Categories
Meeting Information

July 19 – Ensuring Search Engine Visibility – Onsite and Local SEO

Birgit Pauli-Haack of Pauli Systems will walk you through the basics of SEO and how to make sure you ongoing postings are helping your site’s search engine visibility. She shows you are few tools you can use to test your own site, what to look for on Google Search Console, and how to submit your sidemaps. You see how to start using Yoast SEO plugin to improve your writing focus before you publish your next blog post or landing page.

Charlie Rose of SEOMechanic, will then take it to the next level and talk about Local SEO and gives you tips and tricks of keyword search, ways = to find out what people are actually searching for. And how to gauge intent of your visitors. He’ll mention a few of mistakes to avoid.

Charlie Rose has 20 years of experience helping companies fast-track success in organic search results. You can read more about Charlie on the seomanic.com website

Birgit Pauli-Haack, founded of Pauli Systems a web development and strategy company in 2002 and with the team of developers, designers, copy writers and project managers, she helps business and organizations how to connect online with their customers and donors. Check out her full bio on the Pauli Systems’ website.

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Meeting Information

Upcoming WordPress Events: Topics Survey Results 2018 + Online Developers Events

Between Mid April and Mid May, we conducted our topics survey among our members and here are the results.

The Top 6 WordPress Topics are now scheduled for the second half of 2018

  1. Ensuring Search Engine Visibility – Onsite SEO (July 21, 2018)
  2. Tips, Tricks, and Pitfalls to Avoid When Moving Your Site to SSL (August 16, 2018)
  3. Reusable Blocks for Content Creators (Gutenberg) (September 20, 2018)
  4. 3rd Party Editors for WordPress (October 18, 2018)
  5. REST API, Best practices for Developers (November 15, 2018)
  6. The Business of Being a Web Developer (December 20, 2018)

Call for Volunteers

We won’t have a meeting in June, both our co-organizers will be traveling. One of the questions in the survey was “Would you be interested in organizing an event within WordPress Meetup SWFL?”. 50% of the participants answered Maybe(6) or Yes(3). When we get back, we will schedule a video conference call with all to discuss how we can get more people involved in organizing meetups. If you are interested, feel free to submit your name, via email to gcicinelli@gmail.com and you’ll be invited to the video call, too.

Online Events for WordPress Developers

Online JavaScript for WordPress Conference June 29th, 2018!

Learn Javascript Deeply – Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word 2015

A Day of FREE Online Talks from professionals in the arena of JavaScript for WordPress. The schedule hasn’t been posted yet. You can take a look behind the scenes with some of the already confirmed speakers on YouTube 

WordSesh July 25th, 2018

Join WordPress developers from around the world for a must-attend virtual conference on July 25th, 2018. Check out the Speakers, Session, and Speakers

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People

Meet two local bloggers via Naples Daily News

Naples Daily News visited the members of the WordPress Meetup SWFL at the Grind Coffeehouse earlier this month.

Here is the video: (starts after 15 sec pre-roll ad)

The two blogs mentioned:

Anja Carlson: Real Recipes And More

Anja Carlson is co-organizer of the WordPress Meetup SWFL and hosts the KoffeeKlatch every other week at the Grind 

Rosaline Pastrana’s “Self-Censored”

 

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Meeting Information

Gutenberg Beginners Tips by Zac Gordon

… and  #Gutenberg course offers by Zac Gordon for developers and by Joe Casabona for Site Users and Owners, special for WordPress Meetup SWFL members below🙂

https://twitter.com/zgordon/status/953691148618526720

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#Gutenberg course offers by Zac Gordon for developers and by Joe Casabono for Site Users and Owners

Categories
Meeting Information

Meeting Notes: Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts

Notes of our Meetup on September 21, 2017 at Rocket Lounge in Fort Myers.

WordPress News

4.8.2 Maintenance and Security Release is out. Upgrade now.

There are plenty of security vulnerabilities fixed. Read more

What’s to come in 4.9?

All the information about the upcoming release of 4.9 is available on the make blog. Today we look at the Custom Widget for Galleries – mergee of current feature plugin for testing

You can download Core Media Widget from the Repository

While the audio, video and single image widget section were already merged into Core with 4.8, the Gallery widget is slated to be merged into core for the 4.9 release.

If you test it, please report any issues on GitHub. Sarah Gooding tested things and posted an article on WPTavern

We did our own test on our test site. I really like it:-) It also shows, that you need to be consistent when uploading images to your library. The Widget displays the caption section for the image underneath the image, and it looks much nicer if you fill out the caption field for all images to be displayed in the Widget.

How to use the Gallery Widget?

