WordCamp Albuquerque was a ton of fun. Thank you to all who participated. Stay tuned for news, presentation info, and other tidbits.
Meet us at 7pm for more WordPress fun!
Join us at the Holiday Inn for the After Party at [MAP] 1501 Sunport Place at 7pm.
First 50 WordCampers in the door get a coupon for a free drink.
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Sponsor’s Message from Rich Cederberg
I’m very proud to be a sponsor of Wordcamp Albuquerque again this year! WordPress has been an indispensable tool for my Albuquerque real estate business, so I’m happy to give back.
I’ve been working with WordPress since 2006, but it really wasn’t until 2009 when the real estate market was incredibly slow that I turned to WP for an easy and inexpensive way to increase my internet presence.
The results were outstanding; I think it’s fair to say the WordPress saved my real estate business!
I’m not a developer or designer, I’m a blogger or content creator, but I’ve learned quite a few things along the way. In fact, recently I converted my old, outdated website from a html site to WordPress while changing the domain too. I did them both without losing position in the SERPS. That was a huge personal accomplishment for me. View my site and my blog.
You see, that’s what I think the best feature of WordPress is, the ability for a business person to have a tool that is super easy to start a simple blog with that also has the potential to grow into a much larger project. With WordPress, the sky is the limit!
I hope to see you at the upcoming WordCamp.
Have a Great Day!
Rich Cederberg | Senior Advisor | Realtor
M1 505.803.5012 | M2 505.750.1846 | Office 505.255.5609
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The Sweet Spot of 3 Bloggers
Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque speaker, Melissa J White
A teacher, a realtor, and a potter. All 3 have blogs; all 3 have goals and values. But each blogger has a different view on why they blog, and how they measure that success.
“Finding Your Sweet Spot: How to Choose the Perfect Blog Subject” will tell the story of each of these beginning bloggers and show how one simple formula helped them to discover their reason for blogging.
Nancy Judd of Recycle Runway was blogging just to support her other social media efforts. Like a lot of us, Nancy was a creative entrepreneur who didn’t really want to blog 2-3 times per week. But one incident changed the tide for her, and made blogging a way to connect to her audience in a deeper, richer format.
Marilyn Foss was looking for a new website to showcase not just one luxury property, but a succession of properties, while building SEO rank on one domain. We created a “pretty-Frankenstein” half-blog, half-website that has her ranking in the #3 spot on the first page of google with only 4 blog posts! I’ll show you how we reached her goal.
A quiet potter who doesn’t measure success by the number of hits to his site, but who is a savvy businessman, and has a gift for storytelling, found the subject of his blog in the meditative, creative life of clay.
Each of these bloggers found their subject by looking at their professional goals, their audience’s needs, and their personal desires—a powerful formula for finding that sweet spot.
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Confused about the Schedule?
Wow, it’s almost here! The WCABQ team spent Thursday evening getting things ready, unpacking swag, tying up loose ends, and generally getting super excited about WordCamp.
There’s been a bit of confusion about where everything is happening since we are using two venues this year.
So, here’s the nutshell:
Friday night we are meeting at the Holiday Inn for the 6:00 pm Hackathon and Meet and Greet Reception.
Saturday we are at SUVA for the sessions. Registration starts at 8:00 am. Sessions go from 9:00 am – 5:00 pm.
After the sessions, we head over to the Holiday Inn Airport Lounge and Sports Bar for the After Party at 7:00pm
Sunday we wrap up the Hackathon and have our WordPress for Kids session at 9:00 am
More info on our schedule page here:
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Gimme Some Swag!
Some pretty awesome swag is rolling into WCABQ Headquarters. We just got a box from Code Poet, one of our fabulous sponsors.
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Hide The Keys To The Castle: Tips and Tricks to Harden and Obfuscate Self-Hosted WordPress Sites
Guest post by WordCamp Speaker Robert DeYoung
WordPress is a high quality, secure content management system and you’re using it for your castle (er uh…website). Good start! You keep it up-to-date with each new release. Even better! You’re using a reliable web host with an up-to-date LAMP bundle (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or equivalent and good maintenance procedures. Smart choice!
