WordPress Orlando

Official WordPress User Group of Orlando, FL

WPORL

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Reducing Anxiety for Developers and Marketers

Adam Soucie – Getting Back Up Again: Developing With Mental Illness

Darkness is an old friend, and Orlando WordPress developer Adam Soucie has come to talk with you about it. He has battled depression, bipolar disorder, and come to terms with being on the transgender spectrum for over 15 years. He lived to tell the tale, so in this talk, Adam will share his story of how he hit rock bottom, got help from professionals, medication, and the WordPress community, and is now thriving running a WordPress business. Bring an open mind and maybe a couple tissues. This one’s going to get emotional.

Lisa Melegari – Stop the Green Light Panic: Reducing Your SEO Anxiety

Anyone who’s used Yoast has faced the tedious process of struggling to get that green light. But SEO is not the same process for all pages, or even all types of websites. In this talk, Lisa will share the basic ins and outs of SEO and point out situations where the “green light” rules can be broken. She’ll also cover some helpful tools and tricks to get the most out of your SEO beyond Yoast.

Meetup Link

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Meetup Notes: Developer and Client Transparency, and Optimizing your WordPress Blog

Jean Perpillant – The Value of Developer and Client Transparency.

This talk I will discuss the necessity of honesty with clients from the discovery phase all the way post launch follow ups. I’ll also discuss the outlines of introverts and extraverts and how this plays a roll in choosing your next developer and choosing your next client.

Jean Perpillant – Client Transparency in Creative Development

Angelica Yarde – Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

Learn how to optimize your WordPress blog by avoiding making beginner mistakes and utilizing WordPress for its blogging potential. We will cover the most common mistakes bloggers make with WordPress and how to avoid them. We will also share the best practices for optimizing your WordPress blog so you can focus more on creating good content.

Angelica Yarde – Optimizing Your WordPress Blog

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Freeing Up Time With Website Automation

Josh Shashaty – Managing Multiple Sites The Right Way

There are a variety of companies that offer WordPress management, but what if you want to do it yourself? Josh will cover techniques that anyone can use to manage multiple websites without letting any fall through the cracks.

Josh discussed a variety of web services to manage sites, a selection of which are listed below:

David Laietta – Setting Up New Development Sites in a Flash!

David will show how he uses Vagrant, VVV, VV (Yes, those are three separate things), Blueprints, and Alfred to start up new development sites. It sounds like a lot of work, and it can require a lot of forethought, but it also makes it easy to create fully set up sites, ready for content, in just a few seconds.

All of the tools that David uses will be listed and available to freely download, and he will suggest alternatives for different staging environments. If you make sites for other people, don’t let the jargon scare you! Come learn to automate new client setup!

The talk given has some notes that can be followed after reviewing the slide deck below. Check out this article about getting started with the VVV, VV, and WP-CLI automation, then see a sample bash script written with this idea in mind.

Meetup Page

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Help Support the Zebra Coalition with WordPress Orlando this Holiday Season

As we prepare for our annual holiday party, we are thankful for the many speakers, sponsors, and attendees that have helped enrich WordPress Orlando over the past five years. It has been our privilege to be able to serve our community, and we look forward to continuing forward with all of you.

Our ability as a community to come together is powerful, and one that we don’t take lightly. At WordCamp every year we select one or two charity partners to focus on, to expose our network to a worthy cause. In the past, we’ve collected toys for Toys for Tots, video games for Nemours Children’s Hospital, registered members for the bone marrow registry Be the Match, and more.

This year, we focus on a vulnerable population: at-risk LGBTQ Youth in Orlando. The Zebra Coalition is a full service organization devoted to helping LGBTQ teens and young adults with services including medical and mental health resources, drug and alcohol counseling, ongoing education, transportation, peer support, and more. They also provide short term housing, food, and clothing to teens and young adults who otherwise have few resources to turn to.

Zebra Youth Christmas Fund

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Donation Total: $15

We ask that you help with a drive to raise funds to provide necessities, food gift cards, and a bit of holiday cheer for these young people at a time of year that many of us can celebrate how much we have rather than how little. We are raising funds before and during our holiday party to present at the Zebra Youth holiday party a few days later.

