WordPress Developer, Dustin Filippini and Internet Marketer, Scott Offord of Orion Group discuss WordCamp and the WordPress community in the Midwest:
WordPress Workbench ~ March 2013
Dustin: Okay. Well, welcome to what we’re trying to call the WordPress Workbench. This is Dustin Filippini here, and I’m with Scott Offord. We’re both from The Orion Group, and we’re going to go through some of the local events here in our area that we’re working on with the WordPress community. We’ll probably go over some of the WordCamps. We’re doing one in Milwaukee that we’re leading up, and also some people we know are doing one in Chicago and one in Minneapolis. We thought this might be nice for a lot of our clients, local people we know, to get a little more information about, and then we’re going to probably talk about our upcoming meetup here too and some of the things we’ve done in the past, just in case you haven’t been to one of our meetups before.
So, Scott, tell me a little bit more about yourself.
Scott: I’m the Internet Marketing Director at The Orion Group, and we are a web design company and internet marking firm up in Sussex, which is near Milwaukee. I’ve been using WordPress for many years, back when it was Version 1.6 point something. Anyway, that’s a little bit about me.
Dustin: Okay. I didn’t really introduce myself very well, but I’m a developer for The Orion Group, and I make the websites, make them run nicely for your business.
Scott: Excellent. Well, thanks, Dustin. For anyone watching, make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel, which is at Youtube.com/user/theoriongroup.
So what’s up first on the agenda today, Dustin?
Dustin: First thing, we’ve got some big events coming up here. We’re in the planning stages right now of WordCamp Milwaukee. I’m leading it up this year. Last year, Scott led up the event, and we had a pretty good turnout last year. We probably had about 200 people, right?
Scott: Yeah. I think between both days, 200 people in total.
Dustin: We’re looking to ramp it up this year, hopefully we get at last 250. The great thing about WordCamps, if nobody’s been to one, is you can spend a whole week just immersing yourself in WordPress, getting to learn it, and we provide you food. You get to meet some really cool people. You get a T-shirt, and you get to learn, have some fun.
We’re going to be doing that this year June 8th and 9th. Actually, 7th, 8th, and 9th. We’re still in the planning on this, but we’re going to be planning an intro section or WordPress 101 section on Friday, June 7th, to give people a kick off to the WordCamp. So if you’re not really a WordPress fanatic like we are, you can come on Friday, learn a lot of the basics. Our dog Hugo was excited about that. I guess Hugo needs to learn some basics.
Come ahead and learn and then build into new things you’re going to be learning on Saturday and Sunday.
So, Scott, what kind of things did you find most interesting about WordCamps that you’ve been to in the past?
Scott: Well, with WordCamp last year, it was just phenomenal. One thing I really enjoyed was the WordPress Workbench, which was that one-on-one time where anyone could just ask questions of the experts. In Milwaukee at Bucketworks last year, we had Heather Acton helping out there as well as some people from Page Lines, Henry, and it was just great being able to help people one-on-one just learn WordPress and just help them with their issues. That was fun.
But talking about upcoming WordCamps, there’s also WordCamp Minneapolis, and that’s actually in April. You can go to 2013.Minneapolis.WordCamp.org to see all about that, and I think they just recently launched that website. So they’re still working on getting content up there. But April 17th to 18th is the WordCamp Minneapolis. So that’s another one in that Midwest area.
Then I think, Dustin, you know a little bit about WordCamp Chicago?
Dustin: Yes. Some good friends of ours, Aaron Halbrook and Heather Acton are putting on WordCamp Chicago again this year. They just announced the date and location, June 28th through 30th. I don’t remember the location off the top of my head, but I can find it here. They’re kind of planning something similar to what we’re doing with the Friday session to get you started in WordPress. They had a great one last year. It’s University Center Conference Chicago. That’s what it says on their site.
Scott: Okay.
Dustin: They had a good one last year. They’ve been running theirs for a few years now, and both get some great speakers. I know I [inaudible 5:52]. We’ll be having Lisa Sabin-Wilson talk. She wrote the book “WordPress for Dummies” along with a few other books. John Jacoby, J-Trip they call him, he is one of the lead developers for Buddy Press if you use that to make a social network out of WordPress. He’ll be talking at the Milwaukee one. I’m sure that there’s a very good chance of me going down to Chicago too.
So we get a lot of great people who are actually very much involved in the WordPress community and also try to get a lot of local people involved too, because one thing about WordPress and the local community is we try to promote what’s going on right here too in our area, the Milwaukee area or Chicago area there.
