Category: Meeting Information

WordPress Weekly Coffee Klatch – Our first, a success!

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date July 7, 2016
No Comments on WordPress Weekly Coffee Klatch – Our first, a success!

By Ani – organizer of WordPress Weekly Coffee Klatch, WordPress Meetup SWFL

I am calling this one a big success!

We had our first ever WordPress Weekly Coffee Klatch (From the German, Kaffeeklatsch.), on Wednesday, July 6 th 2016 at 11 am. This was the first of what we are hoping to put on every week. Incidentally, it was almost two years ago, to the date, that I first logged into WordPress.com to get a blog started. In September of 2015 I started a self-hosted site/blog, and today I hosted a WordPress Meetup KaffeeKlatsch. Not because I’m an expert by any means, because I surely am not. Simply due to the fact that I have a desire for learning and I’m guessing it’s something all members of the WordPress Meetup SWFL share.

I have attended several of the monthly evening events and one of the things I’ve always longed for at those, was mingling, so we could get to know one another more, make connections with WordPress users to troubleshoot problems, ask advice and things of that nature. Also, for me, while the monthly meetings are soooo informative, and I encouraged the daytime folks to attend this month’s 6-8 pm meeting, my brain is so tired at that time of night. I had been kicking around this late morning coffee shop thing for several months.

It was a pretty fine turnout.

Only under a week notice and we had five people including me. Three out of five brought laptops and I took notes, old school, on paper too. I think all who attended agreed that it was a very productive meeting and we discussed a plethora of topics. We had people from different backgrounds with knowledge of the internet in many forms. I raised several subjects, one of them being, Child Themes which several of the attendees were unfamiliar. Those of us that had been attending Birgit’s monthly 6 pm meetings were acquainted with this term.

Grab the resources at shared on this meetup How to modify Themes? From “Edit CSS” to Creating Child Themes

Hoping to encourage participation.

I decided it would be a nice idea to have some kind of a prize given at the end to whoever was the most helpful to other participants. I was hoping this would be a nice incentive for more advanced users to attend. We decided that James was the winner of that title, but he wasn’t able to take the prize home, (homemade organic pizza crust, made by yours truly) so I made it a gift to Larry, the owner of the coffee house. Incidentally, Larry was also my contact person in reserving their private meeting room. He seemed most appreciative and anxious to try it out!

Our most gracious host.

We all felt that The Grind was absolutely spectacular! The private meeting room was marvelous and we were able to close the doors. Most of us purchased a fruit smoothie which was very refreshing since it’s been really hot the last few days. They also serve lunch so next time some of us may order that as well.

All in all, I believe that it was a huge win! I did forget to take that selfie of our group that Birgit wanted so we’ll have to try for next week. I would really like our members to make an effort to attend in the next month if schedules allow. Having a strong start can make or break these kinds of functions. Hoping to see more of you there next Wednesday and in the weeks to come. Remember to get your RSVP’s in and update if plans change as space is limited to only 10 people at this venue. Thanks again to those of you who attended.

Tags Coffee Klatch

Meeting Information

Custom Post Types & Custom Fields: Meeting Notes at The RocketLounge

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date July 1, 2016
No Comments on Custom Post Types & Custom Fields: Meeting Notes at The RocketLounge

Thank you to Peter & Dieter provide The RocketLounge as our new meeting space. We appreciate your hospitality and generosity!

