Portland WordPress User Group » Meetings

Hood River WordPress Meetup

Kathleen McDade — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 20:02:15 +0000

We’ll be having our regular Portland meeting on August 19, but meanwhile, I wanted to let you know that Callie Carroll is hosting an informal WordPress meetup/unconference in Hood River this Sunday, August 1! Here’s the information from her email to our Google Group (I didn’t post her phone #/email, but you can contact her via Twitter or leave a comment here):

For anyone interested in a short jaunt away from Portland this
weekend, I am hosting a last-minute WordPress unconference/meeting/
camp/chat, at 2pm on Sunday, at this location:

Ground Coffee
12 Oak Street
Hood River, OR

Hood River is family-friendly, and full of shopping and restaurants,
so bring your non-WP-loving family and set them loose. Street parking
is free on the weekends.

Wifi is available, and coffee, beer, and sandwiches are sold on the
premises at Ground. The shop can be very busy, so we will move to the
semi-private office at the end of the hall if that’s more appropriate,
and a sign will be posted to direct you. I don’t have a projector, but
bring your laptop and a VNC client!

RSVP to me privately via email, phone, SMS, or Tweet (@cusability), so
I can get an idea of the size of the group, and plan on having enough
chairs and tables.

cbc

–
// Callie B. Carroll, MS-HCI //
// User Experience Design //
// http://www.cUsability.com //

July…what day is it?

Kathleen McDade — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 04:34:46 +0000

I’m emerging from our family-wide summer break to remind you about our next meeting, and I can’t even remember what the date is! But the calendar says that this Thursday is July 15, and that it is indeed the third Thursday in July.

Let’s talk content, shall we? We talked about SEO a little bit last month, with several people strongly asserting that good content is more important than any other SEO technique. Be prepared to tell us what you write about, or what you want to write about, and how you keep coming up with content on a regular basis. I always learn something new from someone else on this subject.

See you on Thursday, 6:00 p.m. at Webtrends, 851 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1600. RSVP on Upcoming.

June 17: Blogging Tools

Kathleen McDade — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:08:19 +0000

Are you familiar with all of the tools built into WordPress? Know how to add a sidebar widget, create a poll, manage categories, and install plugins?

Or maybe you want to add a Paypal button to your site, or a user ratings system?

My bugaboo is Facebook integration. I tried to install a plugin, but it didn’t quite work for me.

If you want to know more, have specific questions, or would like to share your knowledge with others, please come to our next meeting on Thursday, June 17, 6:00 p.m. at Webtrends (851 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1600).

RSVP on Upcoming

Meeting May 20 6:00p.m.

Kathleen McDade — Tue, 18 May 2010 03:57:46 +0000

Yes, we are meeting this month! I know several of our regulars will be at the WebVisions conference, but if you’re not going to be there Thursday night, please come on over! It’ll just be a general networking and Q & A meeting, rather than being focused on a specific topic. If you have any WordPress questions, or if you’re looking for a WordPress developer, this would be a great time to come by.

As usual, 6:00 p.m. at Webtrends, 851 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1600.

April 15: Taxonomies Are a Wonderful Thing

Kathleen McDade — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 04:59:33 +0000

At our April 15 meeting, Michael Fields will present “Taxonomies Are a Wonderful Thing.” He’ll tell us what taxonomies are, why we should use them, and how to set up and use your own custom taxonomies.

You want to know what a taxonomy is NOW? Well, they’re sort of like tags and sort of like categories. Custom taxonomies allow you to set up alternate ways of categorizing posts, photos, etc. I grabbed this use case scenario from Justin Tadlock:

Imagine you ran a website that reviewed books, movies, and music. When writing posts in WordPress, you want to label something as a book, yet you also want to further label it by genre or by author.

Yeah. The rest of that post kind of confuses me. So I’m looking forward to seeing MIchael’s talk and demonstration.

We’ll have time for networking, too. Come on down! We’ll be at Webtrends, 851 SW 6th Avenue, Suite 1600, 6:00 p.m. RSVP on Upcoming.

Update 4/11 – Mike adds: “Please bear in mind that there will be absolutely no code to learn. All
examples can be reproduced by a beginner with the aid of freely available,
open-source plugins.”