But, hackers are always seeking new attack vectors. LAMP and WordPress are not immune. Plugins and custom function code introduce additional opportunities to attack a site. And, no one has the resources to make a site 100% secure.
What’s a person to do? First, don’t get upset or take it personally! Most sites are not a specific target. Hackers scour the Web for vulnerable sites to release their damaging payloads, be it a clandestine site embedded within your site, attempts to retrieve your users’ personal information or other nefarious objectives.
This session will give you some tools to build your castle walls a little higher and thicker and hide those keys well enough to encourage a hacker to look for an easier target. In some cases, you may even be protected if your site has a well-known vulnerability that you haven’t had time to patch with an update.
Building a Better CMS: Making it Beautiful for the People who Maintain the Website
If you develop WordPress as a CMS, it’s important to think about the needs of CMS users: the people who update the website. What’s important to them? What role does the website play in meeting their goals? Which is more important to them: flexibility or efficiency?
The answers to these questions may vary from one client to the next, but in general, a well-designed CMS for a business or professional organization minimizes the need for styling and hand-coding. These are activities that take time and lead to inconsistencies in presentation, neither of which are good for the business/organization or the CMS users. We’ll talk about techniques that limit the need for these time-wasting, design-mucking activities, making website updates as efficient as possible: custom fields, custom post types, and modification of the TinyMCE editor.
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Hooked on Actions
Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque speaker Bryce Corkins
For any WordPress project, it can seem like there are a dozen methods to accomplish almost everything—and there are! Unfortunately, there are a lot of wrong ways to write your code, and only a few right ones. (Or a lot of right ones, depending on who you talk to). In this talk, we’ll be looking specifically at the WordPress Hook, Action, and Filter process: what it is, how it works, and how it can make your life a lot easier.
Hooks are functions provided by WordPress to allow your theme or plugin to “hook into” the rest of WordPress. There are two types of hooks: actions and filters (and they are different). Actions allow you to specify a custom function to be executed at a certain point during WordPress’ execution, or when a specific event occurs. For example, you could execute a function whenever a post is published, whenever a new user registers, after the admin page has finished loading, or at many more points (there are, as of WordPress 3.4, 587 built in actions).
Filters, on the other hand, are used to “filter” text as it’s moved between the user interface and the database. For example, you could change the length of a post excerpt, create a profanity filter, highlight search terms in your search results, and (again) much more.
In this talk, we’ll go over ways in which hooks, actions, and filters can make your life as a developer a lot easier. We’ll go through some common use case scenarios, talk about how to selectively disable parts of plugins and themes without modifying their source code, and how to troubleshoot currently running hooks.
A basic understanding of PHP and WordPress functionality is recommended for this presentation, but all are welcome.
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Using Cloud Applications to Take Your Site From Good To Great
Guest Post by WordCamp Albuquerque Speaker Sean Wells
Patience is a virtue. And, unfortunately it’s a virtue that I wasn’t given. Although I consider myself a technical tinkerer, I’d much rather spend my time on developing the content of my sites than the mechanics. As a result, I have put some time into finding online services (Cloud Applications) that provide me with easy to use, easy to track, easy to understand applications to enhance my sites.
“Cloud Applications” are programs that exist on the web. You do not download them to your computer. This is handy because it means you don’t need to be at your computer to use them. You can have other people login from anywhere and access the files and data, just like WordPress itself. Many of these services are free or cost very little with great discounts for non-profits.
I don’t hate plug-ins and widgets. There are many amazing plug-ins that are free and great. But, in addition to the convenience, I find the outside services sometimes offer additional benefits like:
- advanced features like statistical tracking
- easy-to-use graphical interface (ie, it’s pleasant and intuitive to use it) ideal for clients
- great technical support
- reliability–most of these companies are well-established and will be around in the future
- free or cheap with good discounts for non-profits
- accounts that are isolated from your WordPress site
These benefits can be particularly helpful when I am designing a website for an organization that may have different people needing to gather different information from different areas of the site. I can create unique access to relevant people and give them access and training to only the part they need, without my having to intervene in the future. For instance, by setting up a membership page with a cloud service, the membership specialist can log in anytime and export a complete list of new sign-ups without having to contact me or gather information from a trickle of notifying emails.
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