Category Archives: Announcements

Announcements

Check Out Our Schedule

1 Comment

After reviewing close to 200 proposals, the organizers of WordCamp New York 2014 have put together a schedule that is aimed to inform and entertain you.

The fun begins with a Contributor Day on August 1. We will release more information as that gets closer, but if you have been interested in how to contribute to WordPress, this is a your chance to get started. It doesn’t matter if you are a developer, designer, documentarian, support provider, or have never contributed before.

On August 2, Doors will open at 8:00am and we will provide a light breakfast. The first sessions will kick off at 9:15am.  Lunch will be provided at 12:15pm.  Sessions will end at about 5pm.  Saturday night there will be a social event so that you can mingle and chat WordPress.  More information on that will be available soon.

On Sunday, we will be opening up at 11:30am for a noon start of sessions.  This should give you time to have a delicious brunch.  We will have coffee available but you should eat before you arrive.  Everything will wrap up at about 5:30pm.

Want to know exactly what is scheduled when so you can start planning which sessions you will attend?  Head on over to our Schedule page now.  We still have a few more speakers and sessions to announce. You are in for something special, but only if you secure your ticket before it is too late.

 

 

Announcements, Speakers

Rounding Out the Speaker List

Before reading this new post on speakers, why not take the opportunity to get your tickets?

Alexis Bellido of Alley Interactive gives advice to non-WordPress developers in “Hit the Ground Running.”

Kevin Miller and Steve Bruner go through the awesome Piklist framework in “Customize the WordPress admin with the Piklist framework“.

Lara Schenck, freelance instructor, designer and front-end developer, leads a panel entitled “Freelancing: Real Talk“.

John Eckman, CEO of 10up, gets philosophical in “Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Responsive Web Design“.

Prodigious plugin author Pippin Williamson talks best practices for plugin developers in “Sane Plugin Updates“.

Courtney O’Callaghan of Freer and Sackler Galleries and Beth Soderberg of APCO Worldwide present “Leveling Up: From Bashful Beginner to WordPress Warrior“.

Ben Dunkle of the WordPress.org core design team presents “Designing Dashicons“, a discussion of iconography in WordPress.

Craig Ralston of Web Solutions leads “Introduction to Plugin Development” for beginner and intermediate devs.

Konstantin Obenland, a core contributor since 3.4, talks about Underscores, the  “1000 hour head start” for theme developers.

Richard Dinh of NorthPoint Digital presents “WordPress Examples Toolkit“, showcasing the power of learning by example.

Daniel Convissor, a contributor to the PEAR and PHP projects, offers “Unit Testing WordPress Plugins with PHPUnit“.

Kathryn Presner of the Automattic theme team expounds on “Supporting Your Themes While Staying Sane“.

Andrea Rennick of Copyblogger Media presents “From housewife to hero: giving back and moving up“, a discussion on giving back to the WP community.

You still don’t have tickets? Come on, now.

Announcements, Speakers

Still More Speakers!

4 Comments

Yet more amazing speakers and sessions planned for WordCamp NYC! Have you got your tickets yet?

Renowned designer Sara Cannon, Creative Director at Range, will expound on modern techniques in her talk, “Smart Design“.

Drew Jaynes of 10up will take us on a tour through WordPress documentation efforts beyond the Codex.

Security expert and author of Professional WordPress Brad Williams will present “Writing Secure WordPress Code“.

Suzette Franck, a WordPress Evangelist at Media Temple, will lead a beginner session on “Understanding WordPress Core Functionality“.

Adam Silverstein, also of 10up, will show us how to incorporate Backbone.js into our projects with “Put a little Backbone in your WordPress!”

Philadelphia WordPress designer, developer, and instructor Tracy Levesque will offer techniques for leveling up with “6 Ways to Up Your Theme Game“.

WordCamp Europe organizer and Chief Product Officer at Human Noel Tock will present “Beyond the Code,” helping us to develop ourselves and get “in the habit of shipping”.

Senior WP dev at Reader’s Digest and fellow WCNYC organizer Mikel King will go through the finer points of caching, clustering and tuning in “High Performance WordPress“.

Syed Balkhi, an expert in building popular websites (WPBeginner, List25) will present “Tools to Better Manage and Grow Your Blog“.

Cal Evans, Developer Advocate for Pantheon and PHP-FIG member, will cover the concept of Numbers Used Once in “NONCE Upon a Time in WordPress“.

Core WordPress contributor and Automattician Mel Choyce will lead us through the current WP design landscape in “WordPress Design Trends“.

We are still not through! Look for more speaker announcements Monday. But before you jet off to the beach this weekend: get your tickets.

Announcements

Save the date and RSVP for Contributor Day

11 Comments

UPDATE: RSVPs for Contributor Day are sold out.

Contributor Day will be held on the Friday before WordCamp NYC (August 1st, 2014) from 12 to 6PM at the Kimmer Center at NYU, 60 Washington Square South.

