Author: Ben Meredith

Have you ever gotten the pre-conference advice “choose sessions based on the speaker, not the topic”? As a first time speaker this year myself, I hope you disregard it. But as your faithful speaker liaison, I have to admit that it’s good advice.

Last year (at my first WordCamp) I spent much of the time sitting in the developer’s track just watching concepts fly over my head. But one of the more memorable talks was on Gulp.js, by Jordan Cauley.

We are excited to welcome Jordan back this year, and take it from one who sat in his session last year: no matter what he’s talking about, if you’re a developer you’d do well to be sitting in on his session.

This year he’s talking about how we can work better together, technically speaking. If you’ve ever had an intern try out git push --force on the live site, and experienced that call from the client where they are steaming from the ears, this one is for you.

He’ll walk us through how to set up processes both from a code perspective and a project perspective so that we spend less time preparing to work, and more time producing results for the client (and also avoiding the client ear-steam)

And like I said, developers will do well to come hear Jordan talk, even if he was planning on reading an EULA. He’s good at what he does, and I’ll guarantee you’ll walk away with something.

Grab a ticket today (free T-shirts included for anyone who registers before October 2nd).

When you want a good smoked brisket, do you cruise down the Lowes Foods aisle looking for a pre-cooked, vacuum-packed, Arby’s-brand ArBrisket™, or do you go with the recommendation of an expert?

Well, it depends on the type of party you want throw.

If this is a late-night just-you Netflix marathon, the ArBrisket™ might be OK. Nobody will judge you*.

If you’re planning on inviting a bunch of friends over, it might be worth figuring out how to smoke a respectable brisket.

But we are talking about WordPress plugins, right?

When it comes to building a WordPress plugin, there’s a way you should do it, depending on what type of plugin you are trying to write.

Writing a just-for-you-Arbrisket™ plugin is simple. Writing a good plugin is a bit of an art. There’s a “WordPressy” way of doing things that a new developer (or a developer more familiar with other platforms and languages) would do well to learn, especially if the plugin is being written for mass consumption on GitHub or the WordPress.org repository.

It’s a good thing we’ve got Ryan Duff coming to help us learn exactly that. Coincidentally, if you want to stick around after the session, he’s also pretty well-versed in Brisketology, as well.

Come learn from the grill-master how to do things the right way when coding your plugin.

Get a ticket today, before they sell out.

*Ryan will actually probably judge you.

When you are just starting out with WordPress, whether it’s as a developer or as a blogger or as a tinkerer, there are important things to learn. But before all the learning, there’s a mindset that will serve you well: It’s OK to fail.

While it’s a nice thing to print on a coffee mug or a motivational poster, “It’s OK to fail” is much more difficult to actually live out in the real world. I’d go so far as to call it impossible without a community. We need someone to rally us and both show us and tell us that it’s OK to fail, to launch projects which go nowhere, and to have wildly unsuccessful products, websites, and blog posts.

There’s no better forum than WordCamp for this type of “Freedom To Fail” environment. This year at WordCamp Raleigh we’re thrilled to have Dylan Ryan come and share from his experience how starting with a “fail first” mentality is the key for success.

Dylan is a Senior at NCSU, and when he’s not busy passing classes he works for WP Valet as a support rep. He’s also released both successful and unsuccessful plugins on the WordPress repository.

Do you feel like you’re doing something wrong with WordPress? First, join the club, and then grab your ticket to come and be encouraged by Dylan.

I love that New Track smell. Our brand new business track is designed to help you find the intersection of WordPress and business. We are excited to expand the appeal of the conference beyond developers and other WordPress enthusiasts, and into small businesses, entrepreneurs, and enterprise-level clients.

We are excited to bring Lee Blue to WordCamp Raleigh this year for exactly that reason. He’s an experienced developer but also an entrepreneur himself, having founded multiple digital businesses. Cart66 is a popular membership plugin turned SaaS.

This dual focus, having launched businesses as well as helped others with e-commerce solutions, gives Lee a unique perspective on helping YOU to simplify using WordPress for your business.

Bring your business problems, because Lee is planning to bring his solutions.