I want to say that this was one of the best ones that I have been too so far. I love the fact that we can be more up close and personal at the new venue. — Ani

Thank you to our new host of our meetup! @RocketLOUNGEFla #incubator #startups in Ft. Myers. #WordPress pic.twitter.com/HP9xoZchci

— WordPress Meets SWFL (@wpswfl) July 1, 2016

Informative MeetUp and met some great people too! — Marcy

Upcoming WordCamps and other WordPress Events

July 15 + 16 – WPCampus – WordPress in Higher Education, Sarasota
August 19 + 20 WordSesh 4 like a virtual WordCamp except there is one session per hour for 24 hours.
Sep 9-11, WordCamp Tampa – Call for Speakers
Oct 7-9, WordCamp Orlando – Call for Speakers
Dec 2 – 4th WordCamp US, Philadelphia – Call for Speakers
June 16-18, 2017 WordCamp Europe
New wp.org Plugin Directory open in Beta, take a look!
New Android App version for WordPress
What’s new in 4.6 target release date Aug 16

Mentioned during discussions

Eventful.com Live Event Feeds from Florida – They also have a Developer API to check out
Google Resizer – use to check how your site looks on different screen sizes.

Custom Post Types and Custom Fields made WordPress Enterprise ready

The WordPress Core Team introduced Custom Post Types in 2010 with version 3.0, and it made WordPress enterprise ready as a content management system for lots of different use cases beyond blogging and brochure-like websites.

Custom Post Types Solutions via plugins

Portfolio & Testimonial via Jetpack Custom Post Types
Book Reviews Plugin
WP Ultimate Recipe
WP MovieLibrary
Products, Business Directory, etc.

Please share your favorite Custom Post Type plugin in the comments!

Articles:

WordPress Codex resources

Plugins for Administrators & Developers

Custom Post Type UI – This plugin provides an easy to use interface to create and administer custom post types and taxonomies in WordPress. The plugin just creates the types. You will need to add them to the theme yourself.
Advanced Custom Fields – love it because of the repeater field in the pro version,
Custom Field Suite a visual custom fields management plugin.

Code Examples:

Display of Custom Fields (ACF) per custom post type.

Code, assuming you installed the ACF plugin.

In your Theme: If your Custom Post Type’s slug is ‘product’ – copy the single.php template from your theme and save it as single-product.php. WordPress will pick that template automatically.

Withing the loop add something like this, assuming ‘product’ is your custom post type and ‘applications’ and ‘twc_options’ are your custom fields, associated with the custom post type.

get_field () and the_field() are ACF-plugin functions.
is_singular() is one of WordPress core functions

<code>

elseif ( is_singular( ‘product’ ) ){

if( get_field(‘applications’) ): ?>

<h2>Applications</h2>

<?php the_field(‘applications’); ?>

</div>

<?php endif;

if( get_field(‘twc_options’) ): ?>

<h2>Features and Benefits</h2>

<?php the_field(‘twc_options’); ?>

</div>

<?php endif;

}

For a custom post type taxonomy pages you can use the following WordPress core functions

function display_wirescables() {

echo( ‘<ul class=”wirecat”>’ );

foreach (get_terms(‘wires-cables’) as $cat) :

echo( ‘<li>’ );

echo( ‘<a href=”‘ . get_term_link($cat->slug, ‘wires-cables’) . ‘”>’ . $cat->name . ‘</a>’ );

echo( ‘</li>’ );

endforeach;

echo( ‘</ul>’ );

}

</code>

Meeting Information

New location, Topics Survey, Party & more

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date June 19, 2016
No Comments on New location, Topics Survey, Party & more

Topic Survey for July 28 Meeting

WordCamp Speaker & WordPress trainer, Chris Wiegman will join us for our July 28th. We have been running a topic survey, for the upcoming presentation by Chris. We will close the poll Monday night. Check out the topics and select your favorite http://goo.gl/5ZXZGA. Decisions are made by those you participate! This is your chance!

