It’s that time again! Another wonderful WordCamp is on the horizon–less than ten days away!
Although I find it hard to believe that any of our regular readers are unfamiliar with WordCamp (come on, now!), for those of you that are completely green: WordCamps are events held all over the world! The events are an awesome place where WordPress nerds unite to share their skills, insights, and learn a whole lot from a bunch of other smarties.
WordCamp Maui is on February 13-14th; it’s the first WordCamp Maui to take place, although it has been long in the works, and thanks to Jon Brown, it’s finally taking place.
The WDS team will have one of our own in attendance: Developer lead Ben Lobaugh will be speaking! Details on the when and what are still to be determined, and we will update with more information once we have it (you can also always keep an eye on our Twitter feed for updates).
UPDATE:
Interacting with External APIs – Saturday, February 14th, 9 AM
Ben will be speaking on tapping into the resources available through external APIs (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). Much of the functionality needed to interact with APIs is already included in the core through the HTTP class. In this session, attendees will learn the concepts behind pulling data from an external API, sending data to an external API, how to utilize WordPress caching to increase speed and functionality, and more!
Ben will be the first speaker Saturday morning, and you won’t want to miss it!
Other than that, though, we wanted to highlight a few other people and sessions that you won’t want to miss:
Friday Notables
Gregg Franklin is a WordPress Developer, team member at ServerPress, LLC. (the creators of DesktopServer), and co-facilitator of the Inland Empire WordPress meetup group. He will be with a team that is presenting two workshops–one for beginners, and one for business. Gregg will be the “opening act” with the beginner workshop, so go see his song and dance and get your beginner knowledge on!
The Intro to WordPress workshop will be on Friday from 9:00 AM – 10:35 AM, and will focus on helping attendees understand WordPress while building and managing their website(s). Gregg will cover everything from initially setting up your WordPress site to managing and publishing posts (including adding categories and tagging content). Attendees can expect to learn the entire Dashboard, as well as handy tricks and tips.
Throughout the rest of the day, there will also be the following workshops:
- 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM – Intro to WordPress Themes – Instructor: Adam Silver
- 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM – Passionate About Plugins & Wild For Widgets – Instructor: Kathryn Presner
- 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM – Hosting and Security – Instructor: Ben Howard
- 3:25 PM – 4:00 PM – Panel discussion/Q&A – Guided by YOUR questions after a day full of WP goodness!
Saturday Notables
Session descriptions from the WC Maui website
These have been picked out by a few of our developers as sessions that piqued their interest, so make room in your schedule:
9:00 AM – How To Not Design Like A Developer – Speaker: Tracy Apps
Have you developed enough WordPress skills to make your own custom themes, but they still look like crap? Don’t worry, there’s some simple steps and tools that can help you design less like a developer. Come with your questions, leave with concrete examples and tools to use right away… and designers everywhere will thank you.
9:50 AM – Building themes with the WP REST API – Speaker: Jack Lenox
With the REST API shortly due to be merged into WordPress core, it’s about time developers started thinking about building themes that use it. The REST API allows developers to create much more engaging user experiences. This will be a talk that covers the challenges one faces when working with the REST API, how to extend the REST API itself from within your theme, and suggested ways that themes can be built to use it.
Lastly…
For those of you who will be there, the WordCamp Maui folks shared a wonderful post on how to make the most of the event. There’s some excellent advice in there that isn’t only applicable to WC Maui; if you’re a regular conference/event goer (or would like to become one), I bet you’ll find something good to take away from it.
Unfortunately, if you haven’t already scored yourself a ticket, you might have to miss this one; it seems that this WC Maui is sold out. You can always keep an eye on their Twitter, though, for any updates on tickets that are being resold.
Make sure to say hi to Ben, and tell us how it went when it’s over!