This month marks 1 year of consecutive meetups. We have had some great meetups but we want to make year two even better. Click on the link below to take a five question survey so that we can provide the best user group possible. Thanks!
Take Our Survey!
Also, there is a WordPress user survey that everyone should take. Have you taken it yet?
The April meetup for WordPress DC is this Tuesday, April 12, 7 p.m., at Fathom Creative. Are you coming? Well then, you should RSVP. And if you can’t make it, don’t worry: We’re going to livestream, record and publish all of the talks.
We have an excellent line-up of speakers for 5-minute rapid-fire talks. Here’s the current snack menu:
Creating Content: Finding It Around Every Corner
David A. Kennedy is the Online Communications Manager for The Arc, a nonprofit organization that advocates for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. He is a former journalist who is now a digital jack of all trades. Follow him @davidakennedy.
WordPress AND …, NOT WordPress OR …
Instead of deciding between WordPress or another tool to do the job, here are a few ways to mash your blog up with other parts of your website. Marc Lavallee is the Technology Architect for NPR’s Project Argo, a local/national journalism collaboration between NPR and member stations around the country. Follow him @lavallee.
How I learned to stop worrying and love the code
The talk: A short introduction to PHP. The goal: Learn how to avoid breaking your theme if you edit it. Ben Balter, a J.D./MBA candidate, is a New Media Fellow at the Federal Communications Commission. Follow him @benbalter.
Taxonomies
A look at taxonomies (such as categories and tags), and how to use them to define your content. Glenn Clatworthy is the director of the Standards & Archiving unit of the PBS television programming division, focusing on advanced metadata management, standards development and reporting. Follow him @GlennClatworthy.
Web Accessibility and Semantics
Russell Heimlich is the sole in-house developer at the Pew Research Center. Follow him @kingkool68.
Defining requirements for your next CMS project
A brief look at several common tools used in developing an effective user experience — from the initial content audit to the creation of personas, user scenarios, and the resulting architecture documents. Anthony Paul is technical lead and user experience designer at Fathom Creative. Follow him @anthonydpaul.
Case Study
John P. Bloch is a web developer at Avendi Media, a creative design agency. When at work, he builds websites exclusively on WordPress, testing the limits of WordPress as a platform. Follow him @johnpbloch.
How to be part of the WordPress community
Aaron Jorbin is a WordPress core contributor and an engineer with Clearspring, where he works on AddThis. Follow him @aaronjorbin.
Hidden Features in WordPress
Andrew Nacin is a core developer of WordPress, and he’s able to work full time on the project as a Tech Ninja at Audrey Capital. Follow him @nacin.
Thanks everyone for coming out to this week’s WordPress DC event at Fathom Creative. Ben Balter and Greg Linch each did a great job with their presentations.
I look forward to see where this group will go next. We’re currently planning to hold lightning talks in April, so submit this form if you’re interested. If you wish to speak now or in the future, or have a topic you want to see covered, please let Aaron and I know.
Greg’s slides are available here. Ben’s have been uploaded here. The livestream was recorded and saved — you can watch it here. For those who asked, the town hall with Matt Mullenweg was also recorded.
If you need help updating to WordPress 3.1, please let us know — there are a number of us who are able to assist!
Some Twitter accounts you might wish to follow: @BenBalter, @greglinch, @FathomCreative, @WordPressDC, @nacin, @aaronjorbin.
Our next meetup is April 12. Hope to see you there! [RSVP here]
For our April meetup we are going to have lightning speeches. We are hoping that you can be one of the people that step up and present. Speeches should be 5-10min in length and related to WordPress. Topics could include: “Designing themes”, “Look at this cool site that I built”, “How I used Custom Post Types for….”, “Adventures in Plugin Development”, “How to power through writers block”, or just about anything else you can imagine. Please use the contact form to get in touch. Continue reading
Our March meetup will be Tuesday, March 8, at Fathom Creative near Logan Circle.
We announced on Meetup.com (please RSVP) that our two speakers this month are Greg Linch and Ben Balter. Greg, who works The Washington Post, will be presenting lessons that can be learned from how journalists use WordPress. Ben, JD/MBA candidate at GW and a member of the FCC’s new media team, will be discussing how you can use WordPress to craft your personal brand. Follow them on Twitter: @greglinch, @BenBalter.
You might want to check out the DC Hacks/Hackers group, a meetup for journalists and developers. We’ve invited them to join us this month.
WordPress 3.1 was released last week. If you need help updating, a number of developers will be at Fathom Creative early that evening (starting at 6:15 pm). Bring your WordPress and FTP login information (and your laptop, if you’d like) and we’ll help!
We announced yesterday on Meetup that Matt Mullenweg would be joining us for a special meetup and Town Hall discussion on WordPress. Within three hours we reached capacity. We’re currently working to see if we can add some more people and also livestream the event. If you aren’t able to attend and would like to ask a question, please comment here and we will try to get it asked.
On October 19, WordPress DC members attended a joint Meetup with DC Hacks/Hackers.
Wes Lindamood and Marc Lavallee from NPR gave a presentation that detailed the technical side of the Argo Network, which is powered by WordPress and other open source applications.
The developers used the WordPress 3.0 multi-site feature and parent/child theme relationships to create the parent Argo theme from the “twenty ten” default WordPress theme and created child themes consisting of images, fonts, and CSS style pages that give each Argo site its own look and feel.
The developers also used Django to aggregate each bloggers’ content from their social media sources (Twitter, Facebook, Disqus, and Delicious).
Vodpod videos no longer available.At our next meetup, we will be discussing what we learned from last the WordCamp sessions held in Baltimore, MD on September 11.
Below is the session titles and links to the reference materials:
9:30am
Keynote – Marco Tabini
11:00am
BASIC: Geoff Livingston – Blogging and Non-profits
PRO: Scott Kinglsey Clark – WordPress as a CMS (PODS/WP 3.0 Custom Post Types)
12:00pm
BASIC: V. Scott Ellis – Taxonomies –
PRO: Guide to protecting and securing your WordPress blog with the author of Professional WordPress -Brad Williams
2:30pm
BASIC: Matthew Dybwad – Using WordPress for Activism/Action-based Campaigns (Replaced by Q/A Session with Aaron Brazell)
PRO: Andrew Nacin – WordPress Undiscovered APIs
3:30pm
BASIC: Lisa Sabin Wilson – Intro to BuddyPress – Same topic on WordCamp TV http://wordpress.tv/2010/07/10/sabin-wilson-buddypress-boulder10/
PRO: Jacob Goldman – Customizing WordPress Administration
4:30pm
Keynote – Interview with Jane Wells
Please feel free to comment on your experience at WordCamp as well as your experience with any of the above topics.
Yesterday’s Presentation was by Aaron Jorbin (hey, that’s me) and and is now available on his site. Check out Users / Roles / Capabilities where you’ll find that he has linked to both his presentation and detailed explanations of the four plugins he wrote to demonstrate the api.
Welcome to the WordPress DC blog. We are going to summarize and talk about our meetup here and also link to interesting tutorials to help you better understand WordPress. If you’re a DC area blogger or WordPress developer, feel free to comment with any questions or ideas for user group presentations you might have.
WordPress DC Meetup Blog 