Last night’s wordpress workshop Kickoff was a success! We had 20 people at IndyHall, as well as another 8-10 watching and listening on our uStream feed, which we recorded for playback convenience. Our hope is to record more sessions in the future, and properly mic the audio so that our remote listeners can enjoy the presentation more. We’ll get the kinks worked out over time.
For those who attended, I promised a summary of plugins/tools that we spoke about.
Wordpress.com - Free, hosted Wordpress. Not as customizable
Wordpress.org - Where you download Wordpress to install yourself
Wordpress Auto-Update Plugin - This bad boy automatically backs up and upgrades your wordress solution (plugin updates are on your own).
CForms II -A very robust form/survey plugin. Even lets you allow users to upload files!
Firebug - A SUPER useful firefox plugin for if you do any template work, wordpress or otherwise. Lets you “inspect” other people’s XHTML/CSS.
Slideshow Pro - a great (and cheap) flash slideshow for displaying photos from flickr streams or your own uploads. Very flexible and customizable, and you don’t need to know any flash
If I missed anything we talked about, feel free to ask in the comments.
As far as events moving forward, we learned a lot about the diversity and needs of the community. Our goal is to design a program that allows the current experts to help the novices get up to speed, and then as we have more background behind everyone, move on to more advanced topics. Some of the proposed topics were:
- Multi-user/multi-blog installations
- Advanced/custom theming (as opposed to “hacking” or tweaking existing themes)
- WP best practices exchange
- Plugin/tool demos
- Boilerplate code exchanges
- Wordpress for “sites” instead of blogs
We’re excited to see the interest in the new educational track, and are looking for people to volunteer to lead and organize topics moving forward. If you have anything, please contact us and we’ll do our best to help arrange it!
Thanks to the attendees and Johnny and Jason for putting the presentation together!
Awesome workshop lastnight - can’t wait until the next session! Can you post some of your favorite themes to use as a starting point for customization? I know K2 was one mentioned last night. Any others that are good, strong, clean code you can recommend?