If you are willing and able, please consider supporting. Our minimum goal is to raise $450 before our party to provide one $15 gift card for food to each of 30 current residents of the housing program, but we welcome gifts above and beyond.

Thank you for being an active member of WordPress Orlando, and please let us know how we can serve you through 2017!

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Creating WP Content on the Go in Rio

Creating content on the go can be a challenge, but fortunately, tech tools and apps are making it easier to create compelling content from remote locations. Bess Auer will be sharing the tools and tactics she used in Rio de Janeiro when covering the Olympics Games. Live streaming and pre-recorded content, as well as photo apps and Facebook Instant Articles will be shared.

Bess shared quite a few tips with us on creating and sharing content in a place far from home, where you can’t bring large recording equipment, don’t have time for a full editing suite, and may not even have fast or reliable internet to upload that content. A few of the suggestions that Bess made:

  • Live Video on Facebook is king right now
  • Podcast listeners are most loyal social media people
  • Use Getty Images Embeds for free for non-commercial sites. They have near instant upload of pictures, useful for breaking stories.
  • Facebook Instant Articles – Your brand should be on it
  • Engagement rates are more valuable than sheer number counts

Additionally, Bess offered up a few tools, digital and physical, that she uses:

Finally, Bess very kindly offered our attendees 25% off at this year’s FLBlogCon! It’s a great event for bloggers and content creators of all types. It’s being held at Full Sail Live on 24 September 2016. Info and tickets are available at that link, and WordPress Orlando members get 25% off with the discount code WPORL16.

Bess Auer is the founder of the Florida Blogger & Social media Conference (FLBlogCon) and the host of the weekly television show Blog Talk TV. A graduate of Gregg Pollack’s Starter Studio, Bess is also the founder of Florida Swim Network, a website that covers competitive swimming and live streams swim meets and original shows for the SEC Network, ESPN, and Your Swim Channel.

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Accessibility and Security on the Web

Helena Zubkow – Including Everyone: Web Accessibility 101

If your website wouldn’t work for anyone living in the state of New York, would that be a launch-blocker? Of course! So why are we ignoring the even larger population of people with disabilities?

Designed for developers, project managers, and directors alike, the goal of this code-free session is to introduce everyone to the fundamental principals and business related factors of web accessibility.

Together we’ll explore the findings from data gathered at DrupalCon LA regarding accessibility in our very own Drupal community and examine the financial viability of a web accessibility initiative in an industry where time is money.

Based on my experience as a web accessibility specialist from both the perspective of a project manager and a front-end developer, I’ll share the knowledge I’ve gained with you to address the following important questions:

– What is web accessibility?
– Why does web accessibility matter to my users?
– Why does web accessibility matter for my company and clients?
– How will a web accessibility initiative affect my bottom line?
– How can I include web accessibility in my company’s culture and work plans?
– What tools can I use to assess and improve accessibility in my projects?
– How can I help the web accessibility community?

I am a ‘bot who loves to make the web better! I enjoy Drupal, web accessibility, and the occasional practical joke. My home is in sunny Orlando where I live with my handsome fiancé and a very mischievous Blue Heeler. The Drupal community is amazing, and I love being a part of it.

 

 

Irina Blumenfeld – Migrate WordPress from HTTP to HTTPS

As more sites transition to HTTPS and Google giving preferred ranking to secure sites, it became important to properly install a TLS/SSL Certificate.
The process of moving to HTTPS can be intimidating starting from obtaining certificate to migrating all content to HTTPS.

Recently, Let’s Encrypt started offering Free TSL/SSL Certificates. CloudFlare offers Free TLS/SSL with HTTP/2 support

We’ll discuss how you can obtain a Free TLS/SSL Certificate, make your content HTTPS friendly, and how to migrate existing content to HTTPS.

We’ll also go over the benefits of serving your pages over secure connection, common problems with transition, and how you can test your certificate configuration.

See Irina’s post about Migrating WordPress to HTTPS on her site.