Scott: Right. It’s great to have that community, that extended community in Chicago and the whole Midwest, really.
Dustin: It’s kind of neat with us here, because we kind of move back and forth between the Milwaukee and Chicago with their close proximity, where a lot of them come up here for our stuff, and we go down there for their stuff and kind of work together.
Scott: Yeah.
Dustin: They’ve been helping with the Milwaukee Camp, and I’ve been helping and you a little with the Chicago camp too.
Scott: Yeah. They were a great help. So anyway, as far as what else is going on in Milwaukee with WordPress, we have something coming up next week.
Dustin: Yeah, we have our monthly meetup. If anybody watching hasn’t been there, and they’re available next Thursday, 7 p.m. at Bucketworks, which is near downtown Milwaukee, you can find information at wpmke.com. We’re going to be kind of doing a discussion topic thing, if you want to call it round table type thing, just going around the room and everybody sharing your favorite WordPress tools, plugins, and tips. So it’s great, because you can learn about anything new, share things that you’ve found. You can come into the night not knowing any of these tips and probably come out with a lot of great things to get you started out working with WordPress or advancing your skills in WordPress.
Scott: Yeah. So that’s March 21st at Bucketworks, and hopefully you know where Bucketworks is. If not, Google it, Bucketworks Milwaukee, and you’ll find it right downtown, just about. So talking about the WordPress meetup in Milwaukee, what are some of the topics that you have done recently in the past months?
Dustin: Yeah. If you haven’t been down to the WordPress meetup before, we do vary our topics, and they come from beginner level to slightly higher level. We try to make things interesting to everybody. If you haven’t really worked much with WordPress, we try to at least give you an overall view of what we’re talking about. If we’re kind of more on a basic level, we try to inject in some things that the high level users would like.
Recently, we kind of went through a few different topics. Last month, we had a great one where Aaron Halbrook, from down in one of the Chicago suburbs, he came up, and he called his presentation “WordPress is a CMS, Dammit!” because we keep getting pissed off at people because we get people coming to us saying, “Well, isn’t WordPress just a blogging tool?” Well, WordPress is so much more than that. You can make a site that has all types of content in there. It can stand up there with any type of CMS out there. It can be used well for small businesses to much larger businesses. In fact, there are a lot of very large businesses using Word Press nowadays.
Scott: Right.
Dustin: We also did one that was pretty neat. It was a WordPress collaborative working session, where we had a bunch of professionals come in and some beginners. Everybody just kind of worked together. If they had a problem, they talked to the person next to them. Just kind of helping each other out, and that’s kind of one of the big things about our community is just helping people out.
Scott: That was a great session. I got a lot of feedback about that. People were just very grateful for being able to learn so much hands-on. It was less formal, and people just sat around and brought their laptops. We encourage people to bring their laptops, and I think we’re going to do that again very soon.
Dustin: Yeah. We had one a little while back, too, with Lisa Sabin-Wilson who I had mentioned. She also wrote a book on BuddyPress, and she kind of gave us an intro to creating a social network with WordPress and BuddyPress. Like I told you about Aaron’s talk, WordPress can do a lot more than just blogging. This is kind of one of the use cases here is you can make a full, all out social networking site with WordPress using the BuddyPress plugin. I also went over some new things that were happening in WordPress 3.5 when that was released.
Scott: Right. Who did we have there? That was Mark Jaquith?
Dustin: Yeah, Mark Jaquith. Yeah, he was one of the lead developers of 3.5, and he is the lead of 3.6 now. He came and talked with us over Google Hangout, like we’re doing this here. Then after that, we kind of had a discussion between our whole group on some of the new things that are coming in 3.5.
Scott: Yeah. That’s great. Yeah, there’s a lot going on in the Milwaukee area. I think we’re almost ready to rival places like Seattle and some of those other places that have much bigger cities than Milwaukee. But the tech community overall in Milwaukee is growing.
Dustin: I’m shooting for San Francisco.
Scott: San Francisco, yeah.
Dustin: Yeah. Milwaukee is going to be the next big tech hub.
Scott: Let’s do it. Well anyway, Dustin, thanks for doing this, and we’re going to have to come up with a topic for next time. In the meantime, everybody stay tuned and come back for more.
Dustin: Hopefully, we can get some good information out to people we know here on WordPress and maybe even bring up some other topics and different things about other internet marketing and web related tech things, post them up online. But if you’re interested in WordPress, definitely check out wpmke.com, and join us at our meetups.
Scott: Right. Thanks Dustin.
Dustin: Thanks Scott. Everybody have a good day.