June 30th Meeting – New Location: The Rocket Lounge

Learn more about the newly opened Incubator/Accelerator – Big “Thank you” to Dieter Kondek & Peter Ocsody for hosting our next few meetings at their offices. We are very grateful to have them as our sponsors! The address: 1422 Hendry St (Map)

2nd Anniversary drinks after meeting at Spirits of Bachus

Although we don’t need a reason to have a party, it’s a nice milestone for our meetup to celebrate its revival in June 2014. Fellow member Erin White found a fabulous place where we can go to after our meeting on Thursday, June 30. Join us at Spirits of Bacchus at their temporary home upstairs of Prime de Leon. (read more). The address:33 Patio De Leon (Map)

Call for session proposals

The WordPress Meetup group is a collaborative effort and community-driven. To be successful, we need your opinion and your ideas. We posted a call for session proposal on our website. Please take a few moments and think about attractive meeting subjects, meeting formats you’d rather want to see. There are about almost 300 members listed on this Meetup group, and only a few of you show up at our meetings. It’s ok if you just watch from the sidelines. But just in case you haven’t seen a topic that interested you, this is your chance to change things:-) Let us know!

Tags meeting, meetup, poll, survey, wordpress

Meeting Information WordPress Community

What’s Missing – Meeting Notes and Resources

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date January 29, 2016
No Comments on What’s Missing – Meeting Notes and Resources

WordPress News:

Contributer Day: 20 Questions Challenge. January 30 and 31, 2016 Who wants to participate?
WordPress Community News via Meetup posted on the website as reminder!
WordCamp Miami, 20 through 21, 2016 w/ pre-WC event on Friday 2/19 – –If you contemplate to go, check out the hotel page: Special rates will end at January 31 or first week of February. Carol, Brian and Birgit will be at WordCamp Miami. Who else?
New pages on our Meetup Space:
- Review Meetup Rules
- Suggesting Meetup Events
- Thank to our Global WordPress Community Sponsors
March Meetup date has changed to 3/31
Upcoming WordPress SWFL Meetups
- February 25th: Modifying Themes: From Edit CSS to creating Child Themes
- March 31st: Report from WordCamp Miami and BuddyCamp

A huge “Thank you” to our speaker, Brian Zajac, (“Say-Jack”) EyeMagination who was thinking fast on his feet when the power went out, and with it all lights, and wifi and projector. Thanks to everyone who stayed with us, when we had to move the venue to the nearest Denny’s to continue our conversation.

Thank you also to Mark and Linda Candels of Candels Estimating, who grant us access to their training room every month!
Despite the challenges, Brian gave us great insights into how you can create more traffic, through better UX – (User experience) and listening in on what your users are actually doing on your web site by studying your Google Analytics and other means.

Here is Brian’s Slidedeck for you.

Big Thank you also to Caroline Ravelo for her extensive Meeting notes who are on GoogleDoc.I also attach Caroline’s original WordDocument: SWFL WordPress Meetup 20160128:

Thank you all, especially Brian for sharing so much great content and Birgit for organizing the event.

Here are some of the notes I took from our Meetup session – Caroline Ravelo

Feel free to add your notes in the comment section as well either here or on GoogleDocs.

Tags Google Analytics, UI, UX, Website owners, wordpress

Meeting Information People WordPress Community

WordPress Community: News January 2016

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date January 27, 2016
1 Comment on WordPress Community: News January 2016

WordPress Community January Newsletter

Sent via Meetup.com to all members. We repost it here just in case you didn’t receive it.

Hello, WordPress community!

Welcome to the new monthly email from the WordPress.org community team. The feedback we’ve gotten from meetup members around the world is that there is not enough of a connection between local groups and the overall WordPress community, so this is an experiment to see if we can create more connections.

Each month we’ll be talking about:

That month’s contributor drive weekend
An event type you could try in your group
The community team that supports the global meetup and WordCamp program
A featured WordPress meetup group that you can check out for inspiration

We hope this will help you feel more connected to the broader WordPress community and provide more opportunities for you to get involved!

Support Team Weekend

In just over a week, our very first worldwide contributor weekend will take place January 30-31. The focus for this month is on our support team, the volunteers who answer questions in the WordPress.org support forums and in IRC. We’re starting with the support team because it is the easiest team to get involved with, and doesn’t require a lot of setup or specialized knowledge. If you use WordPress, you know more than someone who is just getting started and can probably help answer questions for those people. If you are a more advanced user or a developer, then you can help answer some of the more advanced troubleshooting questions. In short, just about anyone can help!

