Author: Ben Meredith

I’ve told you before how excited we are to be adding a business track to this year’s WordCamp. The speaker I’m introducing today is a fantastic example of why we’re excited.

If you’ve considered a WordPress site for your business, the staggering number of options and levels of complexity can be paralyzing. It would be so great to have someone walk you through how you can use WordPress to build a community of fans and customers. Let me rephrase that: It will be great when Andrea Olson walks you through that at WordCamp Raleigh 2015.

Andrea has used WordPress to build her (poop-related) community at GoDiaperFree.com and the new tinyundies.com. Without a large marketing budget or a massive complex site, she’s developed raving fans!

Come hear how you can do the same, whether you build your business around poop or not. Get your ticket today!

If you’ve ever worked on or inherited code from a large application or website built with WordPress and then needed to scale the functionality, a session from one of our developer track talks this year at WordCamp Raleigh will likely resonate with you.

This line reeled me right in, to be honest:

When developers use the same techniques for complex sites that they have been using for smaller sites, the unstructured approaches that are so commonly used can quickly turn a large project into a house of cards. The results are bugs that are hard to contain, an overall scope that goes way over budget and a project that has a high risk of failure.

As developers, we know that WordPress core is solid, and powerful. But to take it to the next level and power larger more complex applications and sites typically built for enterprise companies, we need to get beyond the methods we use for small sites and blogs.

We are excited to welcome Mike Schinkel to our developer track to help you (and me!) take our development skills to the next level and get out in front of those exact issues and pitfalls.

Mike’s primary focus is on WPLib—a foundation library for complex WordPress applications—and helping agencies architect and build complex WordPress sites for their clients.

Grab your ticket today, and join me in furiously scribbling notes to learn all that Mike is going to bring us.

Have you ever written a post introducing yourself? I am right now. In addition to speaking this year, I am my own speaker liaison.

Part of my role is to publish blog posts promoting the speakers. This one will be EPIC.

In the famous words of Shawn Carter, allow me to reintroduce myself.

I’m a freelance WordPress developer with 2 plugins in the official .org repository. WordCamp Raleigh 2014 was my first WordCamp, and I was hooked.

Weeks after last year’s conference, I coded and released a plugin on slightly more than a whim that has now garnered more than 5,000 active users, and 17 5-star reviews. That (free) plugin, in conjunction with my other (free) one, has generated around $5,000 in revenue for me so far this year.

That’s right, folks. I am a literal thousandaire just from WordPress.

In all seriousness, I’m thrilled to have developed plugins that are helping people out, and also generating some spare coin for me. If you want to learn how I turned those free plugins with free support tickets from non-paying customers into revenue (and recurring revenue!), come check out my talk in the developer track. It’s centered around what I think is the strongest aspect of WordPress, the community.

Buy your ticket today!

One of the primary shifts which WordPress has helped to facilitate in the tech world over the past 10 years is taking “web design” from being code-heavy and the exclusive realm of coders to being something that creative folks (regardless of their level of code expertise) can build great sites, and the more entrepreneurial can even build businesses helping others with their sites.

One such self-described founder/creator is David Bentley. He transitioned from high risk security (not web security—the type of security with guns and Kevlar) to web design in 2009.

Come hear how he made the transition, and how you can build a web business without all the code, as David shares with our business track at WordCamp Raleigh this year.

Grab a ticket while they’re hot.

I’ve already told you about the ninjas we have speaking at WordCamp Raleigh 2015.

Now I’d like you to meet our comedienne, Corey Freeman.

In addition to being funny, she’s a teacher. Specifically, she teaches people how to use WordPress to build their own site.

Here’s the lead-in from Corey’s site, headway101.com:

Every successful business and entrepreneur needs a website, and creating websites isn’t as easy as ordering pizza. But Headway Themes can drastically cut website development time and save you thousands of dollars in custom design & development fees. But first, you have to learn how to use it.

It’s easy to get overwhelmed with choices when you first set out to build a DIY site with WordPress.

