Posts Tagged ‘WordCamp’

After catching up on my sleep after traveling back all night from Boston from one of the largest wordcamps that I have attended to date, I finally got around to editing and uploading some basic video I took.  The first video is a quick presentation i gave during an unconference session, showing people how to design their first wordpress theme using the software that makes it easy, Artisteer.

Videos of the WP theme design presentation in 3 parts

Update – Part 3 is now fixed and working

Getting setup and going with the presentation was a little haphazard so the presentation wasn’t as polished as similar versions I delivered in Birmingham, Las Vegas and Savannah, but the audience had a lot of good questions, and I didn’t mind the change up.  It actually helped me quite a bit get a better feeling for those areas of the presentation that are probably more important for people learning to design WP themes for the first time.

This weekend I attended WordCamp Boston at The Nerd Center aka Microsoft’s building at 1 Cambridge Center.  It was an excellent conference and extremely well organized, run and managed WordCamp.

I was introduced to the After the Deadline plugin while helping people at the Genius Bar.  After the Deadline is a great plugin that does grammar checking and spell checking of wordpress posts and pages.  This is no simple tool, it performs contextual checking of grammar and spelling at a very high and accurate level.

WordPress comes with a built in spell checker these days, but its not to powerful.  After the Deadline is a plugin that has been picked up by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com.

I was also re-introduced to the Shopp ecommerce plugin for WordPress.  These days there are several WordPress plugins that provide ecommerce capabilities either as a bolt on plugin or as a conduit to another ecommerce plugin like OScommerce.  Shopp provides a number of great features as an ecommerce tool which include but are not limited to

• Easy to install WordPress plug-in
• Bolt-on e-commerce functionality, just install and activate
• Works out-of-the-box with any theme (quality may vary)
• 2Checkout.com (included)
• PayPal Website Payments Standard (included)
• PayPal Express Checkout (included)
• Google Checkout (Lvl 2 Integration) (included)^†
• PayPal Website Payments Pro (available add-on, US & UK only)^†
• Handles multiple product images with easy drag-and-drop sorting
• Support for selling digital & physical products and donations
• Export orders and customers into Tab, CSV and Excel formats
• Export orders for import into Intuit QuickBooks
• Search engine optimized shopping pages (product name and category in the title, semantic markup, alt/title attributes set, <meta> keywords/description)
• Built-in smart categories provide easy ways to highlight: new product additions, featured products, bestselling products, on sale products, random products, even related products for cross-selling
• Standards-compliant mark-up output (targeting XHTML 1.0 strict)
• Setup free shipping discounts
• Promote overstocked items with buy X get Y free promotions
• Apply any of your discount options using promo/coupon codes

Shopp is not a free plugin, it costs about $55.  As compared to the WP-Ecommerce plugin, which is free at a basic level and has multiple add on components to make it shine.  That said, the total price adds up to about the same amount.

I’m heading to the WordCamp Boston this weekend.  I will be working a shift in the WordPress Genius Bar helping people learn how to design WordPress themes for the first time.  I’m also looking forward to comparing notes with the presenters at Boston WordCamp covering advanced wordpress theme design.  I’m always looking to benchmark best practices to improve functionality, decrease load time and speed up the design process which makes wordpress as a cms theme design more affordable for my clients.

I am also going to see first hand how the Boston WordCamp was organized.  From an online perspective, this show looks tight.  The wordpress community in WordPress is very strong and I’m looking forward to some high level discussions. 

Its also been about 10 years since I visited Boston.  I haven’t been back since my brother in law graduated from MIT.  I lived just outside of Boston in the early 90’s and I do miss seeing one of my favorite cities in the US.

For those of you catching up with me at WordCamp Boston, I design wordpress themes using a combination of the following 3 software programs listed in order of importance based on total usage in the design process:

• Artisteer
• Dreamweaver (Adobe Product)
• Fireworks (Adobe product)
• ThemeDreamer (Dreamweaver addon)
• Firebug (Firefox addon)
• Google Adwords (keyword analysis)

* Note I bought Fireworks and Dreamweaver together a few years ago in a bundle called Studio 8, Adobe Creative Suite Web Premium CS4 is about the equivalent these days.  Its expensive but effective.  If you are a student, but it now while it is still cheap!

In general, I only recommend working on 2 hosting services, Inmotion Hosting and HostGator due to their great support and WordPress friendly atmosphere.  They make installation a breeze.  I do NOT recommend Godaddy, 1&1, nor IPower, which have made my life difficult.

This afternoon, I ‘m watching a great video by Amanda Blum of Howling Zoe Productions from her presentation at WordCamp NYC titled “The Suck Stops Here: WP as a CMS for Non Profits.”  Last year I converted a joomla site to WordPress as a CMS for the non profit group Cancer Services of Gaston County.  I’ve done a few WP sites for non-profits over the years, and I’m always looking for better tools, tips, tricks, benchmarks and other professionals working to push this envelope as well both locally here in North Carolina and nationwide.

In this video, Amanda does a great job of covering why WordPress is a great, effective, cost effective tool for non-profits. She has some colorful language, but she gets the job across in a no nonsense way.  There are some conversations and resources out there for non profits and wordpress but not as many as there could be.  I highly recommend checking out this presentation and conversation to help immerse yourself into how Wordpress can play a part in a Non-Profit organization.

Softduit was founded in Georgia and has expanded to North Carolina, but we serve customers around the world from Ireland and Great Britain and the Netherlands to customers all over the US and Canada to the far East, back around to the Ukraine and Russia.

WordPress CMS & Social Media Resources Referenced

This video references a few different resources which I have used myself including the cformsII Plugin, the social media managing service Social Oomph. 

I use Social Oomph regularly myself.  It lets me manage communications on multiple twitter accounts and my facebook account.  It helps me vet good versus bad followers on twitter.  It also helps me to schedule twitter messages if I want to make a future announcement or setup a recurring message for follow Friday for example.

BTW Cancer Services of Gaston County is offering tickets for a screening of a major motion picture 2 weeks from this Saturday, Letter’s to God Screening details.

Don’t miss your chance to see a major motion picture prior to its’ nationwide release in theatres. Help us spread the word and fill the auditorium seats! 

Saturday, January 30, 2010
Gaston Day School
Pamela Kimbrell Warlick Performing Arts Center

Afternoon Screening;
Doors Open         1:30pm
Live Music:         2:00pm
Movie:                    3:00pm

Evening Screening
Doors Open:        5:30pm
Live Music:          6:00pm
Movie:                      7:00pm

Tickets $5
Available at Cancer Services of Gaston County

Brett Bumeter of Softduit Media joined a large group of attendees and presenters at Barcamp Chattanooga at Chattanooga State Community College.  Brett kicked off one of the first sessions by demonstrating how to create a WordPress theme in 10 minutes with no web design or PHP experience.

This was a live demo of Artisteer for both PCs & Macs and neither video nor slides were available from the actual event, but people can view are in depth video from a WordPress meetup in Charlotte covering WordPress Theme design for people of any skill level from novice to advanced.

Barcamp Chattanooga was a lively and busy event with close to 100 people registering for the event.  Chattanooga is rather unique as a city that has an extremely high percentage of citizen twitter users as well, so this strong turnout for a first year event was probably not a surprise for local visitors. 

People travelled from Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham and of course Softduit Media’s Brett Bumeter travelled in from Charlotte NC about 5 and a half hours away by car.

Chattanooga will also be the location of a future Palm Pre development meetup and Birmingham will host the next WordCamp in the SouthEast at the end of September with attendance currently projected between 150-250 people.

Pictures from Barcamp Chattanooga