Let me know what you think of the presentation and if there’s any specific areas you feel I should fill in on the presentation site.

Also read my brief Interview with Lightspeed on the topic of WordPress training.

I will be conducting various WordPress training courses covering the very basics of WordPress Content & Site Management, Basic WordPress Theme Development and Intermediate Theme Development. For more info on this visit www.wpbedouine.com

The Event will take place at the Bandwidth Barn in Buitengracht street in Cape Town’s CBD.

Date: 28 September 2009

Time: 16:30

Talks: offer to speak

• Talk about the next WordCamp in SA
• The evolution of BuddyPress & Child Themes – Ashley Shaw
• WordPress & SEO – Rafiq Phillips
• Intro to WordPress Coding – Nur (depends on interest)

Still Need:

• Projector
• More speakers
• Any sponsors (snacks etc)
• Ideas for talks & activities
• Help spreading the word

We know there’s very little time left so we’re hoping you’ll all pitch in with the promotion over the next few days and also attend yourselves. Loads ave been happening in the WordPress world over the last year and there’s tons to talk about so it looks like it’s gonna be a real fin event once again.

Add your name to the wiki – http://wiki.geekdinner.org.za/wiki/WordPress.org.za_Meetup_4

Come join the fun and meet the community, have your say and maybe learn a thing or 2.

A free customizable website just a few clicks away

Don’t fret, there are many ways you can get your hands on a free website which you can customize to suite your needs. WordPress.com is one of the easiest ways, in my experience, and provides you with a platform from where you can eventually launch your own, fully customized website on your own domain, when you are ready to do so.

All you need to do is go to wordpress.com, sign up for a free wordpress.com account and follow the quick, step by step process. In a matter of seconds you can be online for free and speaking to an international audience. Your new web address will however have wordpress.com attached to it at the end. Once you have some cash in your pocket, registering your own domain(web address) and installing WordPress is not too much of a mission. You can then export all the content from your freely hosted website and upload it to you new site very easily. Not many other solutions provide this feature.

VeloCITI Cape Town startups using WordPress

On the VeloCITI business development program I have introduced a few of my collegues starting their businesses to WordPress. They’re now online and communicating with their markets quicker than they thought they would. Visit them online:

http://rainbowitgen.wordpress.com

http://digitaldocuments.wordpress.com

http://bluerayoutdoor.wordpress.com

Sometimes it’s just a matter of working with what is available as many companies unnecessarily hold themselves back due to lack of budget.

I personally started out blogging in the same way and eventually migrated to my own domain using a freely available theme. I then started modifying the theme to suite my needs and eventually ended up where I am now a few months down the line with some regular daily traffic and over 100 posts to date.

The other nice thing about WordPress is it’s constantly being improved and upgrading is quite easy. Changing your theme is even easier and adding functionality through freely available plugins makes it a user friendly yet powerful option for many companies big and small.

A few simple benefits of using wordpress:

• WordPress sites are known to rank high on google searches
• RSS feeds come built in
• Tons of freely available themes with which to change your site’s look & feel
• Free functional widgets available to plugin to your site
• Site contents can be exported and imported easily
• Adding and changing content is just about as simple as writing a word document and saving
• WordPress sites are more sociable and helps develop important conversations with you target audience
• WordPress is constantly being updated and upgrades are published for free
• There is a huge community which publishes tutorials, tips, tools and advice and can provide free support on just about any issue related to your WordPress site
• WordPress is one of the most user friendly web publishing platforms available today.

So what’s holding you back, if you’re ready to get online quickly and start publishing or promoting yourself, your ideas, your business or your organisation check out wordpress.com right now.

If you have any questions I’ll be happy to answer them or point you in the right direction. If you’re excited about what wordpress has to offer we’re having a wordpress meetup on 28 May 2008 at the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town which you are welcome to attend. We’ll even help you set up a quick & easy free site if you want to test it out. Visit www.wordpress.org.za for more details on the meetup.

Have a look at a recent client project I just completed where I helped my Praxia Technologies design a self manageable wordpress website. View it at www.praxia.co.za.

