Category: Presentations

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Meeting Information Presentations

April WordPress Meetup Recap & Links

Full Site Editing and the Future of WordPress

As always, thanks to everyone that spent their Thursday evening with us last night at our April WordPress Meetup – another edition of the WordPress MegaMeetup. A special thank you to Anne McCarthy and Marcus Kazmierczak from Automattic for showing us the future of WordPress with Full Site Editing (FSE). Also, a big thank you to @GoDaddyPro for sponsoring our MegaMeetup once again! 

Our apologies for the Meetup.com issues which delayed (and perhaps deterred) many folks from joining us for our great event. Despite the server issues, we had over 120 people connected!

For the TL;DR folks:

You can watch the whole recording on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c4IFn73Nzvk 

Or, even better – subscribe to WCMIA’s channel and click the bell icon to get notified when new videos are posted: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPaXHepv6YbVy-mnElQOx5w 

Our WordPress Meetup Speakers –

First Speaker – Anne McCarthy

Find Anne on the web: 
Twitter: @annezazu
Web: https://nomad.blog

“Full site editing is a collection of projects… arguably too much for a single release”. – Josepha https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/04/08/full-site-editing-scope-for-wp5-8/

The FSE effort is broken down into 7 milestones:

  1. Infrastructure & UI
  2. Browsing
  3. Styling
  4. Theme Blocks
  5. Query Block
  6. Navigation Block
  7. Gradual Adoption

WordPress 5.8 Plans include: improvements from Gutenberg 9.9+, introduction of new blocks (Query, Site Logo, Navigation, a theme.json mechanism, a Template Editor for Pages/Blank Template, Widgets Screen & Block widgets in Customizer, and some Design tools.

Important Dates:

  • April 27, 2021 – Next Go/No Go decision
  • June 8, 2021 – Beta period for WordPress 5.8
  • July 20, 2021 – WordPress 5.8 release
  • December 2021 – WordPress 5.9 release

Get involved!

Anne’s links:

Link to Anne’s FSE presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPPzATDkHzg

Second Speaker – Marcus Kazmierczak

And then we had Marcus do a live demo of Full Site Editing! Marcus even built a theme live. We also got to see how super fast he types – an absolute Command Line wizard!  I wasn’t able to take useful notes as he was doing a live demo – watch the video!

Find Marcus on the web:
Twitter: @mkaz
Web: http://mkaz.blog 
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/mkaz7000

Marcus’s links:

Special Announcement by Joe Simpson Jr

Find Joe on the web:
Twitter: @joesimpsonjr
Web: https://joesimpson.info/ 

We also had our good friend Joe Simpson Jr., Lead Organizer of WordCamp Santa Clarita (@wordcampscv), pop in to announce a few upcoming events he is working on:


Thanks again to David Bisset and Jean Felisme for hosting another fantastic WordPress MegaMeetup! Stay tuned for the May Meetup date and topic announcement.

Cheers.

Guy Cicinelli @guycicinelli 

WordPress SWFL Organizer @wpswfl  

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Presentations

Introduction to Web Design

Key Design Principles and How to Implement Them!

At November’s MeetUp, I shared some of my design knowledge. Below are my slides and the key topics from the evening’s presentation. The ensuing discussion was fun and enlightening!

Continue reading “Introduction to Web Design”
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Meeting Information Presentations

Topic Survey Results and Upcoming Meetups

Topic Survey Results Bar Chart

For the last two weeks, we ran a Topics Survey with 10 Topics to fill the next six slots for our monthly meetings at the Rocket Lounge.

Here are the results:

TopicVery interestedInterestedNot at all interestedVotesPoints
Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts111322633
How to set-up an ecommerce site and evaluate features13852629
Top 10 Plugins or which Plugins do you need for your site13672625
Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, WTF)11962625
How to get backlinks for your site and how to disawow bad ones71452623
Creating web apps with WordPress & Gravity Forms71272619
3rd Party Editors for WordPress61282616
The Business of being a Web Developer79102613
Make WP_CLI Work For You: Extending WP_CLI With Custom Commands86122610
How to find and work with hosting companies?381526-1

The Top 6 Topics will be scheduled. 

