Let’s talk about WordPress meetups! On this episode of The WPCandy Roundtable Podcast, I asked four awesome WordPress meetup co-organizers to chat about what makes a quality meetup and how they do what they do. We also went over what they would recommend to new WordPress meetup organizers.

Joining me on the podcast are Angie Meeker (Columbus, Ohio WordPress Meetup), Brian Richards (Grand Rapids, Michigan WordPress Meetup), Steve Zehngut (Orange County WordPress Meetup) and Aaron Jorbin (Washington, D.C. WordPress Meetup). These folks know what they’re talking about.

Still not sure about listening? Steve Zehngut and Aaron Jorbin each co-organize events with a full roster count of over 800 and 1,200, respectively. That’s a couple of times the size of most large WordCamps, folks.

• MP3 file (27.2 MB)
• Audio RSS Feed

We discussed a number of issues that will face new meetup organizers. Some of my favorites this episode were:

• What’s the best advice for brand new meetup organizers who haven’t started their event yet?
• What sort of format does your meetup use?
• Where do you find your meetup speakers?
• How do you keep your community involved when not meeting?
• When does your group meet? Do you find weekdays or weekends to be best for meetings?

We talked for about 50 minutes and had a great time. If you’re interested in running — or improving — your own WordPress meetup I highly recommend this podcast.

What about your WordPress Meetup experience?

I know for a fact that plenty of you organize the meetups in your city too. I’d love to have your comments on these topics as well. What did you find helpful when you started your event?

If you aren’t organizing your meetup, and also don’t have a meetup in your area, what’s  holding you back? Have you ever considered running it for the community in your city?

The post WPCandy Roundtable #3: WordPress Meetup Discussion with 4 co-organizers appeared first on WPCandy.

In this episode of our podcast David Bisset was kind enough to join me to discuss his upcoming event WordCamp Miami, BuddyPress, and other noteworthy WordPress news of the week. David even gets greedy and offers up somewhere around 3 or 4 WordPress picks for the week. Honestly, I lost count.

You can follow David on Twitter, visit his website (and hire him!) and of course register/sponsor/adore WordCamp Miami in April.

Show notes and download links are after the jump.

Show Notes

• 0:00 – 18:15 WordCamp Miami
• 18:15 – 36:30 BuddyPress.org guest post, bbPress beta, and Achievements 3
• 36:30 – 45:51 Ryan’s pick is Edit Flow, David’s picks are PostStat.us and a recent discussion there, and the BPMail newsletter

David also recommended this video overviewing the upcoming BuddyPress 1.7.

• MP3 file (22 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed

The post WPCandy Podcast 36: Sticker Furniture with David Bisset appeared first on WPCandy.

Scott Basgaard and Brad Williams are currently planning and brainstorming ideas for a brand new online event this year called WordSesh. WordSesh 2013 is set to take place every hour of the day on April 13th this year.

According to their website, the plan is to run one session every hour for 24 hours. The sessions aren’t locked down yet, but few events are more than three months out. They’re planning to use a combination of Google Hangout and YouTube.

Watch the WordSesh Twitter feed for more information about their event as it unfolds. Anyone interested in speaking during the event should read out to them via mail at wordsesh.org.

Will you attend?

Are you excited to learn about WordSesh? Will you attend a 24 hour online event, or will you check in after the fact to watch the recorded videos? I’ll be very interested to see how this ends up coming together and how the presentations end up recorded.

Interested in a full day of live streaming WordPress presentations? Check out WordSesh ’13 wordsesh.org #wordpress #wordsesh

— WordSesh (@WordSesh) January 19, 2013

The post WordSesh aims to bring 24 hours of live streamed WordPress presentations appeared first on WPCandy.

WP Late Night is back in full swing tonight with Brad, Dre and Ryan discussing the news of the week and the big WordPress events of the month. If you’ve been wondering about Pressnomics, John O’Nolan’s Ghost project, or Jetpack Photon than this is the show for you.

Enjoy!

Or you can grab the show in a few other ways:

• MP3 file (38.7 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed

Show notes are just after the jump!

Episode #29 Show Notes

• Pressnomics 2012
• WordPress Community Summit 2012
• http://make.wordpress.org/summit
• John O’Nolan’s Ghost
• Photon added to Jetpack
• Brad’s Bar Trick: From Pressnomics: New Relic, Windows Azure
• Ryan’s Bar Trick: Mixpanel.com
• Dre’s Bar Trick: Love to StickerGiant, BlogWorld 2013 with a Sucuri booth, WordCamp Phoenix

The post WP Late Night #29: “You fork, I’ll spoon” appeared first on WPCandy.

Very late in the evening after the WordPress Community Summit wrapped up (technically early morning, but you know what I mean) a group of five gathered around to discuss the event and what it means for the community. Myself, Brad and Dre, Brandon Dove and John Hawkins all discussed our thoughts on the first-ever community summit.

Download audio file (WP-Late-Night-028b-Special-Edition-WPCS2012.mp3)

Or you can grab the show in a few other ways:

• MP3 file (39.1 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed

The post WP Late Night Special Edition: WordPress Community Summit 2012 appeared first on WPCandy.

