Join the fun, use #WCSTL and tag us @wordcampstl on both Twitter and Instagram
Loading new posts.
Category Archives: General News
Venue maps
All About the AMA – Ask Me Anything Session
At the end of the day, we thought that it might be handy to have an Open Hall or Ask Me Anything session at the last session of WordCamp St. Louis. While we will have the Happiness bar, and we certainly encourage networking, we know sometimes people don’t know what to ask.
Instead of having panel sessions, we decided to invite our speakers to to floor, so you can ask them any question. This will maximize the feedback and you can get different points from different speakers, or be able to get some of those questions answered, that have been brewing in your mind throughout the day.
There are a couple ways to submit a question for the AMA:
- Ask at the session. We’ll have a few microphones going around so you can ask.
- Ask on Twitter. Make sure you use the hashtag #wcstl
- Use the contact form below:
FORM IS CLOSED.
What is the Happiness Bar?
Nearly every WordCamp has a Happiness Bar. No, it’s not about getting refreshments, and definitely has gotten plenty of jokes about that. It’s about getting answers to your WordPress questions. WordCamp St. Louis will once again, have the Happiness Bar. We love to help, and part of the reason why the WordPress community has grown throughout the years, is because of people helping each other.
The Happiness Bar is free, however, we’ve noticed some things that need to be addressed on what is acceptable and not acceptable for gaining help. Our help, are volunteers, and are professionals in their field, but we certainly don’t want to abuse their time. WordPress Support, in the Support Forums is used as a method to showing or guiding people to their answer, because in the end, you are the one learning to take control of your website, and to fix it. The Happiness Bar is an in-personal version of that.
What the Happiness Bar Is:
- If you’re having a problem understanding a feature for WordPress. (Example: Adding and editing images, or optimizing images, or customizing text in a post or page, or setting permalinks, understanding custom menus or widgets,…)
- Guiding your thought process on how to accomplish a development process. We won’t do it for you, but we will guide you to answers or show you some possible methods to achieve what you may want to do with designing a plugin or theme.
- Plugin or theme suggestions.
- Guide you on how to troubleshoot a problem you’re having for WordPress.
- Guide you to articles or existing information to solve other issues, like SEO or gaining traffic, or social media issues.
- Guide you to existing information if you need to configure a plugin or theme properly.
Over the past few years, we’ve noticed some things happening with the questions being brought in, and this year, we’re addressing it.
(credit is from Chris Koerner – see link to album at bottom of post.)
What the Happiness Bar Isn’t:
- Major SEO advice if you’re having problems getting traffic. A simple comb over of a website won’t solve deep underlying SEO issues. We advise you to seek a SEO professional to look into your issue more deeply.
- Unhack your website. You may want to hire someone if you’ve been hacked. This isn’t a simple process.
- Design your website for you.
- Go into depth about social media marketing. We’ll certainly be happy to send you to some extremely reliable resources so you may learn that.
- Advise you on how to make money blogging. Again, we’ll certainly be happy to send you to some extremely reliable resources so you may learn that.
- Installing SSL for you
- Fixing an underlying host problem (we can certainly send you to the right people to get help for your issue)
- Migrating your website for you, from one web host to another
Some Happiness Bar volunteers may choose to share some of their own knowledge with you, that may be a little bit above and beyond what is normal for support at the Happiness Bar. We have enough people that have experience in design, development, blogging, and more, that can help, so if anyone scheduled to volunteer at the Happiness Bar, doesn’t know the answer, they will help guide you to someone at the event, who may be able to help.
Again, we’re here to help, but we ask that you be respectful of our time, and our volunteers.
(photo credit: from Chris Koerner on Flickr)
WCSTL Speaker Interview: Aaron Graham
Aaron Graham will be speaking on Developing with WordPress Multitenancy. Aaron is from St. Louis, and a Web developer for Washington University.
Here is Aaron’s interview.
NILE FLORES: What was it about WordPress that got you to start using it?
AARON GRAHAM: I had been writing HTML for years and just started to use PHP when I discovered WordPress in 2010, I was excited by being able to be able to build on top of an already great system with a wonderful community surrounding it.
NILE FLORES: What motivates you to give back to WordPress and its community?
AARON GRAHAM: I’ve made so many friends in the WordPress community and have seen the amazing things they do for people that if I can give back one tenth of what they do I’ll consider myself to have left this world a better place than I found it.
NILE FLORES: How many WordCamps have you been to, and what was your best 1 or 2 experiences that you had when attending WordCamp?
AARON GRAHAM: This will be my 8th WordCamp. My favorite WordCamp experience will always be my first, I went to WordCamp Kansas City in 2012 and met a (relatively unknown at the time) developer named Pippin Williamson, I consider myself very lucky to consider him friend and mentor to this day. The second best would be meeting Greg Homyak (aka the host San Diego Beer Talk) at WordCamp San Diego 2016 and getting a personalized tour of some of the best breweries in one of the best beer cities in the world.
NILE FLORES: What is your number 1 tip for WordPress users?
AARON GRAHAM: Don’t be afraid to ask questions, I have yet to meet an unfriendly person in the WordPress community.
NILE FLORES: What is your favorite feature in WordPress?
AARON GRAHAM: The Filters and Actions system is one of the handiest things, I get really frustrated when I’m trying to build something with another system or framework that doesn’t have as many places to hook into the core code. (Bonus: The fact that WordPress is open source and if you’re patient enough you can walk through the code and figure out where/when/why just about anything happens in the system).