We’re looking forward to having tons of great WordPress users in town for WordCamp New York. While we have such a large part of the WordPress community together in one place, let’s take advantage of it! Contributor Day is your opportunity to, well, contribute to the WordPress project.

Whether you are a user, designer, support specialist, developer, or writer, there’s a way for you to contribute:

  • Test out new features and check for bugs in WordPress 4.0, which will be coming out at the end of August
  • Write or update WordPress documentation
  • Answer a support question in the forums and help other users who are new to WordPress
  • If you’re a programmer, contribute to core*

* If you’re planning on helping out with WordPress core code (writing patches, testing bugs on trunk, etc), then you’ll need to get set up with a few things. To save time on the day, we strongly recommend that you set up WordPress locally on your laptop (and bring it!).

People who come to contributor day will be 100% focused on contributing or learning to contribute to core – although we have fun this is a working event. We will have sessions introducing the various contributor groups for absolute newcomers. If you have been looking for an opening to add your contribution to WordPress, this is a great opportunity!

Photo: Helen Hou-Sandí and Hugo Baeta at WordCamp San Francisco’s contributor day. Photo credit: Sheri Bigelow.

Announcements, Speakers

Announcing (Some) Speakers!

4 Comments

As we finalize the schedule, we’re working on getting information out to you as quickly as possible. To that effect, here is a (limited) group of confirmed speakers with brief descriptions of their presentation topics:

Tammie Lister and Kathryn Presner, both of Automattic, will host an in-depth workshop on how to become a WordCamp speaker. Meta!

For serious geeks, Daniel Bachhuber, who maintains the WordPress Command Line Interface (WP-CLI) plugin, will do a deep dive on its functionality. Helen Hou-Sandí, a Contributing Developer of WordPress and the Project Lead for WP 4.0, will present “So You Know WP_Query. Now What?”

For working devs, Jenn Schiffer, an open web engineer at Bocoup, will lead us through “A Career of Being Lazy Using WordPress“, and Boone Gorges will talk on “Free Software, Free Labor, and the Freelancer: The Economics of Contributing.”

For writers and content managers, Mary Beth Coudal, a blogger whose work has been published in The New York Times, will lead a creative session on “Dangerous Writing” – with improv exercises! Stephen C. Miller, a media technologist from Brooklyn, will help us make our writing stronger, and Jay Hoffman, WordPress dev for the Sesame Workshop, will teach us how to find the best plugins for the job.

And for all of us: Sveta Kouznetsova, a local UX and accessibility professional, will guide us on how to make websites that are more usable for everyone.

PLUS MANY MORE SPEAKERS!

We’ll be publishing more on speakers the rest of this week, with the full schedule soon to follow. Be sure to get your tickets today!

 

Announcements

Updates and a few reminders

8 Comments

Hey, folks. We want to give you an update on what’s been going on behind the scenes at WordCamp NYC. The blog’s been a little slow lately, but we’ve been working furiously behind the scenes to bring you the best WordCamp NYC ever.

Sessions/Schedule

As you may have seen on Twitter, we’ve been hard at work confirming speakers, and we will start announcing them VERY soon. We hope to have the final schedule posted soon, but we’re going to start announcing speakers and sessions next week!

Volunteer!

We’re still looking for a number of volunteers, if you’d like to help make WordCamp NYC an awesome event, please sign up to volunteer!

T-shirt deadline

To be sure to get a t-shirt in your size, buy your ticket before July 1st, 2014. We’ll be ordering some extras, but can’t guarantee you’ll have a shirt if you buy your ticket after that date.

Marriott Room Rate Deadline

There is a group rate available to book a stay at the Marriott where we’ll be holding the event. The deadline to book at the reduced rate is Friday, July 11th, 2014.

Announcements

One week left for Speaker Submissions

Wow, where did the time go? The call for speakers has been open for just over three weeks, and we’ve been receiving lots of great ideas!

If there’s something you’re passionate about that you think people need to hear, let us know! We’d love to see some topics that Here are some ideas to get your gears moving:

  • How you taught yourself you build a plugin/theme
  • What challenges you face setting up a site, and how you overcame them
  • An overview of the tools you use to run your business on WordPress
  • How you setup a curriculum for teaching WordPress to students
  • Some great plugins/tools for writers who use WordPress
  • Managing a website with dozens of users

New York is full of creative people, and lots of us use WordPress in unexpected ways. If you’re an educator, artist, creative person, or anybody really, who uses WordPress, we’d love to hear your story!

Topic submissions end one week from today, Friday May 16th, at 5pm EDT (or 9pm UTC), so if you have a story to tell, please let us know!

UPDATE: Speaker submissions are now closed! Thanks to everyone who submitted a topic. We’ll be going through the entries and finalizing the speaker list over the next few weeks.