WPEngine: Helping pay the bills around here.

We’d like to give a special shout-out to WPEngine for being a sponsor of WordCamp Raleigh this year.

WP Engine is a leading SaaS content management platform for websites and applications built on WordPress. The company powers thousands of websites and apps built on the WordPress platform delivering a fast, reliable and secure web experience. All levels of users including bloggers, marketers, SMBs and large corporations rely on WP Engine’s platform to keep their websites up and running. The company’s exceptional customer service team specializes in quickly solving technical problems, and creating a world-class customer experience ensuring that each user’s WordPress site continues to perform at its full potential. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas and has offices in San Francisco, California, San Antonio, Texas and London, England.

Check them out, and tell them WordPress Raleigh sent you.

Infinite thanks to our community sponsors!

Thank you to our generous WordPress community sponsors! These are sponsors who pledge to support the WordPress community in a certain region (or, in some cases, the whole world). Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

Outstanding community sponsors:

bluehost_main_logoBluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over one million WordPress sites. Their goal is to provide outstanding hosting services and customer support for the best possible price. Bluehost is also constantly innovating and upgrading their services and infrastructure at no additional cost to their customers. Join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how they can help you with your site.

wiredtreelogo600wideWiredTree provides Managed VPS and Managed Dedicated Servers to WordPress users worldwide from our Chicago-based data center and offices. Every WT server is backed by 24×7 telephone support, ticket support with 15 minute average response times, and is fully managed and monitored by WiredTree to maximize uptime and minimize frustration. All servers come ready-to-run with cPanel/WHM and are optimized and security hardened with firewall and anti-spam out of the box. With experience in SSD technology, MariaDB, Memcached, WordPress plugins, server optimization, and LiteSpeed Web server, WiredTree can take your site’s performance to the next level.

mt-250x140-dkFrom its inception in 1998, (mt) Media Temple has been on a mission to help people and businesses succeed online. Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in their 24/7 customer support. Their customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

jetpack-logo-horizontal-940x198Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me

Superb community sponsors:

GoDaddy_logo-1GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

Splendid community sponsors:

wpmlOnTheGoSystems is the author of WPML and Toolset plugins. WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites. OnTheGoSystems is always looking for exceptional people to join the team. To learn more about our products and open positions, you can visit: http://www.onthegosystems.com/

dh_logo-a-2014-940x198DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. More information can be found at http://dreamhost.com.

tinyElk is Keeping the Lights on Around Here.

Call us biased, but it makes us smile to see things like this on a web development firm’s website:

Most web development/design firms offer a wide range of services. From video production, social media designs, to SEO. tinyElk Studios, however, focuses on one area and that is WordPress. We know, we love, and we develop for WordPress.

And that’s exactly what you find over at tinyElk studios. These folks know WordPress, and do it well. Founded by Adam Sewell (a speaker around here), they “specialize in clean, elegant design coupled with an intuitive interface and powerful functionality.”

They are based out of Lexington NC, which if you ask me has the best BBQ in the known universe. (note author’s born-and-raised bias)

Check them out for your web needs. And tell them Ben over at WordCamp Raleigh sent you.

Avalara Paid for the Coffee. We Like these people.

We are so grateful for Avalara, not just because they are a generous sponsor of WordCamp Raleigh, which includes tasty developer fuel coffee but because they do something that few businesses want to do, and even fewer know how to do.

If you’ve ever dealt with sales tax (or any tax) compliance, you know that it’s a full-time gig.

Unless you get help from Avalara.

They are the world leaders in sales tax and use tax compliance software. They, um, do it for you. Their stuff integrates with TONs of ecommerce solutions, and saves you hours upon hours of your life.

Go check out their site, and tell them WordCamp sent you.

A Tool chest for WordPress: Welcoming Tony Zeoli to WordCamp Raleigh

These are the type of notes you might expect to take during Tony Zeoli's WordCamp Raleigh Talk.  Creative Commons Image Attribution
These are the type of notes you might expect to take during Tony Zeoli’s WordCamp Raleigh Talk.
Creative Commons Image Attribution
So I sent out a request to some of the speakers to help me understand their talks so that I could write a promo blurb for them.