NILE FLORES: What are your 3 most favorite WordPress plugins?
AARON GRAHAM: Easy Digital Downloads – like I said above I consider Pippin a mentor and I love using is plugins (and how-to’s) I also love reading through the code and seeing how he does things.
Advanced Custom Fields – when I discovered this plugin I thought I had just worked myself out of a job, that’s how powerful it is.
Jetpack – I have a love/hate relationship with Jetpack (usually based on which blog post about it I’ve just read) but I like it mainly for its WordPress.com single sign on.
(Bonus: I would have listed the WP REST API but since it’s now part of core I can’t call it a plugin anymore but when it was I had it installed on all of my sites )
NILE FLORES: What is your favorite WordPress theme?
AARON GRAHAM: I’m a big fan of Twenty Seventeen. As a developer I’m a big fan of Automattic’s Underscores, but since it is more of a framework you have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself so I wouldn’t recommend it for most end users.
If you’d like to meet Aaron, and sit in on his talk, you’ll have to go and buy a ticket to see him on March 18th!
WCSTL Afterparty Announcement
WordCamp’s over, now what do you do? CELEBRATE!! Come to the Regional Arts Commission building (6128 Delmar Blvd.) for an evening with your fellow attendees.
The afterparty will start at 6p.m. and go until 9p.m. There will be opportunities to chat with fellow attendees, snacks, drinks, and more!
Bring Your Brews!
We’ll have soda, water, and beer, but if you are a brewer and want to share, feel free to bring some along!
WordCamp St. Louis Tentative Schedule and Talk Descriptions are Up!
Yep! You heard it! We’ve put up a tentative schedule HERE so you can click on the talks and learn about each of our sessions. We are also going to have a “AMA”, or “Ask Me Anything” session where everyone can ask all of our speakers any WordPress, blogging, social media, design, development, or business question.
We wanted to make sure, that by the end of the day, if you had questions, we can try to answer those. It’s really important to all the organizers here at WordCamp St. Louis, that you go home feeling like some of your issues have been answered, so aside from the AMA, we will have the Happiness Bar again.
If you didn’t know what the Happiness Bar was, well, it’s an area set aside, just so you can have one-on-one time with a volunteer expert who may be able to guide you in the direction you need, whether troubleshooting a problem you’ve been having with your site, advice, or whatever it may be.
Please make sure to take a look at our schedule, and if it’s of interest to you, buy a ticket today! Tickets are only $20 for the ENTIRE conference!
WordCamp St. Louis Diversity Statement
Platitudes are cheap. We’ve all heard conferences and communities say they’re committed to “diversity” and “tolerance” without ever getting specific, so here’s our stance on it:
We welcome you.
We welcome people of any gender identity or expression, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, neurotype, religion, elder status, family structure, culture, subculture, political opinion, identity, and self-identification. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work.
We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and functions.php overloaders. (We welcome WordPress beginners who aren’t sure what any of those terms refer to.) We welcome you no matter if you’ve used WordPress since it was called b2/cafelog or if you just heard about it yesterday.
We welcome you. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, leather, piercings, a pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something we can only dream of. You may carry a guitar or knitting needles or a sketchbook. Conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist — we believe it’s possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to come together and learn from each other. We believe in the broad spectrum of individual and collective experience and in the inherent dignity of all people. We believe that amazing things come when people from different worlds and world-views approach each other to create a conversation.
We get excited about creativity — from pro to amateur, from novels to haiku, from the photographer who’s been doing this for decades to the person who just picked up a sketchbook last week. We protect our creativity and our diversity through our Code of Conduct.
We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. We believe in being inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of anyone who comes to us with good faith and the desire to build a community.
We have enough experience to know that we won’t get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don’t know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we can certainly work to avoid harming anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we’ll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we’ll do our best to make good on our mistakes.
We value empathy more than we value code quality and how well you know WordPress. Not just empathy for the users of the things we make but for everyone who contributes as well. When any of us make a mistake, we are ready and willing to take the responsibility to correct it. If someone is hurt by us, it is always our first response to put ourselves in their shoes.
We recognize that inclusivity is not as simple as words on a page and just the statement that all are welcome. Sometimes we will need to step out of our comfort zones to make everyone feel welcome. We recognize that privilege is real and that the privileged have more bandwidth to be uncomfortable and help make our space more welcoming.
We decided when organizing this WordCamp that we would like it to be a conference that we wanted to attend ourselves. We thought it was important to bring this discussion out into the open. We want more people involved in the community and we don’t want anyone to feel silenced. We are specifically interested in making the lesser heard voices heard.
We welcome diversity because we believe it makes the open source community stronger and more productive. We believe diverse teams make better products. We strive to make everyone feel welcome and know that their contribution is important.
Come WordCamp with us.
(Adapted from the Open Source & Feelings Diversity Statement)
Photo by Chris Koerner – Licensed under Creative Commons
Welcome to WordCamp St. Louis
WordCamp St. Louis is happening March 18th!
We’ll be at Washington University‘s Danforth Campus. We will once again be in the Laboratory Sciences Building on the North Side of campus. To get directions, check out the Location page.
Subscribe using the form in the footer to stay up to date on the most recent news. We’ll keep you posted on all the details over the coming weeks, including speaker submissions, ticket sales and more!