March 18: Multisite features and more in WordPress 3.0

Kathleen McDade — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:56:09 +0000

Join us March 18th at 6:00 p.m. as Aaron Jorbin demonstrates the new multisite, custom post type and menu management features coming in WordPress 3.0. This will be an opportunity to see some of the biggest changes to WordPress in quite some time. Some of the things Aaron will go through include:

What the multisite features mean to both users and developers
How to enable Multisite once you’ve upgraded
How to add and customize custom menus on your site
How to add a custom post type

This talk will be aimed at both users and developers. Even if you don’t know a thing about coding, Aaron will show you the basics to help you understand these three changes. If a beta version of 3.0 is released before the meeting, we will work off of that. Otherwise Aaron will use the latest trunk version of WordPress. As this will be a development version, things can and will change before 3.0 is released, but this should give you an idea of what to expect. If you have any questions or suggestions on specifics that you would like to see covered, please comment on this post. See you on the 18th!

http://aaron.jorb.in
twitter: twitter.com/aaronjorbin

———
As always, we’ll meet at Webtrends (851 SW 6th Avenue) from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m.
RSVP on Upcoming.

February 18: WordPress and Statistics

Kathleen McDade — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:41:41 +0000

Join us Thursday, February 18 to talk about statistics: what programs can you use, what are the benefits and drawbacks of each, and what can they tell you that’s really useful?

Chris O’Rourke will join us to talk about Mint. We’ll also look at the WP-Stats plugin, Google Analytics and Woopra. Do you use any of these, or something else entirely? Bring your expertise and/or your questions, and let’s talk!

As always, 6:00 p.m. at Webtrends, 951 SW Sixth Avenue, Suite 600. You may need to have the security guard enter an elevator code if you arrive after 6:00. RSVP on Upcoming.

January 21: Aaron Hockley On How To Launch a Blog

Kathleen McDade — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 04:44:56 +0000

UPDATE: If you missed the meeting, or if you’d like to review an outline of Aaron’s talk, you can find it at Another Blogger. Thank you, Aaron!

Actually, the name of Aaron’s talk is “After Launching a Couple Dozen Blogs, I Figured Out how to Do it Right.” Aaron presented this talk at WordCamp Seattle, and has done several blog posts around this theme as well. Aaron is experienced at starting new WordPress blogs, including his highly successful SocialPhotoTalk site. Even if you’re an experienced blogger, if you’re thinking about starting another blog (and who isn’t?), Aaron Hockley has great information for you.

We’ll also have time for networking and socializing. If you’ve got questions about WordPress 2.9 (actually, we’re already up to 2.9.1), someone might be able to help you!

As usual, we’ll be at Webtrends, 851 SW 6th Avenue on the 16th floor. We usually get into Webtrends right around 6:00, but if you come later than that, just let the security guard know that you’re coming to the WordPress meeting and he’ll punch in the elevator code for you.

Hope to see you there! Please let us know on Upcoming if you’ll be attending.

Using Child Themes – November 12, 2009

Kathleen McDade — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 02:26:08 +0000

Sites we mentioned or looked at in our discussion of WordPress child themes.

On ThemeShaper:

How To Protect Your WordPress Theme Against Upgrades

How I Used a WordPress Child Theme To Redesign My Blog

How to Modify WordPress Themes the Smart Way

Devin Price’s website: WordPress Theming

Michael Fields is working child theme support into his Platypus Theme, and offered a solution to a problem he had: TEMPLATEPATH for Child Themes

We also discussed upcoming features in WordPress 2.9: 10 Things You Need to Know About WordPress 2.9

Aaron Jorbin offered the following 2.9 advice on Twitter post-meeting: “add_theme_support( ‘post-thumbnails’ ); is what’s needed to add post-thumbnails support in 2.9.”

We’re Meeting This Week! Let’s Talk Child Themes.

Kathleen McDade — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:47:12 +0000

We had a more developer-focused meeting in October, and a great discussion with Aaron Jorbin, Eric Curtis, Michael Fields, Kevin Peoples and Devin Price. We discussed bugs, taxonomies, wp-ecommerce, themes, svn, git, and more. Don’t know what all of those things are? Me, either. But if you come to a meeting, maybe someone else can explain it to you.

Our next meeting is on Thursday, November 12 at 6:00 p.m. (still at Webtrends). Yes, that is the second Thursday of the month. This month is Ignite Portland, and you know you want to be there on November 19, so we’re doing our meeting on the 12th. This month’s topic is using child themes, so that you can customize a theme without losing all of your changes when you upgrade to a new version of that theme. We don’t have a speaker, so I’m currently crowdsourcing. Do you use child themes? Can you be there to help us learn about them? Contact me using kmcdadepdx at gmail. You can also RSVP on Upcoming.

UPDATE! Devin Price is a child-theme-user, and will be at the meeting to share his knowledge. Thanks, Devin!