MERGE! Orlando 2017

This session will introduce you to Gantry 5, a well established theme framework compatible with Grav, Joomla and Wordpress. We will cover the core concepts behind the framework such as styles, page settings, layout manager, menu manager, assignments. We will then delve into the more advanced aspects of Gantry that make it so unique like overriding system, drag & drop simplicity, presets / styles, particles.

BREAK FOR LUNCH - Room/Session closed during this time unless otherwise arranged. You are on your own for Lunchtime Break - perfect time to establish lunch meetings, or extend that exciting new connection made with new people during the morning sessions and activities.  The Marriott World Center has numerous delicious restaurants or quick dining options. 

An introduction to Grav CMS, a modern open-source flat-file CMS built to be fast, flexible, and extensible. This session will cover the basics of why Grav makes a great alternative to traditional database-driven platforms by discussing it's benefits and limitations. We will cover origins of the project, system requirements, getting up and running, basic architecture overview, extending Grav with plugins, admin plugin overview, and basic theming.

The release of Drupal 8 in late 2015 was a watershed moment for the Drupal project - the culmination of years of work from the community as well as a new phase in the history of the project that brought long-needed features into Drupal core and modernized the codebase. Drupal 8 changed the way the community and project is involved with the PHP community, embracing modern PHP development principles and "encouraging" Drupal developers to modernize their tools and techniques. For developers, the major changes to Drupal 8's underlying architecture will require a significant investment in getting up-to-speed, with the big question of "is it worth it"? Organizations who are considering moving to Drupal 8 have the same question. In this presentation, we will look at some of the most important factors to consider.

We focus in this session on the series of contracts that holds the private sector domain name industry together. We will look at the interplay between RAs, RRAs, registrant agreements, backend provider agreements, private agreements with ccTLDs, the past and future Applicant Guidebook, and the zone of ICANN’s Contractual Compliance powers.

Most attendees will instinctively understand what domain names are at risk in the informal dispute mechanisms (UDRP, URS, etc.) and which are not. This session will lay the groundwork of the elements of the dispute mechanisms and then focus on the “close calls.” We will also take a brief tour of some of the non-bad faith based dispute policies already in place in the gTLD industry.

BREAK FOR LUNCH - Room/Session closed during this time unless otherwise arranged. You are on your own for Lunchtime Break - perfect time to establish lunch meetings, or extend that exciting new connection made with new people during the morning sessions and activities.  The Marriott World Center has numerous delicious restaurants or quick dining options. 

Joomla! is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility, have made Joomla! the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla! is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone.

In this session Todd Woodward of the Joomla Certification team will showcase what makes Joomla an award winning CMS.

It’s time to get down to the basics of UX and conversion rate optimization on your website. You do not need to be a developer to get started, anybody can do it! Learn how to collect data, analyze data and optimize your WordPress website using various free marketing tools & plugins. You will discover ways to run simple AB tests, heat maps, basic and advanced analytics tools to better understand your visitors and optimize your website. Learn how to optimize your users experiences based off easily collected data.

Learn about an innovative new publishing technology and naming convention - Frogans.

This is a new and innovative UX/UI concept that is growing in popularity!

The goal is not to replace the Web but to open a new space for online creativity that adapts to users, not the other way around.

For them, Frogans technology is:
- invisible: content floats on screen
- universal: each Frogans site is exactly the same on all screens and is fast whatever the bandwidth
- secure: no need for protection
- protective of their privacy.

It is ideal for a new generation of services in online communication, advertising, gaming, gambling, e-commerce and categories not invented yet. ​

Like the Web, it is free to use and only publishers have to pay to register the Frogans addresses where their sites will be available.

Very simply, Frogans addresses follow the NetworkName*SiteName pattern in any language, even in Chinese and in Arabic.

A few examples:
Show*Merge
frogans*NOW
amazon*HarryPotter
PSG*NeymarJr
español*sí
餐厅*北京
فروجنز*سلام
...

Frogans Addresses For All (FAFA) is the largest registrar of Frogans addresses and the first one in the US. We launched the first online registration platform early 2017 and we signed up our first affiliate this summer.

During this session, we'll discuss how our affiliation program can help you generate sales with no hassle.

Technical Debt is a factor for any development team that continuously delivers features and products to customers and users. In this session we will learn to understand technical debt, when that debt is bad and when it is not. We will dive into tools that help us understand where the debt is piling up in our code base so we can focus efforts to reduce it. If you are on a team or leading a team that has slowed its development velocity due to debt and you want to understand why, how, and what to do about it this is a session you'll want to invest in.

Making your content more accessible to international markets requires the right tools - learn about Joomla's ability to effectively manage multilingual websites and content.

BREAK FOR LUNCH - Room/Session closed during this time unless otherwise arranged. You are on your own for Lunchtime Break - perfect time to establish lunch meetings, or extend that exciting new connection made with new people during the morning sessions and activities.  The Marriott World Center has numerous delicious restaurants or quick dining options. 

Joomla's poweful MVC allows for easy customization of Joomla without hacking the core code. In this session, Robbie Adair will explain the Joomla override system and showcase how to customize Joomla with template overrides.

It is 2017 and time to make the robots do all the things we can make them do. Machines can do just about anything as long as you give them the properly formed instructions. Fortunately for us WordPress allows us to give these instructions in an easy to learn and very robust manner called The WP-CLI. It is the fastest way to install, active and update any theme, plugin or just about anything else in your WordPress site. In this presentation I will demonstrate a simple install script that will have a fully functioning, customized WP website in about the same time than it normally takes download the WordPress.zip file. We will also look for how third party tools and hosts are leveraging the WP-CLI to make your life as a developer even easier. Walk away with: -A new appreciation for the command line. -The desire to script 'all the things' to save time. -Knowledge of serious time saving tools -Ideas about how to automate your processes to be more productive and profitable