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January 24, 2008 by Alex Hillman

WordPress Workshop Wrapup

Filed under: Community Support, Education/Workshops, Events, Independents Hall

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!

  • http://echoability.com Kelani

    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?

  • http://www.sinelnikov.com Denis Sinelnikov

    Great Workshop! I hope to see a more in depth WordPress workshop in the future.

    Thanks Alex, Johnny and Jason.

  • http://laurengalanter.com Lauren Galanter

    Like I told Jason and Johnny briefly, I’d love to organize/lead a section about using WordPress to videoblog. I’m helping out with Show In A Box, a set of tools for people to easily produce shows/vlogs using WP.

  • Kel

    Thanks folks – Would love to see a preliminary list of possible content for the WP sessions. Also to consider if you do decide to go with a weekend approach – morning session for novices, afternoon for advanced. Something to allow a possible overlap when one group can help the other.

  • http://startuporbust.com Chris Conley

    Definitely bummed I missed this one, but looking forward to the proposed topics!

  • C-LO

    I also missed this one. Just found out about you guys. I got to stop by the next time you do a wordpress workshop.