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
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!
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?
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.
Over the last four weeks, I have screened some of the best podcasts via Stitcher. I found some excellent shows around WordPress, too.
I may not have found all WordPress-related podcasts, but let’s start with the five shown below which include links to apps. The podcasts cover different topics. They are created by WordPress enthusiasts who share their expertise, their insights and even offer free advice about freelance work.
You can download the apps to your mobile phones and download links to learn more on how to make podcasts.
WordPress Weekly is hosted by Jeff Chandler, contributing writer to WP Tavern site, & Marcus Couch. Recorded on Wednesday nights, Chandler and Couch cover all news around WordPress and interview presenters of recent WordCamps. Nearly every podcast has a section about Plugins, where Couch shares newly discovered Plugins. The show features WordPress royalties like Matt Mullenweg, and last month covered WordPress’ 12-year anniversary.
During last week’s episode Chandler and Couch took a closer look at the upcoming WordPress 4.3 release. Right now, WordPress Core 4.3 is in Beta 3, and the final release is scheduled for August 18, 2015. They also discussed the community’s take on how to handle old content on WordPress TV, which has content dating back to 2007 when there was still a 2 in front of the WordPress version numbering.
Congratulations to Jeff Chandler, who will host WordPress weekly’s 200th episode this week!
Troy Dean, owner of WPElevation.com, discusses how to create a business as WordPress freelancer or consultant. He talks about how specific tools and concepts can help make better WordPress Plugins or themes to better serve your clients. Dean built his own business providing specialized advice to Plugin developers, themes designers or website implementation consultants. His guests include business owners working within the field of WordPress. Dean brings you behind the scenes of their businesses, and lets you in on their failure, struggles and triumphs.
This week’s episode was a real treat – Dean featured Seth Godin who advised Kristina Romero, who has been struggling with the conundrum of having less and less time available to work but still needs to earn additional income.
I also enjoyed one of the previous episodes when Dean interviewed Kronda Adair, a fellow member of NTEN Community of Practice and a volunteer for Black Girls Code. You can learn more here.
Next show is already online:
Know what problems your clients have & be the authority at solving them. My appearance on @WPelevation w/ @troydeanhttp://t.co/fgYkZNl7QZ
Who is able to keep track of all the thousands of Plugins beyond the most popular 100?
It seems Jeff Overall and Marcus Couch can.
During their weekly podcast they review new Plugins and separate the wheat from the chaff. They cover all aspects of WordPress – ecommerce, multi-site, handling of graphics and BuddyPress, as well as maintenance, security and speed. I always appreciate their wit and wisdom, sorting through the vast amount of Plugins available on WordPress.org as well as around the universe of Premium plugins. Once in a while, I go on a binge listening session, mostly when I need to procrastinate. Listening to Overall and Couch always makes me want to improve the various WordPress sites in my portfolio.
Latest Show announcement:
It's Episode 226 w/plugins for User Feedback, Interactive Maps, Inserting Media from Dropbox http://t.co/kB80erARyL
Adam Silver, organizer of the South Bay WordPress Meetup and former stand-up comedian, hosts the weekly Kitchen Sink Podcast. The format of his show varies. Sometimes he creates an educational segment and other times he features guest interviews. But Silver always covers Upcoming events, WordPress News and includes a Tip of the Week. This week Silver interviews Kyle Maurer of Real Big Marketing. Maurer is a speaker at WordCamps and develops WordPress Plugins and themes. Silver also offers you, the listener, to leave him a voicemail–via SpeakPipe–asking him a WordPress question. Go check it out!
Dave Hehenberger and Doug Yuen host the WPCast.fm, a podcast for WordPress professionals by WordPress professionals.
Yuen runs a successful WordPress hosting and online service business, and Hehenberger runs a WordPress Plugin business. They don’t number their episodes, and their format varies from time to time, depending upon what’s going on in their own professional lives.
Hehenberger just returned from WordPress Europe. He gives a recap of his experiences and talks with Yuen about the progress on their business while giving shout-outs to other great WordPress professionals. It’ll be worth going back to some of their podcasts to “binge listen.”
Great discussions ensued about using plugins and how to choose them. We went over the plugins repository screens in details and also looked at 3rd party sites with plugin reviews and directories. You’ll find all the links discussed in the Google Slides embedded below.
WordPress Plugins from A to Z
If you like podcasts and learn more about WordPress Plugins I recommend you listen to episodes on the WordPress Plugins from A to Z podcast, hosted by John Overall and Marcus Couch
The WordPress Plugins A-Z Podcast can be found on iTunes, Stitcher Radio and also on WordPress Radio. I have found it very helpful. Both hosts come prepared to their shows and it’s fast paced. The selection is always well rounded and I learned about new plugins and use cases for plugins, I haven’t considered yet.
Links to find more
John Elcik shared these links via our online survey:
If you too, like to share some resources regarding WordPress Plugins, use the comments sections below.
The search is over. We have a new venue sponsor: Candels On Call.
Mark and Linda Candels generously let us use their state of the art training room at their offices for the rest of the year. Please thank them and give them a shout-out on the social webs:
Video of Matt Mullenweg’s “State of the Word” at WordCamp San Francisco couple month ago. I always find listening to Mullenweg talk about WordPress fascinating. His poise and his passion has not diminished since he started out ‘Democratizing Publishing’ through Blogging and WordPress in 2003, when he forked an earlier blogging software and created an open-source community that span the whole world. Get yourself some coffee, sit back and listen in on “The State of the Word 2014”
The WordPress in Numbers
23.6% of the web is powered by WordPress, from 17.4% in 2012.
785 contributers to WordPress core
6,458 new plugins have been approved, bringing the total of plugins in the WordPress.org repository to 34, 016.
684 new themes were approved, an increase of 36% to a total of 2,781 Themes on WordPress.org. Note: this doesn’t count the 3rd party and premium themes that are available for WordPress ecosystem.
A total of 1,000,000 commits in the SVN repository (WordPress’s version control system), 22% happened alone in 2014
WordPress Version used around the Internet
If you haven’t installed 4.0 yet, don’t procrastinate any longer!
See Slides of 2014 WordCamps in Florida:
Tampa (the slides are link from the sessions pages)
Adam Gilardi and I went to WordCamp Tamp in October. Here are a few example slidedeck of sessions we found particularly compelling, interesting or just very, very helpful.
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!
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)
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)
