Room 149. His topic is a comparison of meta box frameworks. Let’s get to know him…

I’m lucky enough to wake up to a view of the lake every morning – and get out on it in a kayak, canoe or motor boat whenever I can! See https://2017.toronto.wordcamp.org/speaker/paul-bearne/ for more about me.

Explore the options and frameworks for adding custom meta boxes to WordPress admin.

Custom meta boxes are a fundamental tool in customizing the functionality available within WordPress. This presentation will give you a deeper understanding of what they are, how to use and extend them and which methods are likely to work best for you.

WCTO is my WordPress home! And it’s great to tear myself away from the lake once in a while and come back to the city, visiting friends and familiar haunts.

Connect with Paul through his speaker profile.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Sponsor Spotlight – Carbon60 Networks

carbon 60 logo

Simply put, Carbon60 provides a reliable, scalable and secure WordPress hosting platform in Canada and beyond for companies that can’t afford to be down. We cater to agencies and customers with websites that are high-traffic and high-visibility where any issues can have serious impact to their brand. Our depth and nimble structure can adapt to important deployments or events to help clients be successful – always.

We’ve tailored WordPress over the past several years to work effectively on our platform for our customers and it just works. As an increasing number of businesses in the private and public sector realize the benefits and economies of WordPress, they can focus on their content and messaging while we manage the platform infrastructure and security.

WordPress managed hosting is a niche that Carbon60 has built. Enterprise clients tend to have governance and in some cases regulatory requirements. We start with a high bar for security to help these customers specifically, but all customers small to large also benefit from this approach. The WordPress hosting business also very easily translates to our broader managed hosting business for the same customers.

Visit Carbon60


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Sponsor Spotlight – BoldGrid

Bold Grid logo

BoldGrid is a suite of WordPress plugins that make it easy to quickly create beautiful, dynamic WordPress websites. When used in totality, the BoldGrid plugin suite creates a website builder environment within WordPress to streamline the creation process. Or you can use individual BoldGrid plugin solutions to easily schedule automated backups, create a staging environment, grade your on-page SEO, and much more. More than just a page builder, BoldGrid brings the best parts of the website builder experience to the open source world.

More than 25% of the internet utilizes the WordPress platform and for good reason, it is a powerful and versatile tool. Our aim is not only to provide tools to improve the WordPress experience for webmasters, but also ease the learning curve for new users.

We exist to serve and grow the WordPress community. Without it, we would not be around. WordPress has continued to attract a larger and more varied audience over recent years which gives us the interesting task of identifying and solving new user pain points, as well as finding faster ways to accomplish routine WordPress tasks.

You can try BoldGrid today as a free trial at www.boldgrid.com! Web Hosts and Agencies interested in BoldGrid can also contact us at our website.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

James Strang – Featured Speaker

James is one of our local speakers. He is speaking Sunday morning at 11:00 am in Room 149. His topic is an introduction to online advertising.

I’m from a small town in Ontario near the GTA.  I started teaching myself HTML when I was 12, things just picked right up after that.  I have run a couple businesses, worked in a handful of startups, and I really enjoy helping people and contributing in multiple communities.

Growing up in a small town I have really come to appreciate the outdoors and nature.  I will often set up my laptop out doors so I can hear the birds and feel the breeze while working.

In addition to web development and the outdoors I also like to build stuff with my hands.  Metal, Plastic, Wood, Electronics, I’m always looking into ways to build new things.”

The online ad industry is insanely complicated.  There’s no one stop solution for anyone.  What I’m attempting to do in my presentation is give you the tools to be able to make decisions relating to your online ads.

My goal is that people can make informed decisions about how to optimize their ad revenue.  And I do go over a little about how to put ads on a WordPress site too.”

If you have ads on your site, or you’re thinking of putting ads on your site you will probably get the most out of my presentation.

Even beginners with no coding skills should be able to follow along in the presentation easily.

If you work as an Ad Ops Specialist, then I don’t think you will get much from this workshop.”

Being from a small town, I like going to Toronto and seeing all the large buildings and fancy architecture.  I like WordCamp because of the people I meet there.

Connect with James through his speaker profile.


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

Sponsor Spotlight – GoDaddy

GoDaddy Pro is for all the web designers and developers who build and maintain websites – particularly WordPress sites – for other people. It automates routine maintenance tasks, consolidates client management tools into one dashboard and gives you 30% off all new GoDaddy products plus 5% in-store credit on every new purchase. And it’s 100% free.

WordPress is not only easy to use but recognized throughout the world as a standard in website creation. It’s more advanced than the typical website builder and has a huge number of plugins available to help users customize their sites and make them function at the optimal level for each individual user.

WordPress collaboration has helped to provide all WordPress users, including GoDaddy customers, with more robust options to achieve their best, most successful online presence.

Let’s be real, you’ve all heard someone’s opinion about GoDaddy’s services for people that use WordPress and build sites for others. It’s because of those vocal opinions that we’ve been able identify areas for improvement and make changes and we want you to try it for yourself. Find Andy McIlwain if you’re interested in checking out the changes for yourself.

Visit GoDaddy


Make sure you have your ticket to #WCTO before they sell out!

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