We’re happy to announce that Evan Volgas will be speaking at WordCamp Raleigh this year. Evan’s session will cover Things you should know about WordPress (but were always afraid to ask) and will be on the Power Users track.

Licensed Caffeine Therapist and Data Geek. Huge lover of dogs, tea, coffee, and cantaloupe. Wanders on purpose. Gets lost a lot while driving. Used to tap dance and do ballet. Now, messes around with Scala, Python, Cassandra, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hadoop/Hive/Spark/Sqoop/etc, WordPress, and R.

This talk is aimed at designers and new developers who maybe have a few PHP tricks up their sleeves, but still don’t really see how all of this stuff comes together. If you’ve never edited functions.php and don’t know what it is, this probably isn’t a good talk for you just yet. If you’ve written a plugin or modified several .php files in your WordPress themes, this will probably be a bit too basic for you. If you’ve set up a child theme before and know what functions.php is, even if you haven’t really used it all that much, or even at all…. you’re probably the exact person who will get a lot out of this talk. If that’s you and you come to this talk, you should be familiar and comfortable with most of the behind-the-scenes mechanics of WordPress by the time we’re done.