What I got from Tony Zeoli made me gaze frustratedly at the schedule, because I’m speaking (in a different track) at the same time on Saturday.

His talk is one I will have to catch on WordPress.tv after the fact. It’s gonna be a good one.

I can tell you that if you are a power user, comfortable with themes, plugins, and some basic code, Tony’s session is going to give you a digital set of tools like none other to speed up your workflow, get you on the same page as your team, and give you the rails to run (in several directions) as you take your WordPress game to the next level.

Bring a notebook, and scribble some good notes for me, would ya?

Grab your ticket today!

Creating Branded WordPress Sites Without the Use of Hot Coals

Cattle Brand on hot coals
We’re not going to cover this type of branding at WordCamp.
Creative Commons Image Attribution
Just getting started out with WordPress, and looking for how to create a branded site? Where do you start? What are the things to look out for? How do you make the site stand out from other sites?

We’ve got what you need at WordCamp Raleigh this weekend!

We’re excited bring Ava Blade, a digital brander using WordPress to build branded sites to our beginner’s track.

Her talk will cover the elements you need to build a branded site, as well as walk you step-by-step through doing it with WordPress.

Grab a ticket today!

Thank you to Jetpack our Outstanding Sponsor sponsor

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me

Thank you to Jetpack for being a generous WordPress community sponsor! Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

Thank you to Media Temple our Outstanding Sponsor sponsor

From its inception in 1998, (mt) Media Temple has been on a mission to help people and businesses succeed online. Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in their 24/7 customer support. Their customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

Thank you to Media Temple for being a generous WordPress community sponsor! Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

Praying for Rain Means Carrying an Umbrella: Scaling your Site for Traffic.

child with a frog umbrella
It seems silly to pray for rain, and not carry an umbrella. What will you do when your site gets that flood of traffic you’re building toward?
Creative Commons Image Attribution
You’ve set up all the sales funnels, tweaked the copy on the home page, and gotten everything in line for your site. The last thing you need is the flood of traffic you’ve been wanting and even expecting to come to spell the end of your shared hosting and an “ERROR CONNECTING TO DATABASE” welcome mat on the day of the big marketing push.

Or let’s say you run a well-attended annual event—so you have some major server needs running up to and during the event, but not the rest of the year. How do you set up your hosting environment to handle it?

What if you get an email from the managing editor at Huffington Post letting you know that your site (on $4/month shared hosting) is going to be linked on the home page a week from this Thursday? How do you get it on more stable ground—with minimal downtime—without breaking the bank?

Well first, it’s a good thing that WordCamp Raleigh is happening before next Thursday (but congrats on the HuffPo feature!) because Charlie Harper of WooshData.com is going to be able to help you out.

Scaling a hosting environment, especially for irregular spikes in traffic, doesn’t have to be confusing. Let him walk you through the minefield, pointing out where not to step.

If it’s time to scale your site’s hosting, it’s time to come hear how this weekend at WordCamp Raleigh. Today is the last day to secure a free T-Shirt.

Grab a ticket today

Thank you to WiredTree our Outstanding Sponsor sponsor

WiredTree provides Managed VPS and Managed Dedicated Servers to WordPress users worldwide from our Chicago-based data center and offices. Every WT server is backed by 24×7 telephone support, ticket support with 15 minute average response times, and is fully managed and monitored by WiredTree to maximize uptime and minimize frustration. All servers come ready-to-run with cPanel/WHM and are optimized and security hardened with firewall and anti-spam out of the box. With experience in SSD technology, MariaDB, Memcached, WordPress plugins, server optimization, and LiteSpeed Web server, WiredTree can take your site’s performance to the next level.

Thank you to WireTree for being a generous WordPress community sponsor! Their support allows us to concentrate on creating stupendous, volunteer-organized events for the WordPress community.

WordCamp Raleigh 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!