Speaker Spotlight: Nile Flores – Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress

May 31, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Nile Flores – Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress

Hi! My name is Nile Flores (@blondishnet on Twitter).  I am going to be covering “Rocking Out Your Site With WordPress.” My goal is to help those who either need a direction or some type of inspiration in to using WordPress. Considering I have been to WordCamp before, I do know some of you may even be stepping into WordPress as newbies or even considering it as an option for a CMS for your site.

Some points I will answer:

  • Why Use WordPress? (my answer to this question)
  • How you can use WordPress in combination with social networking to drive traffic and convert visitors.
  • What site owners should focus on when developing their site both design-wise and content-wise.

I will also be sharing some cool tools to help you along the way.

For those who have been in WordPress for a long time, you might not get too much out of this, but for those who are newer, I will even open the floor up for 5-10 minutes for questions. So, knowing that, put together questions and do not be shy- ask away!

I want to help inspire you when you walk away from this 2-day event to go back to your home or business and rock out your site! WordPress is a great content management system to use no matter what type of site you want to open.

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Speaker Spotlight: Ron Rennick – BuddyPress Child Themes

May 29, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Ron Rennick – BuddyPress Child Themes

A BuddyPress theme is a superset of a WordPress theme. It’s a fully functional WordPress theme with extra functionality to handle the BuddyPress content.

I have been developing themes for WordPress since 2005 and working with BuddyPress themes since 2008. The way that themes are implemented in both WordPress and BuddyPress have changed significantly since I started working with them.

In my session, I’ll take a brief look at the history and development of theme handling in WordPress and how themes are handled/implemented in WordPress 3.0. In the second half of the session, we will look at the extra BuddyPress functionality in a BuddyPress theme and how it interacts with the WordPress theme system.

This will not be a coding type session. We will not be looking at the source code of any themes.

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Speaker Spotlight: Jake Goldman – Hijacking WordPress Administration

May 28, 2010 by Heather Acton • 1 Comment

As developers, most of us know how to tailor the front end of WordPress to our clients’ or users’ hearts’ desires. The real WordPress Ninjas know how to refine the part most visitors never see – the back end – for the individual client or project. Inspired partly by one of my more popular Smashing Magazine articles, this session – a WordCamp Chicago debut – offers even more tips for customizing WordPress admin.

We’ll dive right into the default theme’s functions.php script, where we’ll review specific API hooks, techniques, and tricks for customizing the WordPress admin to reflect your brand or simply reduce the noise. No forking of core code and no plug-ins involved.

Are you a consulting agency that wants to emphasize your brand? Learn how to replace the WordPress logo in the header and login screen, change the credits / thank you notes in the footer, and replace the WordPress news feeds in the dashboard with your own agency’s news feed.

Does your client get easily confused or overwhelmed? Add additional contextual help inside the “help” tab on individual admin pages. Remove unnecessary default sidebar widgets. Strip down the post and page editing screen widgets (like the custom field editor) based on the user role. Customize the styling of the WYSIWYG editor to better reflect the styling of posts and pages on the front end. Remove unneeded WYSIWYG buttons. Add some common buttons back.

Wish “Posts” were called “Articles” in the admin menu? Learn how to override a few translation strings without creating an entire translations file.

Note that for time and focus reasons, we won’t be covering adding new content types or content meta within the site admin (custom post types, taxonomies, custom meta boxes). Combine this session with one of the other sessions covering new content types / content meta features and you’ll be building awesome WordPress sites tailored to individual clients’ administrative needs in no time!

Questions about this session? Is there an admin customization tip you want to see covered? Reach out to me on Twitter: @jakemgold

As developers, most of us know how to tailor the front end of WordPress to our clients’ or users’ hearts desires. The real WordPress ninja’s know how to refine the part most visitors never see – the backend – for the individual client or project. Inspired partly by one of my more popular Smashing Magazine articles, this session – a WordCamp Chicago debut – offers even more tips for customizing WordPress admin.

After a quick overview, we’ll dive right into the default theme’s functions.php code, where we’ll review specific API hooks, techniques, and tricks for customizing the WordPress admin to reflect your brand or simply reduce the noise. No forking of core code and no plug-ins involved.

Are you a consulting agency that wants to emphasize your brand? Learn how to replace the WordPress logo in the header and login screen, change the credits / thank you notes in the footer, and replace the WordPress news feeds in the dashboard with your own agency’s news feed.

Does your client get easily confused? Add additional contextual help inside the “help” tab based on the admin page. Remove unnecessary default sidebar widgets. Strip down the post and page editing screen widgets (like the custom field editor) based on the user role. Customize the styling of the WYSIWYG editor to better reflect the styling of posts and pages on the front end. Remove unneeded WYSIWYG buttons. Add some common buttons back.

Wish “Posts” were called “Articles” in the admin menu? Learn how to override a few translation strings without creating an entire translations file.

Note that for time and focus reasons, we won’t be covering adding new content functionality to the site admin (custom post types, taxonomies, custom meta boxes). Combine this session with one of the other sessions covering new content types / content meta features and you’ll be building awesome WordPress sites tailored to individual clients’ administrative needs in no time!

Questions about this session? Is there an admin customization tip you want to see covered? You can reach me on Twitter: @jakemgold

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Speaker Spotlight: Aaron Jorbin – Building Child Themes

May 28, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Aaron Jorbin – Building Child Themes

Building a theme from scratch is so 2007. Now with a default theme like Twenty Ten and theme frameworks such as Thematic, Carrington, and Hybrid there are less and less reasons to ever build a theme from scratch.

Continue reading Speaker Spotlight: Aaron Jorbin – Building Child Themes →

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Speaker Spotlight: Kyle Jones – WordPress and BuddyPress in Education

May 28, 2010 by Heather Acton • 1 Comment

I’ve listened and learned from some of the best WordPress gurus for the past five years of my experience using WordPress in a variety of educational ways.  But at WordCamp Chicago I’m able to give back to the community that’s given so much to me.  Needless to say, I’m thrilled.

You don’t have to be an educator, instructional technologist, or librarian to get something out of my talk on using WordPress and BuddyPress in education.  Maybe your company needs a new Intranet or you run a non-profit that provides adult learning courses – whatever your situation I’ll walk you through the key tenets of using WordPress and BuddyPress to create personal learning networks that can help your site users have an absolutely wonderful online learning experience.

Along the way I’ll highlight some stellar uses of the WordPress/BuddyPress combination in education and also reflect on my own experiences of creating learning management systems for graduate students using these technologies.

Posted in Announcements, Blog, Speakers, WCChicago 2010 | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Speaker Spotlight: Chris Jean – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Backup WordPress

May 26, 2010 by Heather Acton • Comments Off on Speaker Spotlight: Chris Jean – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Backup WordPress

My name is Chris Jean. I get the honor of speaking about a very important topic that most people never think about.

Imagine that you just lost everything on your site. You wake up in the morning to find that your posts, pages, comments, images, themes, plugins, and customizations are gone. It doesn’t matter how it happened; all that matters is getting the site back up as quickly as possible. Having a reliable backup and restore strategy can mean the difference between a frustrating morning and having to completely redo months or years worth of work based off of memory.

In my presentation, I will cover the following:

  • The necessary elements for an effective backup and restoration strategy.
  • A few different strategies that can be quickly and easily implemented.
  • Best practices for avoiding the worst-case-scenario: total data loss.

If you run a business website or have valuable content on your site and don’t have a backup and restore strategy, please attend my presentation at 10:30AM Sunday, June 6th.

I’ll give you the tools you need to stop worrying and backup WordPress.

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