For the 1st meeting of the year, I thought we’d try something a little different. I think we need a lot more member involvement to really get this group going, since as you can see from my dearth of blog posts you don’t want to be depending on me. To that end, this month instead of one person giving a presentation for an hour or so, I though we’d have multiple members volunteer to give one tip each on a subtopic within a general theme. The theme topic for January’s meeting will be WordPress performance. We really need to get everyone participating, so if you haven’t presented anything yet, this means you should strongly consider stepping up. It’s not hard, [...]
John Biddle
Jan 072011
Jan 062011
December’s meeting was another great one. Andrew Norcross gave a comprehensive presentation on eCommerce in WordPress. He used the Shopp plugin as his example, but talked about other approaches as well. Using concrete examples he clearly explained how one would go about the entire process of creating an eCommerce site from the genesis of the idea to the final implementation of the live site.
Sep 092010
September’s meeting was excellent. With a great presentation by Mark Jaquith on Custom post types, giveaways of 3 great WP Books, a Site Review, an extended Q&A session, a volunteer to lead a project to improve our theme (which needs it badly), and a wonderful idea for our next meeting, it was a heck of a meeting.
Aug 292010
We’re very lucky this month to have Mark Jaquith give a presentation on Custom Post Types. As one of the 5 Lead Developers of WordPress, Mark is one of the most knowledgeable people worldwide about WP, so if anyone can be called an expert, he can. In addition to his voluminous and steady contributions to the core product, Mark has 23 plugins in the WP plugin repository. He’s been a featured speaker at a number of WordCamp events, most recently at Savannah, GA where he spoke on July 13, 2010, about “Building Your First Plugin”. Custom Post Types are a new way in WordPress to have a type of post which has standardized extra features when compared to regular posts. [...]
Jul 222010
You have probably noticed as you’ve browsed the web, that in the comments section, many user’s names are accompanied by a little picture. It’s called an avatar, and it is a way to help personalize your persona on the web. I strongly recommend you to do this because people are primarily visual learners, and they will remember your avatar much longer than they will remember your comment.
Gravatar, an enhancement to avatar, is a way to use one avatar in many places, without having to set them all up separately.
Jul 082010
TampaBay WordPress should make some decisions, even if only temporarily, as to what we’d like to accomplish as an organization, and what we’d like to do with this site. This article puts forth a number of ideas and solicits member comments.
At our first meeting, a suggestion was made to put up a poll to get member feedback on topic ideas for meetings. Well, here is that suggestion brought to life. There’s one poll for topic ideas for major presentations, and a second for topic ideas for short presentations.
Jun 182010
In our monthly meetings we conduct one or two website reviews. this post presents guidelines for how to get the most out of those website reviews. There’s one list for the volunteer presenter, and another for the audience members/feedback providers.
Jun 172010
WordPress 3.0 was released today, June 17, 2010. There are a number of important new and improved features that make this one of the most consequential releases yet. Here’s a quick summary of those new and improved features.
Jun 152010
Our second meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 14th, from 7:00 – 9:00 PM at CDB’s Southside. It’s OK to arrive a 1/2 hour early to chat over a drink (yes, they serve alcohol) and get to know your fellow members.