Monday, July 6, 2020
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM

In this Zoom presentation, Doug Yuen will explain the basics of GitHub (and Git, the version control system that GitHub is built around). This presentation is designed for people who have never used GitHub, or tried to learn but got confused.

GitHub is a popular service that is commonly used to track changes to code you write. In WordPress, some uses would be a custom plugin you wrote, your changes to a child theme, or even just additional CSS you’re adding in the Customizer.

I’ll explain some of the key concepts, demo the GitHub website and the GitHub Desktop client software, and share specific examples of how GitHub has helped me on some projects. It’s much more than just a place to back up your code. I won’t be going into technical stuff like the command line interface, but I’ll mention some of the powerful things you can do with Git/GitHub, and I encourage you to learn more as you get comfortable with it.

GitHub has a generous free plan that’s sufficient for most users. If you’re writing or editing code, I think you should be using GitHub, especially for larger projects. And if you have a developer writing code for you, getting them to use GitHub could be very useful in case someone else needs to take over or collaborate.

—

Note: This will not be at our usual location, it will be an online event using Zoom. If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for free at https://zoom.us. You can download the desktop software, use a browser extension, or download the mobile app. If you haven’t used Zoom before, you may want to get set up and familiar with it in advance. We recommend you upgrade to the latest version, especially if you’re running a version before 5.0. There have been some major security improvements since then.

You can join the meetup at the scheduled time (6pm Pacific) by going to the link provided when you RSVP. For added security, we’re not going to display the link publicly. You’ll need to RSVP to see it.

Along the bottom of the Zoom window, there are buttons to mute/unmute yourself, enable/disable your video, access the Participants panel, and access the Chat panel, among other things.

For security and to prevent interruptions, everyone else will be prevented from screen sharing during the meetup. Your audio and video *should* be off by default when you join the call, but you may want to double check when you join. You can unmute yourself and turn on your video, but please note that you may be included in the recording. If you unmute yourself, please only do so temporarily, while you’re asking your question. This helps reduce extra background noise from getting picked up.

If you have a question, please go to the Participants panel and click the button to “raise your hand”. We’ll take breaks to answer questions, and we’ll call on whoever has their hand raised. You can unmute yourself while you ask your question, and then mute yourself and lower your hand after you’re done.

There’s also a Chat panel. You can use the chat to converse with other participants, but if you have a question for the presenter, remember to “raise your hand” instead of typing the question into the chat. We won’t be monitoring the chat as frequently.

We’ll be recording the presentation, and we’ll link to the video in the comments after it’s been processed.

We will not have the usual hands-on help and networking portion of the meetup. However, we encourage people to converse in our Slack group for general WordPress discussion at any time. You can join here.

Please RSVP on Meetup so we know how many people to expect. We hope to see you there!