Last weekend was the WordPress Community Summit in Tybee Island, Georgia. I stayed in a house with some of the coolest folks I know — WordPress or otherwise — and we all took a bunch of photos during the trip. I’ve included a few of them below.

I’ll be publishing further thoughts on the WordPress Community Summit, as well as a special recording we did during the event, real soon.

The Captain’s Travels

Don’t ask my why, but Brandon Dove and John Hawkins and I somehow got it into our heads to take a small captain statuette from our shared house and photograph it around the island. It just wouldn’t be right to deprive the world of these photos, right?

Photo credits: myself, John Hawkins, Brandon Dove, Brad Williams, Dre Armeda.

The post Photos taken at the 2012 WordPress Community Summit appeared first on WPCandy.

Last night’s episode of WP Late Night, “Bughetto”, had the regular crew discussing theme philosophies, the WordPress.com homepage redesign, and the slew of WordCamps coming our way soon.

You can listen in right now:

Or you can grab the show in a few other ways:

• MP3 file (39.1 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed
• Watch on Spreecast

Episode 23 Show Notes

• WordCamp Chicago 2012
• Twenty Twelve theme coming closer
• Jason Schuller’s thoughts on themes
• http://wordpress.com
• http://www.noeltock.com/web-design/wordpress/making-sense-of-the-wordpress-com-redesign/
• http://make.wordpress.org/summit/
• http://2012.vegas.wordcamp.org
• http://2012.philly.wordcamp.org
• Ryan’s trick: http://wordpress.tv/2012/08/28/ryan-imel-the-state-of-themes/, http://wordpress.tv/2012/08/25/pete-davies-how-to-run-a-small-country-using-the-p2-theme/
• Dre’s trick: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cloudsafe365-for-wp/
• Brad’s trick: http://wordpress.tv/2012/08/28/adii-pienaar-the-business-of-code/, Twitter Feed
• Bonus trick: http://symbolset.com

The post WP Late Night #23: “Bughetto” appeared first on WPCandy.

The liveblogging fun starts just after the jump!

[liveblog]

The post The WPCandy WordCamp Chicago Liveblog appeared first on WPCandy.

For those willing to read a bit more, continue on. The speaker’s notes and slides are linked up below as well, including further thoughts on the events and the presentations I sat in on.

Speaker presentations

I’ll be updating the list with further slides and notes as they are posted and available.

The developer track speaker notes and slides were:

• Topher Derosia: Intro to Plugin Development
• John P. Bloch: Awesome Helper Functions in WordPress Core — Slides on his blog
• Tim Shangle: Developing for Committees — Slides on Slideshare
• David Tufts: Webb Apps for the Masses — Slides on SlideShare
• Pippin Williamson: Extensible Plugins — Slides on Slideshare
• Aaron Holbrook: WordPress and Version Control — Slides on his blog
• Mark Jaquith: Deploying WordPress with WPStack

The theme track speaker notes and slides were:

• Jonathan Calvin: CSS3 and WordPress Themes
• Ryan Imel: Every Theme Sucks and Nobody Cares — Slides on SlideShare
• Jake Caputo: No, I Didn’t Read the Instructions, Just Do It For Me — Slides on SpeakerDeck
• Ross Johnson: The Overlap of Emotion and Usability — Slides on SpeakerDeck
• Chip Bennett: Developing Child Theme-Friendly Themes — Slides on SlideShare
• Brad Parbs: 320px and Up, Getting Started with Responsive Design
• Reid Peiffer: WPatterns — Slides on Tribe’s site

The community track speaker notes and slides were:

• Justin Razmus: Using WordPress to Start and Grow Your Business
• Kimanzi Constable: How to Keep Them Coming Back for More
• Paul Kortman: Stop Selling SEO — Slides on Slideshare
• John James Jacoby: BuddyPress or bbPress? Which to Use and Why.
• Benjamin Lotter: Getting Started with Video Blogging
• Tharon Rodriguez: Getting Familiar with PODS
• Timothy Burns: Social Media Broadcasting — Using Online Tools and Metrics to Build Your Tribe

The user track speaker notes and slides were:

• AJ Morris: WordPress: Up and Running
• Chad Warner: WordPress Admin: A Guided Tour — Resources on his blog
• Andy Stratton: Everything is Relative (Frameworks, Plugins and SEO)
• Justin Jones: WordPress Security, or Why Google Says You Shouldn’t Visit My Church — Slides on Slideshare
• Lisa Sabin-Wilson: Exploring WordPress Multisite — Slides on Slideshare
• Dustin Hartzler: Podcasting with WordPress and Live Podcast Recording — Planning PDF

Presentations I attended

I attended a session or two every hour, minus the hour that I gave my talk about WordPress themes. First up was Jonathan Calvin’s in the theme track, who everyone was really bummed for because his car was broken into this morning and his laptop was stolen. So, unfortunately, his talk — on CSS3 and using it in WordPress themes — was mostly on-the-fly and in response to questions. It was a great talk, particularly considering the limitations he was put under — and dealing, no doubt, with the frustration of losing a computer that way.

