Meetups

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

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:

• MainWP – WordPress Management
• Manage WP – WordPress Management
• Ghost Inspector – Automated Testing
• BackstopJS – (GitHub) Automated Testing
• Selenium – Browser Automation
• CasperJS – Browser Automation
• PhantomJS – Headless Browser Testing
• Wraith – Screenshot Comparison
• SiteSpeed.IO – Website Performance
• Stream – WordPress Admin Logging Plugin
• SpeedCurve – Continuous Speed Testing
• Pantheon – High Performance, Developer Friendly Hosting
• New Relic – Site Performance and Monitoring
• CircleCI – Continuous Integration Tools
• Kalabox – Local WordPress Development

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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

John Hughes – My Journey as a WordPress Newbie – From Zero to Ready to Outsource in 2 Years

What began 2+ years ago as an immediate need to build a website, with zero capital, due to a loss of employment, John embarked on what became a meteoric journey to build his initial website as well as a supporting cast of landing page sites, using WordPress and its various resources. John credits WordPress and the WordPress community in building his successful golf coaching practice in Central Florida, that routinely brings clientele from around the globe.

Using the various tools and resources available through the WordPress Community, John will tell his personal story of using WordPress to go from building one basic site to now building and maintaining multiple WordPress sites, while operating a successful golf coaching practice. John will detail his failures and triumphs, as well as the items he believes are critical to his current success as he quickly educated himself in the use of themes, plugins, servers, security, SEO, using service providers, and other topics all newbie end users of WordPress experience.

John will also provide information and lessons he has learned as a WordPress user to the developers and agencies who use WordPress, specifically about how to find, service, and keep great clients. Through the best practices of his business, as well as those within the WordPress Community, there are common threads and a few overlooked details we all face as we continue on our journeys to build our businesses.

John Hughes is a PGA Master Professional, Vice President of the North Florida PGA Section, PGA National Award Winner, and avid WordPress user.

Sandy Edwards – Kids and Code: The Facts and The Future

Getting your kids involved in the WordPress world is an important step to their future. Kids are bombarded from every angle with media and created content. They should also be able to dive into the content creation world themselves.

I will be talking about why childhood content creators are necessary for our future and one specific event that will allow your child to start creating content safely online. I will also provide online resources for kids who want to dive head first into development as well.

Sandy Edwards has been working in the online marketing space for over 5 years. She started at a niche firm that utilized WordPress to create sites quickly utilizing several options frameworks. Today, she owns CESquared a WordPress focused Agency that engages in SEO, Project Management and Development. She loves to give back by teaching kids about coding, WordPress, and other technical skills. Sandy is very active in the Orlando WordPress community and is excited to see what 2016 will bring to the tech space in Florida!

http://www.meetup.com/WordPress-Orlando/events/233969716/