Come and laugh with Corey as she teaches you how to build a site on the Headway theme for WordPress. This talk will be on our beginners track.

Get your ticket today!

We’ve all heard of those developers who refer to themselves as “ninjas.” Micah Wood actually is a ninja. You know: the kind of ninja who can subdue the bad guys and save the day.

This is not official, but I think he learned martial arts in the sewers of New York City under the tutelage of a large mutated rat sensei. Or maybe I’m getting my origin stories confused.

In addition to being a martial artist, Micah is a prolific developer, plugin author and CTO at NewClarity consulting, LLC.

Perhaps most significantly, Micah has generously shared his knowledge over the years as a speaker at WordCamps, meetups, and other conferences.

We’re excited to have Micah join us for WordCamp Raleigh in our developer track to share about advanced workflows including dependency management, task runners, automated testing, code review, multiple environments, build systems and automated deployments.

Come join us on October 10th and 11th. Get your ticket to WordCamp Raleigh today!

Sometimes when I’m looking for how to introduce someone, I have trouble finding the words, so I’ll let Frank Corso’s plugin users speak on his behalf:

What really impressed me was that today I had an issue with the latest upgrade. I cannot believe how quickly the plugin author replied and helped. I expect that sort of quick response from a corporate, but not from a very small business! Magical stuff. Thank you Frank.

–redcars

I am still discovering a lot of things that I can do with it, and every new possibility seems to impress me more. Thank you Frank Corso for this wonderful plugin.

–dannyballan

Great plugin which is very easy to use. Always helpful answers from Frank if you need them. Great support.

–pipibox

…and there are hundreds more just like those! One of the highlights of using WordPress is coming across developers who pour their heart and soul into their work. That’s clear about Frank from just a brief perusal of the reviews and support forums for his plugins!

We are excited to have Frank come to WordCamp Raleigh to teach us how to grow products from a handful of users to 4-digit user bases. He’ll teach us from experience how we can grow our theme, plugin, or other product beyond a small user base.

His session is going to be on our business track.

So what are you waiting for? Grab your ticket today!

I have discovered a much better way to write speaker introduction blog posts for WordCamp Raleigh 2015: while listening to the great Americana Music Show podcast. (though I keep having to take breaks to bob my head during the guitar solos)

Calvin Powers, the host of the show, is joining us at WordCamp Raleigh this year, to share his wisdom on how WordPress can be used as a podcasting platform. More than just hosting the actual content, the WordPress site forms the marketing funnel driving listeners to subscribe, and interact with the show.

We’ve all heard “WordPress is more than a blog platform” and Calvin is proving that by using it for the podcast.

So join me in bobbing your head to the tunes over at Calvin’s show and then come learn how you can pull off something similar by getting your ticket to WordCamp Raleigh 2015!

Have you ever thought about how WordPress could be used to power a massive corporate intranet? Lisa Linn Allen has. As the Vice underlord of the PHP dungeon intranet team lead at SAS here in the Triangle, she’s thought about it more than you, most likely.

We are excited to have Lisa join our developer track at WordCamp Raleigh 2015 to talk through the intricacies of how SAS uses WordPress for exactly that.

On the docket for her talk is how they built the underlying infrastructure to manage those multiple WordPress installations powering the intranet. Developers will learn the key pain points and takeaways for building that system.

What are you waiting on? Get your ticket today!

We are excited to begin announcing our speakers for WordCamp Raleigh 2015! First up is Steve Mortiboy. Steve has been helping organize WordCamp Raleigh for several years now, and is excited to be kicking off our inaugural year of having a business track.

Our goal with this track is to help business owners expand their toolset and understanding with regards to web technology (generally) and WordPress (specifically).

Steve comes to us with a unique position as someone who meets with businesses on a weekly basis to explain and demystify the web. His session this year on SEO for Business Owners: Understanding the complex world of Google search results is a great opportunity to hear how you can take proactive steps with your business and the web.

As the conference nears, we’ll post the schedule. We look forward to seeing you at WordCamp!