Check out the WordCamp Orlando t-shirt design

You know that the $20 ticket price for WordCamp Orlando gets you a spiffy t-shirt? Here’s what the design for that shirt looks like. It’s spectacular.

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Session Spotlight: Git and All His Friends

Track: Developer

Presenter: David Rogers (@al_the_x)

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.

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Session Spotlight: Community with BuddyPress

Track: Publisher

Presenters: Ptah Dunbar and David Bisset

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.

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Session Spotlight: UCF’s Use of WordPress as a CMS

Track: Publisher

Presenters:  Matthew Vaccaro and Justin Sisley

“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.

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Buying tickets on Saturday

In case you haven’t gone ahead and purchased your tickets in advance (which you can do right here) you will be able to buy them the morning of Saturday 12/3 at the event itself. The cost will still be $20 and we will ONLY be accepting credit cards on-site so keep that in mind.

If you haven’t checked out the Schedule for WordCamp Orlando 2011 yet one look will tell you what a value you’re getting for that $20.

We’re looking forward to a great time. If you’re planning on attending you can use #WCO11 on Twitter to mark your thoughts on the speakers and their topics (and the food if you so choose). And if you’re not able to be with us in person you can follow that hashtag throughout the day and see what you’re missing. We’ll also be recording sessions to post here afterwards.

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Session Spotlight: Editing the Visual Editor

Track: Developer

Presenter: Jake Goldman (@jakemgold)

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.

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WordCamp Orlando Sponsor: ZippyKid

Welcome – and thanks – to the newest sponsor of WordCamp Orlando, ZippyKid: Let’s get real here for a minute and learn more about them:

ZippyKid is a managed WordPress Hosting company, the fastest WordPress Host ever. We do WordPress so much better. We live, eat, & breathe WordPress.

ZippyKid offers reliable, secure and cost effective web hosting solutions that keep your website up and running. Content Delivery Network (CDN) is included on all plans, this means content is served from servers closest to your visitors. Partnering with Rackspace, our networks & servers, along with the top 5,000 sites in the world, are located in enterprise class data centers. This give us the ability to offer you high network connectivity and security you need to ensure you your website is always accessible to your users.

Learn more at their website.

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Get Happy at the Happiness Bar

If you’ve ever been to a WordCamp before you’ll know one of the focal points of the event is the Happiness Bar. If you’ve never been to a WordCamp before you should know: The Happiness Bar is one of the focal points of the event.

The Happiness Bar is, in and of itself, a microcosm of what WordCamps are about. They’re tables or booths at WordCamp that are manned by men and women who are WordPress experts in any of a number of fields. And they’re there to share that expertise with attendees. Bring your questions about scaling, design problems or anything else to these folks and they’ll do whatever they can to help you out.

The Happiness Bar will be in full swing at WordCamp Orlando, staffed with volunteers who are all committed to WordPress and giving back to the community in the best way possible.

We’ll have a full schedule of who will be there throughout the day closer to this Saturday. But rest assured there will be someone on hand to help you through whatever issues you’re having.

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Session Spotlight: Designing Your Brand Through User Experience

Track: Publisher

Presenter: Dan Maccarone (@danmaccarone)

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.

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Session Spotlight: Scaling, Servers, and Deploys — Oh My!

Track: Developer

Presenter: Mark Jaquith (@markjaquith)

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.

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