  • Got to Appearance > Widget
  • Click on Galllery widget and select the widget section
  • Give the widget a Title
  • Click on “Add Media” to select the respective images from the Media Library
  • Make adjustments to other settings, like column number and type of display
  • Click on “Insert Gallery” button
  • Preview in Gallery Widget admin screen
  • Click on Save

Note: You might see in the video that the desired number of columns is set to 2, however, the display in the widget admin screen shows 3 columns. That is a known issue and already in the issue tracker as #190

WordCamp US Dec 1 -3, 2017,

Gutenberg – 1.3

Since our meeting, there were two more updates to the plugins. It’s now in version 1.3. If you’d like to test it but don’t want to set-up a new test site, send me birgit.pauli@gmail.com an email and I will give you access to the tt.wpswfl.org site where we keep the Gutenberg plugin updated

You can catch up all things Gutenberg on this Storify including links to online discussions, documentation, blog posts on how to interact w/ Gutenberg in Themes and Plugins.

WordPress ditched React… see what happened next.

Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress.org will not use Reactjs as it’s new javascript library because of the license that is attached to the open-source library. This decision requires a rewrite of Gutenberg, once the decision is made with of alternative Javascript libraries, the Gutenberg time will change over to the new framework.

This will delay the release of Gutenberg a few weeks and with it the 5.0 release.

Made it Techcrunch pay attention

And then Facebook announced they will release the next version and other open-source projects without the patent clause. And on the subsequent post by Matt Mullenweg more discussion happened. Seems like a never-ending story.

Topics survey results

Topic Survey Results and Upcoming Meetups

Schedule & Speakers

Tools & Plugins to Schedule Social Media posts

Plugins to handle Open-Graph meta tags

Plugins for auto-post / cross-posting to Social web

Tools for scheduling

  • Sprout Social – awesome bulk scheduling feature
  • Hootsuite
  • CoSchedule – WordPress plugin right from your post screen
  • Buffer – Long time around – always relevant
  • SocialOomph – nice Twitter features on the free account, with bulk upload.
  • HopperHQ – only scheduling tool for Instagram

Mini-Tip

if you have a Gmail account and you need more email addresses, you don’t need to create a new account. Just add a + sign after the handle and another string before the @ sign. Example:

Categories
Meeting Information Presentations

Topic Survey Results and Upcoming Meetups

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Meeting Information

Four most exciting presentations at WordCamp Europe

WordPress Gutenberg

Learn more about the new editor Gutenberg. It’s a major shift from the current editor. Revealed at WordCamp Europe it has received already 3 updates and it now in 0.5.0 You can find a collection of resources and blog posts on Storify

And I created this post in the Gutenberg editor 0.5.0. and then I messed it up. Not yet production ready. Told Yeh!

Get a head-start on Gutenberg Editor testing via this post

Three Kinds of Design

John Maeda talked about the Three Kinds of Design. He used his Design Tech Report 2017 PDF as prompts on screen, which was interesting.
You can read his Design Tech Report here. You can also listen to the report via Vimeo.


Listen to John Maeda explains how WordPress actually produces Computational Designers. It’s in this video close to the end:

I particularly was fascinated by Maeda’s remarks about China. Listen to him yourself. Especially how Chinese people use their
smartphones.

CSS Grid – Creating Web Layouts the right way! Finally.

CSS Grid is finally here. I had given up on ever getting into the nitty-gritty of Cascading Styles sheets. Our designer-developer is so proficient in it, that I was able to delegate that part since 2006 or so. Wholeheartedly agree with Morten, when he says “Web Layouts are broken. We just refined how we break them.”

NEED AND EXAMPLE?

Layout files like this are not uncommon. They are almost a badge of honor. Right?

Here is a little excerpt from the slide-deck

CSS Grid Changes Everything About Web Layouts: WordCamp Europe 2017 from Morten Rand-Hendriksen

For everyone who wants to really dive into the talk and see Morten go to all of his 106 slides, watch it on WordPress.TV

Well worth your time!

Cathedral and Bazaar

How do we build Community? Like we build open-source. Eric Raymond wrote about his time at Linux – the open-source operating system, in his book Cathedral and Bazaar. Andrea Middleton at WordCamp Europe

  • With many eyes, all bugs are shallow.
  • Release early, release often.
  • Scratching a personal itch
  • Egoless participation.

Five Good Faith Rules

  1. The group is for the benefit of the community, not specific businesses or individuals. (egoless participation)
  2. Membership is open to anyone. (many eyes, and also modeling that open bazaar concept)
  3. Everything is volunteer-based; speakers or organizers are not paid. (egoless participation)
  4. Anyone can organize an event. (many eyes, release early/often, “personal itch,” egoless participation, and also the open bazaar.)
  5. The community works together to make a welcoming environment, and discriminatory behavior is not accepted. (many eyes)

 

Andrea Middleton’s talk is now on WordPress.tv.

…. and then I attended a WordCamp