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, [...]
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.
Color me guilty. I’ve been telling everyone that I would get a post up on the the TBWPUG blog about the upcoming meet-ups, but life has gotten a bit in the way. So now that I’ve gotten the Mea culpa out of the way, let’s get down to business. At the last meet-up we tried an experiment in which we were going to pair up experienced developers/users with those that wanted to learn more about a particular subject. Two major topics seemed to dominate the requests – HTML to WordPress theme and e-commerce. I volunteered to work with a couple of front end designers to put together a talk for November on the subject of HTML to WordPress theme, with [...]

In our October meeting, we’re going to have several simultaneous break-out tutorial sessions, each led by a volunteer mentor. This will enable us to cover topics in depth, for people with specific interests in one of those areas, and enhance the sharing and exchange of information that our group, and WordPress itself, are all about.
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.

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. [...]
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.
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.
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.