Grab your ticket today, before they sell out!

This is most certainly not to disparage hosting companies who offer shared hosting plans for WordPress (they’re paying some bills around here, and we really do love them), but if you are ready to take your hosting to the next level, often the options are to pay a hefty fee, or to completely surrender control of what plugins or themes you are allowed to use, or both.

Adam Sewell is here to tell you of a third option: becoming your own sysadmin.

Adam is an entrepreneur and developer who founded tinyElk studios where they develop plugins. He’s joining our Power User track this year, and we are excited to have him.

Adam will help to demystify what is going on behind the scenes at the server level, and show you how you can set up your own blazing-fast DigitalOcean VPS to host WordPress for just $5 per month.

While this talk is directed at Power Users, note that a bit of Linux command line knowledge will be useful to get the most out of this session. Don’t be scared of the command line. Read up on it before you come!

Grab your ticket today.

Think WordPress is the right platform to organize and manage your next event or conference? With the right tools and a few pointers, you can be well on your way to organizing top-notch events from the comfort and familiarity of your WordPress dashboard.

Why not swing by WordCamp Raleigh this year and learn from someone who’s done it before, though?

We are excited to invite Jeremy Davis to take the stage in our Power User track to talk through some pointers on setting up WordPress to handle event organization.

Jeremy has used WordPress to manage events with thousands of attendees, so come learn from his expertise!

Grab your ticket today!

Ever clicked on a post on your site and watched the image load seemingly pixel-by-pixel? Slow-loading sites are brutal—not just for readers, but for servers, search engines, and everyone else.

Images are important, everyone agrees. They drive engagement and pageviews, and are cuddly and warm. But given that they can be a significant drain on server resources and bring your web host to its knees when done incorrectly, it is worth getting images right.

We’ve invited Peter Baylies, a WordPress developer at Chapel Hill’s Rivers Agency, to come and untangle the knots that we tend to tie ourselves in dealing with images.

Learn best practices, optimizing images, and how to keep readers, servers, and search engines happy with the images on your site. Grab a ticket today.

So, you’ve read that Uncle Google uses https:// as a ranking factor for SEO, and you’re ready to pull the trigger on getting your WordPress site switched over. Just a quick Google search and…

There are right ways to do these things, and several wrong ways.

We are excited to invite Patrick Stox to WordCamp and our Power User track to walk us through the right way. Patrick is the Marketing Project Supervisor at TheeDesign in Raleigh, an organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup, and a contributing author for Search Engine Land for their All Things SEO column.

Grab your ticket before they sell out, and join us at WordCamp to hear from Patrick.

We are excited to welcome back Ray Mitchell, owner of SixFour Web Design to WordCamp Raleigh 2015. A veteran WordCamp speaker, his expertise is tailor-made for our new business track. Here’s what he has to say about himself:

I know how hard it can be running a small business. There are dozens of things to keep track of, and building your new website is just one of them. It shouldn’t take up all your time and money. SixFour Web Design has one mission: to create websites that help Small Businesses compete effectively with their bigger competition, without spending a fortune.

Are you on the fence about using WordPress for your small business, non-profit, or church website? Come learn from Ray’s experience. His engaging style and helpful talks are a hit every year!

This year his session is “Not Just a Website.”

Grab your ticket today.

We are excited to welcome Jen Riehle McFarland for WordCamp Raleigh 2015 to share more with us about how to use WordPress for education. There’s been a discussion around the WordPress community on the logistics and feasibility of “WordCamp-like” conferences and an on-going community specifically focused on the macro-niche of education.

The week before WordCamp Raleigh, Jen is going to the HighEdWeb conference in Wisconsin. There she’ll participate in (among other things) the ongoing national discussion of how best to support the use of WordPress in education, primarily in Higher Ed, but also for K-12 and continuing education communities. She’ll be bringing that discussion back to Raleigh, and to WordCamp.

Given our proximity to such amazing research and educational resources here in the Triangle, we’re uniquely positioned to take the conversation even further from concept to reality. Get your ticket today to hear from Jen and join in the discussion about using WordPress in education.