Speaker Spotlight: Chris Jean of iThemes

Posted on May 10, 2011 by Steve M

With six years of experience developing and maintaining a closed CMS, Chris finally saw the light in 2008 and shifted his focus over to WordPress. As a member of the iThemes team, his focus is creating themes and plugins that allow users to have advanced control over their site without knowledge of code. Whatever that means. When he’s not on a bash shell or coding away in Vim, he can be found watching anime or playing TF2.

Chris will be presenting on the topic of Standardized Loop API: The Next Big Thing in the Developers track. Here’s an extract from what you can expect to hear from Chris:

Themes used to be the wild west of WordPress with everyone doing their own thing. Over the years, APIs for widgets, comments, menus, featured images, post formats, and so on were added to tame themes with a consistent set of tools and features.

This presentation makes the case for and shows examples of a possible next step for evolving the theme API: a loop API and standard.

So register today for WordCamp Raleigh 2011 and come meet Chris. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter – @chrisjean

A Small Orange sponsors WordCamp Raleigh 2011

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Steve M

We are pleased to announce that A Small Orange is sponsoring WordCamp Raleigh 2011. Here’s a note from the guys at A Small Orange:

We’re A Small Orange – a soon to be Durham-based Linux hosting company dedicated to our customers. We provide a wide range of high value hosting options including shared hosting, business class hosting, virtual private servers, and managed dedicated servers. Even though we’re responsible for hosting over 450,000 domains, we haven’t lost sight of our humble roots. Our commitment to customer service continues to set us apart from our competition.

We’re not just making things easier for webmasters, we’re also doing our best to make a difference. That’s why we’re proud to support the local WordPress community through our sponsorship of WordCamp Raleigh 2011. Without strong support from talented developers and users like you, the world wouldn’t have access to terrific open source tools like WordPress. We admire and respect the collaboration and effort required to make projects like WordPress possible.

So, thanks for all the hard work you’ve poured into this project, and thanks for making WordPress what it is today.

The CEO of A Small Orange will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh about the WordPress Showcase. We’d like to thank A Small Orange for their support of WordCamp Raleigh 2011. Come join us on May 21st and 22nd and meet them.

Speaker Spotlight: Ronald Huereca of iThemes

Posted on May 9, 2011 by Steve M

Ronald’s worked with WordPress since 2006 and mostly dabbles in WordPress plugins. He has extensive experience with Ajax and jQuery. He recently joined the iThemes team to develop plugins for PluginBuddy.

Ronald will be presenting on the topic of Plugin Localization in the Developers track. Here’s an extract from what you can expect to hear from Ronald:

The topic will deal with plugin localization, including which functions to use, how to generate PO and MO files, and how to localize JavaScript files.

So register today for WordCamp Raleigh 2011 and come meet Ronald. Don’t forget to follow him on Twitter – @ronalfy

Announcing BackupBuddy as a Silver sponsor for WordCamp Raleigh 2011

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Steve M

We are very pleased to announce that we have a new Silver sponsor for WordCamp Raleigh 2011 – BackupBuddy, the WordPress backup solution!

BackupBuddy is the only complete WordPress backup solution. You can backup to your server to Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, or by e-mail. Then quickly and easily restore your site on the same server or migrate to a new server with a different domain and database. The process is easy, fast, and reliable. Learn more at getbackupbuddy.com.

We’d like to extend our thanks to iThemes and the BackupBuddy team for their continued generous support of WordCamp Raleigh and all things WordPress. Come join us on May 21st and 22nd and meet the team from iThemes who are responsible for BackupBuddy and many other great plugins.

Speaker Spotlight: Douglas Hanna of A Small Orange

Posted on May 8, 2011 by Steve M

Douglas runs a web hosting company called A Small Orange, but has been involved with WordPress in a variety of ways for a number of years now, including as the person responsible for the very popular WordPress Showcase. The Showcase is terrific because it shows what people can do with WordPress. As Douglas put it, it’s WordPress’ way to sort of promote the people who have used WordPress in unique ways and attract more users to it.

Douglas will be presenting on the topic of Showcasing the Showcase in the Users track. Here’s an extract from what you can expect to hear from Douglas:

In his presentation, Douglas will highlight close to 20 of the most interesting WordPress sites online today. Expect to learn about what celebrities, world leaders, athletes, and the like are using WordPress, but also about some unique and innovative sites that you might not have heard about. Douglas will also go over how to get your own site included in the Showcase and how the WordPress Showcase came about and works today.

So register today for WordCamp Raleigh 2011 and come meet Douglas.