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WordCamp Orlando was December 5 2009, at Rollins College, in Orlando, Florida. We brought together a collection of developers and publishers from around the country to share in their love of words and WordPress. Follow us on Twitter and visit our Facebook page.

Session Details: A BuddyPress Primer

Posted by Nick Gernert on November 24, 2009
Posted in: Sessions

What would WordCamp Orlando be without a session on one of the hottest topics in the WordPress community right now… BuddyPress! We’re just now seeing the first generation of sites coming up that are using BuddyPress and the potential of the tool is really exciting. John James Jacoby is a BuddyPress core contributor from Miami that’s here to educate us on BuddyPress. Here’s what you can expect…

BuddyPress is a new and exciting way to turn an ordinary WordPress blog into a multi-user community of friends, blogs, groups, and more. John is going to walk us through what BuddyPress is, why you will want to use it now (if you aren’t already), and how to leverage it to start your own completely customizable social network. He will also touch base on the future of BuddyPress, what to look forward to in future versions, and how you can take part in helping to shape its future.

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Session Details: WordPress as a Content Management System

Posted by Nick Gernert on November 23, 2009
Posted in: Sessions

WordPress made its mark as a great blogging platform for taking a clean, simple approach to content publishing. The beauty is, these same principles are not exclusive to blogs and can be applied to the management of many different types of websites. Orlando’s Eric Marden of Xentek will touch on the following:

Defining what a CMS is and where WordPress fits within that role
Quick overview of the built in features of WordPress
Extolling the virtues of the flexible, light weight approach WordPress takes
Brief Case Studies of successful WordPress deployments
Different Use Cases for maximizing WordPress as a CMS for organizations of any size.

Update: Eric’s slides are now online.

1983 Comments »2009-11-23+12%3A49%3A52Nick+Gernert

Session Details: From Podcast to Print: Sneaking Into Publishing Through The Basement Window

Posted by Nick Gernert on November 18, 2009
Posted in: Sessions

WordCamp Orlando is offering a great set of sessions with perspectives from all around the country on things like communities, publishing and development. I’m really excited at the chance to showcase great things happening right here in Florida. J.C. Hutchins will be heading up from Fort Lauderdale to share how he basically took control of his own promotion and built awareness of his works through some very creative tactics. Here’s a bit about what you can expect at WordCamp this year…

In 2005, author J.C. Hutchins chased publishers the traditional way … and heard “no” at every turn. Convinced his novels were worthy of an audience, he took to the “podwaves” in 2006 and released his 7th Son thriller trilogy as free serialized podcast audiobooks. A thriving community soon formed around J.C. and his fiction. By 2007, St. Martin’s Press saw the grassroots platform J.C. had created, and offered to publish the series’ first novel, Descent, and a supernatural thriller, Personal Effects: Dark Art. Learn how J.C. used innovative “zero budget” marketing techniques, savvy cross-promotion and community-building to get his novels on bookshelves.

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Session Details: Design Isn’t The Problem: Why Online Products Fail

Posted by Nick Gernert on November 17, 2009
Posted in: Sessions

Dan Maccarone and Andrew Zipern are a couple of really smart guys with one thing in mind – creating successful products. Better still, their experience backs this up as Dan was involved in design and strategy for Hulu and Zip’s clients include CBS, NHL, MLS and the NYSE. So, here’s a bit about what you’ll learn…

Design Isn’t The Problem: Why Online Products Fail

Companies keep creating useless Web products. With all that’s gone wrong, there are simple lessons we’ve learned as well as some easy steps to follow to ensure you create a product/experience that people actually want. We’ll discuss why they get it wrong how it can be done right.

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Session Details: You’re Doing It Wrong

Posted by Nick Gernert on November 13, 2009
Posted in: Sessions

Chris Scott, who is one of the lead WordPress developers at Voce, spends the better part of most work days developing some custom component for WordPress. Even better, a lot of what Chris develops is then hosted on WordPress.com’s VIP hosting service which means everything that he develops is scrutinized by the folks at WordPress.com. We felt a great session would be imparting some of those lessons learned.

So, taking a page (well, a few posts) from Dion Hulse Chris will use code from some common plugins to point out what you shouldn’t be doing in your WordPress code and how to do it right. Due to the the fast pace of updates to WordPress, lack of WordPress experience, or just trying to get things done, there’s a lot of plugin code in the that is not using the most current WordPress methods, not doing things the “WordPress way”, or just plain doing it wrong. Learn from the mistakes of others and learn to write kick-ass code.

Slides online at Slideshare.

1472 Comments »2009-11-13+18%3A22%3A16Nick+Gernert