Above: Brian Richards giving the opening words at WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012. Right after he announced his candidacy for president, by the looks of it.

I spoke next, and then after chatting it up in the hallways came back just in time to see Jake Caputo using me as a stand-in for an annoying customer’s support questions during his talk about supporting a commercial theme user base. That was pretty funny, although a bit creepy in how well the joke was timed.

I enjoyed Jake’s talk, particularly because I don’t think I’ve seen support talked about from a commercial theme developer’s perspective before. He explained the reasoning well, and how to effectively do it, though really my takeaway was learning that the bulk of his customers are turning around and using his themes on client sites rather than using the themes themselves. I’ve heard this sort of thing quite a bit from those who sell commercial themes, and I’m beginning to wonder how much bigger a lot of theme shop’s businesses would be if they could find a way to sell directly to the end user. Food for thought, I suppose.

Above: Jake Caputo presenting, mere moments after making me his example obnoxious customer in a screenshot.

After lunch I sat in on Web Apps for the Masses, a presentation by David Tufts where he talked about building web applications on top of WordPress and used his KickPress project as an example. It was interesting to hear about their experiences building on top of WordPress that way, and will be very excited to see them launch their (paid, I believe) product before too long.

Above: David Tufts talking about KickPress and how to take advantage of “The WordPress App Stack”.

Above: Pippin Williamson talking about making smarter plugins.

During the 2pm hour I was torn between Pippin’s Extensible Plugins and Chip’s Developing Child Theme-Friendly Themes. In the end I sat through the first half of Pippin’s and the last half of Chip’s. The funny thing is, and perhaps this was by design, they were each talking about the same thing — extending another person’s codebase, or rather making your own codebase something others can extend — but were talking about it in regards to plugins and themes, respectively.

I’ve been beginning to build my own plugins to work together, so hearing a few tips from Pippin about how to go about it, and the various ways to consider going about it, was super useful for me and I’ll use his tips in the immediate future. Like, tomorrow.

My favorite part of Chip’s presentation was when he talked about how to write out theme options for a theme in such a way that a child theme (or plugin, really) can filter them and add, subtract, or modify what they are entirely. Just think of it: there could exist a plugin strictly for the purposes of making crazy theme options panels go away. Oh, the possibilities.

I enjoyed Brad Parbs and his presentation in the theme room toward the end of the day, particularly when the room became part of the discussion and various war stories and client tales were shared from those in the room about their responsive site designs. It’s impossible to argue against the importance of responsive designs and media queries nowadays, but the exact implementation and problem solving that is needed is what makes this topic so fascinating to me. I’ll be seeking him out soon to discuss this one some more.

Finally, I wrapped up my day of sessions with Reid Peiffer in the theme track (yes, I hung out there for most of the day) where he talked about web design patterns, and how they apply to the WordPress theme industry. What I liked about his discussion was that, though it’s clear that design patterns are everywhere — sometimes to a comical degree — that doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Instead, he said, see that as an opportunity to work within the conventions and spend your time instead to create interesting things within the expected layouts.

For instance, one example he showed was for a zoo and had a small cartoon dinosaur at the bottom of the page that had taken a big bite out of the footer background area. Clever things like that, he said, is what we miss out on when we get too fixated on making something super original across the board. Of all the slides I saw today, Reid’s are the ones I’m looking forward to grabbing and sitting down with to look through again.

(Kind of) final thoughts on Grand Rapids

Obviously there is still another day of WordCamp tomorrow, specifically a Study Hall day. I’ll be spending a bit of time, at least, chatting with folks about finding blogging inspiration. That should be fun, and not something I get to do that often. I’m also hoping to spend some time hacking away at core stuff and plugin development if time allows.

Overall, I’m very satisfied with the event today. I think it can be daunting to run your first WordCamp, and the Grand Rapids organizers has pulled it off well and with style. There are small hiccups here or there that any camp will have — the wifi required some tweaking to stop it from kicking you offline every twenty minutes, for instance — but where it mattered I thought it was great.

Keep an eye out for the presentation videos as they make their way to WordPress.tv (except for mine, which I guess my mic was muted on, sad face) and make sure to get your ticket for next year’s WordCamp in Grand Rapids. These folks know how to throw a WordCamp.

The post Recap: WordCamp Grand Rapids, Day 1 appeared first on WPCandy.

If you’re at home — or at the very least not cloned and therefore not at all three events — then use the information below to follow these current WordCamps in whatever ways you can.

• The Twitter hashtag for WordCamp Grand Rapids this weekend is #wcgr. There isn’t a live stream or anything, but you can follow the WPCandy liveblog of the event since I’ll be in Grand Rapids all weekend.
• WordCamp Montreal will be using the #wcmtl hashtag on Twitter.
• WordCamp Portland is using the #wcpdx Twitter hashtag. Keep an eye on that one around 1pm Portland time, since Matt Mullenweg will be there doing a town hall event.

If you’re going to be at any of the events above, or just pay really good attention and see anything worth drawing attention to, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.

The post Armchair WordCampers: Watch these three camps happen this weekend appeared first on WPCandy.