I offer wordpress customization, as well as custom wordpress design and development and am a wordpress enthusiast. For more information or a quote contact me on nur@nomad-one.com.

We got some ideas to start you off, first off we’d like some feedback if you were at the last one and please send your photos to post on the site as well.

Head on over to http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com/ and get involved.

For starters the turnout and involvement was much better than meetup#1, though there are a few critical aspects of the meetup we now need to discuss going forward to make it something of real substance. Anyone interested in the attending the next one give me a shout. We’ll be putting together a planning team soon.

Those who made it this time around were in no order of priority: ChrisM, Callum Macdonald, Henk Kleynhans, Adii, Foxini, Sarah, Selim Kagee, Nadah, Jamaal, Francois Raubenheimer, rafiq, Foxinni, Stelio, Johann Botha, Kilian Hagemann, Miguel, Frans Kuipers, Joe(amobia),

At the meet Callum did a sterling job of drumming up excitement and getting people interacting. Well, errr, he tried his best and though there was a slow start we got a few sessions onto the white board for people to vote on. People were interested in chatting about WordPress MU, Using wordpress for social networks, Drupal comparison, Why wordpress, WordPress security, Plugins, WordPress 2.5

There was a range of people at different levels of wordpress knowledge and experience so it was a bit tricky, I’d pitch myself in the middle somewhere between the complete newbies and the ultra wordpress geeks like Callum.

I was particularly impressed by the way Nadah of work online, a complete wordpress newbie and sceptic from the first meetup, has quickly become a total enthusiast. She admits becoming somewhat of a blog junkie of late.

Comparing Blogger, Moveable Type & WordPress, by Henk

Henk hit us with an awesome session taking a critical look at 3 different blogging platforms and questioning the pros and cons of each. From where I’m standing wordpress comes out tops, though the others may have a point or 2 over wordpress on different levels. Henk currently runs at least 1 blog on wordpress, blogger and moveable type.

I personally get a yucky feeling whenever I am faced with a blogger based blog and tend to stay away from them as much as possible. It has to have something to do with the fact that I’m a designer and a sucker for pretty looking things which blogger does not facilittate very well.

I’m hoping we can get the PPT Henk put together to show you all, will have to ask him nicely.

What’s your fav plugin

The session broke out into a plugin show & tell with a few of us sharing plugin ideas and asking about plugins we’ve been wanting to get out hands on. I was off on a tangent about a plugin which allows you to manage sidebar content out of a specific post category or page though I don’t think I got my point across very well. We discussed some issues surrounding cache plugins including my recent disaster with WP Super cache and hope to get a recommended plugins list going. Chris recommended php speedy to help imrpove performance for high traffic sites.

WordPress Security Issues

One of the more technically focussed topics which were discussed was security. The concerns were voiced by those who are managing and hosting multiple installations of wordpress for clients or organisations. WordPress is known to be exploitable and there have been cases wherewell known sites have been hacked into and even hijacked completely. The discussion centred around updatability of multiple installs as well and the guys through a few suggestions around including working off the SVN codebase.

The guys lost a few of of us along the way when they veered into ultra-geek mode.

So what is really different about WordPress 2.5

Admin Interface Re-design

The admin area of wordpress has seen a significant overhaul, not so much in functionality as far as I can tell, but in terms of the user-interface and design with a few added extras. Here’s hoping it works faster than the existing one as I find one of the issues is the loading time with my limited bandwidth. I logged into the 2.5 demo site and poked around a little taking a few pics.

Here’s a few screens of the admin interface

The dashboard is not customizable/widget based which means you can very much personalised your admin area ased on your own preferred usage. WordPress has been working with Happy Cog to give wordpress a re-design which will hopefully very much improve its usability. Any usability changes improvements to wordpress will take it from good to Great I think. Also with the involvement of Jeffrey Zeldman I feel alot more confident the new solution will solve many problems. I agree fully with their reasoning behind the dashboard redesign:

The Dashboard’s most important role is to inform quickly and get you to where you’re headed in the admin. In interviewing users, we found that most of you ignore the Dashboard entirely — its useful information being mostly hidden in an overly complex design.