We already have speakers for the following topics:

  • How to set-up an e-commerce site and evaluate features – Chris Christoff
  • Understanding WordPress Vulnerabilities (XSS, CSRF, WTF) – Chris Wiegman
  • Creating web apps with WordPress & Gravity Forms – Colleen Brady
  • Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts – Birgit Pauli-Haack on September 21, 2017

We are in the process of coordinating dates with the speakers. The meetings will be announced on Meetup. but you can already mark your calendars with the dates.

Save the Meeting Dates:

All 6 pm all at Rocket Lounge, Downtown, Fort Myers.

  • September 21, 2017 – Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts
  • October 19, 2017
  • November 16, 2017
  • December 21, 2017
  • January 18, 2018, and
  • February 15, 2018

Question: What topics do you find missing?

Answers:

  • Dealing with online harassment; hiding identity online — (not a WordPress topic)
  • WordPress 101
  • How to prevent or avoid spam comments and messages, if that’s even possible (Should be covered in the Plugin Topic) 
  • Troubleshooting – where DIY’ers can find help for some nagging issues
  • REST API
  • Best practices for developers

We keep the suggestions related to WordPress for the next survey, which will be held in December.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Meeting Information Presentations

Online Strategies for StartUps – Recap and Resources

Whether you’re starting a new business or launching a new website, you’re probably wondering how to develop a successful online strategy.

At this month’s WordPress Meetup SWFL three local businesses answered start-up strategy questions! They focused on branding, content ,marketing, and social media marketing strategies and finished off the evening with a lively Q & A.

Branding and Design: Elle and David Denning
Jumpanzee @Jumpanzee_team

Content Marketing Strategy: Tia Willin
THOH Creations Blog and Content Services @THOHCreations

Social Media Marketing Strategy: Mary Anne Cipressy
What’s Up Southwest Florida @WhatsUpSWFL

Huge Thank you to Elle & David, Tia, and Mary Anne for sharing their expertise so generously!

Thank you to Peter Ocsody of The RocketLoungs for hosting our meetup and providing the video recording!

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Meeting Information Presentations WordPress: What's New?

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

What’s new in WordPress 4.3?

Here is the video of WordPress 4.3 “Billie”


 

Upcoming WordCamps

  • 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

  1. Easy Watermark https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-watermark/
  2. Instagram
  3. The Simply Instagram plugin display your Instagram photos in three Endpoints that Instagram offers through shortcode for Post and Page or using Widget.
  4. Another richly featured plugin for you Instagram integration is
  5. Regenerate Thumbnails ++ https://wordpress.org/plugins/regenerate-thumbnails/
  6. NextGen Gallery – Very large set of features on the free version already.
  7. 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.
  8. 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

WordPress and SecurityWe 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.

 

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Meeting Information Presentations

Slides: Google Analytics for Website Owners

Google Appliance

Additional Resources to learn more on Google Analytics

Google Analytics Academy – Improve your Analytics skills with free online courses from Google.

Google Analytics YouTube Channel – provides playlist for different use cases, like Google Analytics & Ecommerce or Google Analytics for Agencies or Google Analytics for Developers

50+ Google Analytics Resources by Kissmetrics – a brilliantly curated list of blog posts from various sites, categorized by topics.

WordPress Meetup SWFL July 2015

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Meeting Information Presentations

Resources: How to find the right WordPress plugins?

WordPress Meetup SWFL Meeting June 2015

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:

  • http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-100-wordpress-plugins
  • http://wpplugindirectory.org/
  • http://www.bloggingwizard.com/must-have-wordpress-plugins/
  • http://www.wphub.com/essential-wordpress-plugins-2014/

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.

Candels LLC logoMark 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: