WordCamp Orlando will have something for both content publishers as well as developers. Our December 3 WordCamp’s first sessions will start at 9:30am and will be split into two separate tracks for the day with sessions specifically geared towards those audiences.
More session information will be added daily, so please continue to stay tuned for details.
Jailbreaking WordPress: Escaping from Hosting Provider Lock-in
Changing servers doesn’t have to be scary, and we’ll prove it by moving a site LIVE! Beyond database dumps and DNS, we’ll get into updating URLs embedded in WordPress plugins and other techniques. We’ll shine a light in those dark corners and peek under the bed — trust us, there aren’t REALLY any monsters under there.
Have a question you’d like us to address? Tell us here: http://bit.ly/questions-for-chris
WordPress in the News Room
WordPress and the set of tools it provides can be used beyond the scope of a typical blog or even a simple content-management system for any website. This session will give an overview of how a major online publication, Salon.com, uses WordPress as its day-to-day publishing platform and the journey it took to get there. We’ll cover the things that WordPress can do right out of the box, the major features we’ve added or subtracted, and ways we’ve adapted the software to support our editorial process to meet the demands of a high-energy, high-traffic publishing environment. We’ll go over the challenges we faced, how we overcame them, and those we’re still dealing with.
Emergent Content Forms
“Content,” like “Digital,” is a word that should denote a whole range of activities, but usually brings to mind just one – in this case, a bunch of words. As platforms and technologies and services evolve, they influence and are influenced by the unpredictable ways communities and makers take advantage of what those tools can do to present new kinds of things. Experiments and one-offs slowly evolve in to common forms as more makers use them, as audiences begin to understand and expect their conventions, and as they are found to fill an audience need or niche particularly well. This session will explore some of the things out there other than words that publishers are making, including videos that aren’t podcasts or shorts, pictures that move, pictures that don’t move, and the other (other) C word, Curation. After all of that talk about *what’s* being made, if there’s time we’ll talk a bit about how some of those forms of expression might influence *how* content is made.
What’s Ahead for WordPress
WordPress 3.3 is right around the corner and we’re fortunate enough to have Jane Wells, User Experience Lead for WordPress to walk us through not only what to expect in the coming version, but also in the coming year for WordPress.
Jane will demo WordPress 3.3, discuss the state of WordPress and its community as well as what she has planned for 2012.
Designing Your Brand Through User Experience
In the digital world, traditional branding is no longer the best approach to define your product. Instead of spending an extended period of time discussing the mood your logo should convey and what the right tagline should be, it’s important to focus on the overall experience actual people will have using your product. From conceptualization to implementation, defining details of how interactions work, creating a distinct voice and tone, and what features need to be there from day one all feed into how users will eventually feel about your product. We will explore how your brand comes into reality as the experience design evolves, especially focusing on how all decisions in the product development timeline are tied to the original product strategy. We will look at real-world examples that showcase successes and failures of digital product branding and will share insights on our own experiences and where mistakes are generally made.
UCF’s Use of WordPress as a CMS
“WordPress as a CMS” explores the why’s and how’s of using WordPress as a fully-functional Web Content Management System. Presented by the designer and developer of the latest iteration of the UCF College of Medicine’s website, you will hear about topics such as reasons for choosing WordPress over other systems, what the design and development process has been like, and where they see the system taking the college’s web communications efforts in years to come.
Covering its history as a blogging platform to what the system is capable of today, Matt and Justin will discuss content organization strategies, security concerns, and publishing workflow.
Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!
This talk will discuss professional WordPress development, scaling up and out to meet demand, and strategies for deploying everything that will keep you sane. Topics for discussion: Apache, Memcached, APC, nginx, NFS, rsync, Git, Capistrano.
Choosing the Best Developer and Designer
Whether you want to start a site from scratch, migrate an existing site from another CMS, or make updates to an existing site you’ll be faced with the tough decision of hiring a designer and/or developer. A bad decision can cost you time and money–and your sanity. So how do you make the right decision? We have put together a panel of designers and developers to talk about what questions you should ask when evaluating potential vendors, what homework you should do prior to requesting proposals, options for hosting your site, and share examples of what makes projects successful.
Editing the Visual Editor
WordPress’s visual content editor (TinyMCE) is one of many elements that contribute to the power of its content management capabilities. You can tailor this tool to be even more powerful both in its capabilities as they relate to your content. This session will cover adding custom stylesheets based on post type to the editor, modifying, removing buttons from the editor, and even creating your own custom buttons for the TinyMCE toolbar. We’re even going to cover brand new WordPress 3.3 techniques introduced with the new wp_editor function.
Intended for developers, this will introduce new ideas and techniques to even the most experienced programmers, while also providing newer developers a good sense of how to use WordPress hooks in creative and powerful ways.
Community with BuddyPress
Adding social network capabilities to your blog or website can be an exciting way to drive content and interact with your audience. BuddyPress can offer a lot of these capabilities, but can sometimes be intimidating in terms of the number of features and then the customization of those features.
This discussion will address how to use BuddyPress for a variety of projects and sites – beyond just simply adding a “social network” to your blog. We will explore how you can customize BuddyPress templates and functions to alter and add components for custom projects. We’ll also check out some great customizable plugins. The goal is to have fun and explore what BuddyPress can really do. Although there will be some discussion of code, this is general enough in nature to appeal to those new to BuddyPress or even non-developers.
Git and All His Friends
So you may have heard about this “git” thingy and how it makes your life as a developer better, easier, and more manageable. Our beloved WordPress, however, is still mired in Subversion, but that shouldn’t stop you from enjoying some git-enabled goodness. Let me show you some workflow techniques that will help.