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/25-sneak-peek/

The Admin Navigation menu

Very much more simplified which will hopefully reduce the confusion first timers experience and should make homing in on specific tasks a little more straightforward. I Particularly appreciate the little touches of detail which gives you an idea of activity at a glance like the comments bubble in the screenshot below.

Posting Interface upgraded

Because of the clunkiness of the wordpress post writing interface I’ve moved over to posting through Windows Live Writer, though I have found the code it generates to be a little messy. I still like it for the speed at which I can get a post together along with images and formatting. I hope with the new wysiwig editor interface things will happen alot faster for those of us accessing the web on South African speeds.

Moving in the direction of a full CMS

Something else which has become more important for wordpress is being able to order the display of your content in ways which suites you. 2 new tags is_front_page() & the core feature which allows you to randomly order posts allows for more flexibility in determining what shows up where.

There’s also a new media library which will among other things give you the ability to upload more than 1 file at the same time, something I know I’m definitely going to be much happier with.

The get_avatar() tag, which is something I think will play a greater role on blogs and other social networking sites as people increasingly connect randomly via the sites they visit. I’m definitely looking forward to integrating avatars into my site soon as this was part of my initial plan but the time needed to integrate them into the code meant I ditched it while I was re-developing. I love to know who’s visiting, who’s commenting and generally who’s out there.

The addition of buddypress into the wordpress family is another promising development and one I can’t wait to hti the ground with. As we know a website is nto just a website anymroe but a platform for conversation & community and even blogging as we know it is set to evolve further along those lines.

I cannot wait for the new Buddy Press plugins are released. This new feature supports the concept of multiple niche social networks across the web. While sites like Ning attempt to cater to this, the reality is that websites will continue to exist as standalone entities. As such, the new Buddy Press plugins will enable users to communicate within any blog that they find interesting.

http://www.socialtimes.com/2007/11/buddy-press-turns-wordpress-into-social-network/

All in all I just can’t wait for a stable version of wordpress 2.5 to hatch from the incubator now. C’mon guys, let us know what’s happening.

What do the rest of you think of the logo?

Grab the badge below or paste the code into your sidebar to let others know you’ll be there and to encourage more to join us!

<a href=”http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com” title=”Wordpress Cape Town Meetup March 26 2008″><img src=”http://www.nomad-one.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/wpmeetup-button.gif” alt=”Wordpress Meetup Cape Town March 26 2008″ border=”0″ /></a>

No payments necessary this time as the venue is being Sponsored by Jayz.co.za. So you’re interested in wordpress, you want to learn something or have some crazy wordpress skills and experience to share with others,head on over to the second WordPress Meetup in Cape Town on 26th March 2008.

The Details

Date: Wednesday 26 March 2008

Time: 4pm – 7pm

Location: Bandwidth Barn, 125 Buitengracht Street, Cape Town (map)

What’s The meetup all about?

Basically it takes on the style of an (un)conference and is very informal. We get together, bring some ideas,questions, problems, cool wordpressy stuff and share, present, ask and generally try to progress in our understandings of the platform.

Branding the Meetup

I’ve been working on giving the meetup a bit of a face and was wondering what you think of it. We’re hoping to turn this event in something of a feature and one which will build in momentum. I’m also looking to form a proper network of WordPress enthusiasts. The designs below are inspired by some designs developed for a previous wordpress based project.

So let me know what you guys think of the logos and hopefully see those of you who can make it there. Please register by posting a comment on this post.

After struggling to prevent a few business people from hijacking the session with their own off topic focus, not mentioning any names, we managed to get stuck in talking about a few pertinent issues.

Those who attended were:

• Organiser, Callum Macdonald – Nomadic entrepreneur & web developer/blog master from Scotland
• Marc Pelteret – Business Science / Computer Science Graduate with an interest in open source development
• Christina de Silva, Online marketing strategist and wordpress enthusiast – AlterSage.com
• Nada Jones, sales & biz development executive – Work Online Interactive
• Chris – iMod
• Rob Wilkonson – Butlers Pizza (Energy Crisis Maniac)
• Will – 2oceansvibe.com
• Grant – mobi me
• Jamaal – Web Strategist at Jayz

What was spoken about?