To participate in the support team weekend, you can get together with other people in your meetup group, or you can go it alone. The goal is to answer 20 questions over the course of the weekend, but there is no minimum requirement. The main goal is to have people helping each other through the WordPress support channels, and during the contributor weekend we’ll have volunteers online to help if you get stuck. We encourage you to give it a try next weekend and get together with some folks from your group. You can get more information on how the weekend will work at https://make.wordpress.org/support/20-questions/. Good luck!

Teaser: The next contributor weekend will be the last weekend of February, and will be focused on the Video team that manages WordPress.tv.

Event Idea

One of the things we’ve heard from a lot of meetup organizers is that it’s a challenge to line up speakers and plan events in advance. To help with this we’ll be suggesting an event type each month that has worked well for other meetup groups and that doesn’t require a speaker – the kind of event that anyone can organize, and we hope you will! This month’s suggestion is the WordPress.tv brown bag lunch.

Event Type: WordPress.tv Brown Bag Lunch.
Difficulty Level: So easy.
Venue Requirements: Conference room, monitor or projector with sound.
Prep Work: Choose a video to watch from WordPress.tv, and reserve a conference room.

Description: Have people show up and bring their lunch. Play a video from a recent WordCamp that has been posted on WordPress.tv, making sure you choose one that is going to fit in your time allotment. Have people eat their lunch while the video is playing. When the video is done, have everyone discuss what they just watched. When your time is up have people clean up their lunch stuff and head out. That’s it! Could it get any easier?

Notes: The brown bag lunch works well when you have a location that is easy to get to during the lunch hour, for example a downtown office building. While our suggestion here is specific to a lunchtime event, you could do this anytime, and there could be any number of these in your Meetup group each month, with different events in different parts of town, on different days, and/or with different areas of focus (blogging, theme development, core development, etc.) – it’s up to you. If you’re interested in organizing an event like this on a weekend day or an evening rather than during a lunch hour, a good video to use might be Matt Mullenweg’s State of the Word presentation and Q&A from WordCamp US in December: We hope you’ll give this event type a try!

The Community Team

This month, a general intro to the team. The WordPress community program is supported by a team of volunteers from around the world called the community team. This team oversees WordCamps, meetups, trainings, and other community-focused events. These volunteers, experienced organizers from all over the place, are available to answer questions in the #events channel on the WordPress contributor Slack instance. If you’re interested in organizing an event and need support or would like to talk with other organiers, join us there! If you’re not already on the WordPress contributor Slack instance, you can sign up here: https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.

All event organizers are considered part of the community team, and we choose our deputies (the people that handle WordCamp and Meetup applications and help run the program) from this group, so if you are interested in getting more involved with the community program on a broader scale, hanging out in the events channel and supporting other organizers is a great way to get started.

Featured Meetup Group: Seattle WordPress Meetup

Our featured Meetup group for January is the Seattle WordPress Meetup. While this is one of the larger meetup groups in our community, that’s not why we are giving it this recognition. The Seattle group has put into practice many of the goals that we have identified for the Meetup program, which some other groups have struggled with, so they’re a great group to kick off this feature and provide inspiration to other WordPress meetups.

If you look at their Meetup.com site you’ll see there are a dozen organizers organizing different types of events in different parts of town on different days of the week and at different times. That is a lot of variety, and it means that more members of the meetup group can find an event that interests them. There are events tailored for users, developers, beginners, experts, you name it. There are study groups for people to learn together, contributor events, presentations, and workshops, and they’re not afraid to experiment, which is how they have managed to grow their group to this level of activity.