After wrestling the party crashers out into their own business session outside we discussed migrating 2oceansvibe.com onto the wordpress platform.

We started discussing data migration and mobile publishing as a few of the challenges faced by migrating a static html site with huge amounts of existing content onto the wordpress platform and keeping it maintained on the fly.

Developing a Theme Framework

I shared the basics of my WordPress Theme Framework idea with the guys and we discussed the merits of using themes like K2 and sandbox as a platform for developing wordpress themes. These themes are well known for their solid html structure and their dynamically generated classes. One of the key issues I highlighted facing non design or tech savvy wordpress users is customisation of the look & layout. As a result way too many blogs out there are looking exactly the same which robs.

Content Syndication

Chris from iMod shared a few ideas about content syndication and we discussed the merits of using plugins like “feed wordpress“, to find and post content of interest automatically. The idea is that plugins of this nature read your RSS feeds and can be set to automatically post content from selected sources at chosen intervals with a few other settings.

Why we blog

We also debated the topic of the monetisation of blogging and the reasons many decide to go into blogging from building a personal profile, racking up subscribers, becoming an authority to purely blogging for the sake money.

We also discussed content writing and planning in advance for the month by posting before hand and setting posts to display at different point in the month. This is something I still need to get the hang of but I can see the value of it in keeping a consistent flow of posts going.

SEO

Christine then gave us the lowdown on why wordpress is the platform of choice when it comes to having an SEO friendly website, one of the reasons many web publishers and companies are now either switching to wordpress or adding blogs to their main websites.

Crazy Ideas

I threw in a theoretical data modelling idea which would use WordPress as the basis and a combination of data modelling techniques to display content in a more abstract manner similar to the way tag clouds are used. This idea stems from my thought universe idea which is the creation of a space where thoughts, media and content can be browsed in an abstract 3D space to allow for a more lateral flow of ideas. I hope to get a model going in the future to showcase this idea but would need to find the right development partner to get something workable going.

Dinner

The dinner afterwards was very interesting to say the least where discussions ranged from economics to the current SA Crisis (energy, political, racial etc). We spoke about what can be done to improve things in our troubled country and whether it’s possible at all. As an outsider Callum posed a few challenging questions concerning racial issues. I appreciated the fact that everyone kept an alcohol free day and dinner and all in all it was an inspiring day.

Future Meetups and the challenges going forward

One of the greatest challenges for our gather was the planning, and unlike other (un)conference events recently held in Cape Town this one was on a little short notice. The turnout was not great and I was disappointed not to see the likes of Adii and Rafiq and a few other names who might have added some further value to the conversation.

Jamaal has offered to sponsor the next meetup which we hope to get going soon at the bandwidth barn. Ideas on the agenda is the setting up of a more formal wordpress group to run with future events and also a possible wordpress online community site where we could discuss these the topics from our meeting further and in more detail as well as a space to share resources.

I know Adii has had something like this on the cards for a while and hope his wordpress magazine will fill this gap but we might need to get something going sooner rather than later so anyone interested in being a part of an online focus group, whether blog or wiki style should sign up on the blog or the google group.

We need to think about how we’re going to promote the next event and I hope to be chatting with Jamaal and the guys from AlterSage a little further about doing a more vigorous marketing effort for session 2.

Callum Macdonald, nomadic web worker and travelling entrepreneur hailing from Scotland was responsible for setting the ball in motion after the recent Open Coffee which was recently held in Cape Town.

Visit the wordpress meetup google group or the blog to catch up with developments. Tomorrow is the first meetup and you’re required to register just so we can get an idea of the numbers for catering and logistical purposes.

The River Club[1] can provide us with a venue for R175 per person. That includes tea and coffees on arrival, a light dinner in the restaurant, and reasonable use of the internet (web only, no heavy downloading). So I’ve confirmed that booking for Monday 18th.

Leave a comment on this post to confirm attendance.