The organizing team is diverse, which ensures that multiple points of view are represented when decisions are made for the group, and they welcome new organizers, rather than having one or two people control the group. In short, the Seattle meetup provides something for everyone in their group, has worked hard to be a welcoming community, and is worth checking out to see if they have any ideas you can copy. (Good work, Seattle!)

Want to check out other WordPress meetup groups? They’re all listed at http://www.meetup.com/pro/wordpress/
That’s it for now — see you next month!

– Your friends on the Community Team

make.wordpress.org/community
P.S. One last thing — check out our new #ilovewp testimonials page at https://wordpress.org/about/testimonials/ and if the spirit moves you, add your own!

#ilovewp 'couse https://t.co/kVTnDZ7S0u

— guido scialfa (@guidoscialfa) January 21, 2016

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Meeting Information Presentations WordPress: What's New?

Updates & Resources: What’s New 4.3, Plugins for Photos, Security and more

Post author By Birgit Pauli-Haack
Post date September 20, 2015
No Comments on Updates & Resources: What’s New 4.3, Plugins for Photos, Security and more

What’s new in WordPress 4.3?

Formatting Short Cuts, Quick link Toolbar, Site Icon,
Quick Link Image toolbar – not new but still worth mentioning. …
By default comments are turned off on pages for new installs. For theme developers: check out the new singular.php template.
Customizer now includes creating menus, and is accessible via a separate menu link in the top navigation.
WordCount now updated while writing + some better parsing.
Explore the 4.3 Field Notes for more details on this release.

Here is the video of WordPress 4.3 “Billie”

Upcoming WordCamps

WordCamp Tampa: September 25 – 27, 2015
WordCamp Orlando: November 13 – 15, 2015 https://vimeo.com/137146108
WordCamp US: Philadelphia, December 4 – 6, 2015. Tickets are on sale right now, including Livestream, for those of us rather stay in warm Florida

Check out WordCamp Central for more WordCamps scheduled around the world.

Get Involved and Contribute to WordPress (Download PDF)

Take the WordPress Survey 2015

Plugins for Photo handling on Site.

In our meeting in April, we looked at the WordPress Gallery as well as the options Jetpack adds to the media library handling. See the meeting notes with links to videos and other links

Easy Watermark https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-watermark/
Instagram
The Simply Instagram plugin display your Instagram photos in three Endpoints that Instagram offers through shortcode for Post and Page or using Widget.
Another richly featured plugin for you Instagram integration is
Regenerate Thumbnails ++ https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
NextGen Gallery – Very large set of features on the free version already.
Save & Import Images from URL is one of the plugins, I wish, would go into Core WordPress. It’s a must have especially if you are producing content for multiple sites.
ImageInject: Search Flickr via Keyword and import images to your site.

We didn’t get to talk about the next four plugins. They are on my list to test in the near future. Have you used any of them? Please let us know what you think in the comment section.

Sources:

Website Security even more important for small biz and nonprofits

We had to work quite a bit on security / performance the past months. Performance sufferes with excessive login attempts and a lot ot spam comments lingering in the database, before they are deleted. We also had to fight off a so called SEO.spam.injection, a script rerouting traffic from your search engine result to some ecommerce site. And lastly we dealt with an intruder using our email server to send out massive amounts of spams.

If you are on shared hosting, you hope your hosting provider takes care of all the server maintenance and monitoring systems. Most of them do. If you are on a VPS (Virtual Private Serrver) you and your web developer are responsible to tighten up the security of the system.

We have multiple VPS accounts and maintain some of them for our clients. Security has become a considerable part of our ongoing server and maintenance tasks. , and some of you have already experienced that:

We are using Sucuri subscription, and we were very pleased by the experience
And we have been testing WordFence on a different site and had good experience as well.
We also us WP-Spam Shield to keep the spam posts down, and performance high.

We are testing those to add them to our “Peace of Mind” hosting service for our web development clients, in addition to the monitoring of uptime, update service as well as database clean up of spam and other residues.