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

Congrats to Ashley Shaw and the team at light speed for pulling off a spectacular event. Many of the top designers & developers were there including some people I’ve only interacted with via the interwebs. I finally got to put a face to quite a few names and got to meet a few guys I’ve personally worked with on projects but never met in person. I was absolutely stunned at the amount of sponsors who came to the party.

If you wanted to overdose on WordPress enthusiasm WordCamp would have been your ideal opportunity.

The speaker schedule was quite varied with both a publisher(non dev) track & a dev track for the hardcore guys. I was slotted in on the last minute to stand in for a cancellation. That was 2 days before the event, so the run up to WordCamp for me had a couple of sleep deprived days on coffee overdose which left me in a semi twilight zone type state on the morning of the event.

I arrive around 7am, still not 100% done with my presentation and only second to one of light speed’s interns from the Netherlands, a newbie to WordPress, but like with many others grabbing onto it quickly.

The Lineup for the Day.

The WordCamp website was a really excellent piece of communication and I think the most outstanding part of it was the schedule, designed to put the spotlight on the main attraction, The Talks.

WordCamp Presentations I Attended

Jason Bagley - Responsive Web Design

First up on the developer track was Jason Bagley of whitespace focusing on the ever popular topic of responsive web design. His slick slides are viewable on slideshare and he’s also put together a cool list of resources at http://responsive.jasonbagley.com

I watched jason’s presentation while finish off mine.

Byron Rode - Improving Ease of Use with the WordPress Admin Dashboard

Next up was Byron Rode, a developer I’ve hired for some tricky customizations in the past and someone who openly speaks out against the overuse of plugins and unnecessary features. His Presentation was about only giving your clients what they need in their dashboard and ruthlessly stripping out everything else.

Byrone mentioned a plugin at his talk which helped with some admin customizations and has shared it here.

Dan Milward - WP-eCommerce

Dan’s présentation focused mainly on the growth of Instinct’s wp-ecommerce plugin, it’s growth from the very early days of being the first WordPress commerce plugin, of hacking the core to make it work, on the process of finally going GPL and the attention that brought to the project. I’ve used wp-ecommerce some time back to develop a software product site which earned my client 1 million Rand in it’s first 6 months in new product sales. Back then setting up a site using wp-ecommerce was a slight challenge, but the project has come a long way and with WordPress’ new custom post types Dan & his team have completely repurposed the plugin and made a really powerful yet easy to use and mostly Free product.

Dan also discuss some of their other projects form an Arcade style game builder running on WordPress to the drag & drop WordPress theme builder they’ve been delving into pushing WordPress to it’s limits to produce some really amazing solutions. Another proof for me that WordPress is truly a CMS, and in many cases it could even be used as a base Application Framework.

After Dan’s presentation I had to take a little break and escaped the presentation rooms until the lunch break, took a breather, did my mid day prayers and prepped myself for my own presentation. I had only just finished adding some bits and pieces to mine the morning of the event.

My Presentation – WordPress IS a CMS

There’s been a debate on the go for as long as I’ve been using WordPress about whether it’s a true Content Management System(CMS) or not. In fact at the last WordCamp in Cape Town which I believe was held 3 years ago the same issue was discussed.

Generally those who use WordPress have been satisfied that it is a true and in many cases superior CMS for the majority of today’s web needs, though some development die hards and other old-school non WordPress users still argue the point.

There’s also been a ton of articles, presentations & talks been given around the world on using WordPress “as” a CMS. I wanted to make a case for putting the final nail in the coffi.

Jeff Pearce – Using WordPress as a development framework

@jeffikus gave a very exciting, though somewhat technical presentation on the merits of using WordPress as an application development framework with an example of a Task Management App which completely bypasses the regular WordPress admin. We’ve seen the rise of quite a few application style implementations of WordPress and I believe this is only the beginning.

Most Memorable Presentation

Adii Pienaaar – The Business of WordPress: Making Money in more ways than one

The presentation which stood out the most for me was Adii’s WordPress Ecosystem. Not that Adii’s in need of any more ego boosting if you know what I mean, but really we have to give credit where it’s due.

Adii is a really interesting character, someone who can only be admired for what he has achieved in the last few years. It’s clear when you listen to him speak he’s got a business brain. I’ve seen Adii rise up through the WordPress ranks from the time he was selling his first theme and have to admit I sometimes feel really lousy about myself for not taking the same kind of chances and putting in place the same kind of strategies to achieve something more significant.

His dissection of the WordPress Ecosystem was such an apt metaphor for the way the WordPess community operates, which reminds me of a similar talk given at Heavy Chef on the New Media Eco-system. Same concept on a much wider scale.

Adii unpacked the various spheres where people are forging niches and tapping into the economy of WordPress, making a living or a killing in some cases.

Some of the Interesting People I chatted with at WordCamp

• Dan Milward – WP Ecommerce/Get Shopped
• Byron Rode – Tangram
• Matt Geri – wpgeeks.com
• Fred Roed – WorldWide Creative
• Justin Slack – @urbanrenewal
• Zaheed & Zugdi – Zedduo
• Angelique & Jamie (WordPress students of Mine from Last year)
• Handre (a WordPress student of mine from many years ago)

Sorry if I left anyone out. I know I did, not intentionally, there were just so many cool conversations.

Everyone seemed to be really inspired, not only by the technical workings on our favorite web publishing platform, but by the sense of community which resulted in such an exciting event. Others were just there to show their absolute obsession with their favorite publishing platform.

Experiences

For me the presentations were secondary to the networking & connections. No doubt what was presented was inspiring and created lots of energy and ideas in many directions, but those connections made, putting faces to names, establishing potential partnerships was the most beneficial part of the whole thing.

A few moments stood out for me. I managed to catch up with some people I’d never met in person but have had some meaningful interactions with via the web.

1. I had a really good conversation with Fred Roed, someone who I’ve interacted with only via the web and twitter. We discussed our own challenges going forward in our businesses and social contributions towards improving society.

2. I finally got a chance to meet Dan Milward who I’ve known online for a few years and we had a coffee just after the event with some really good conversation both on issues of WordPress and community and outside of that. Justin Slack joined us for a bit. What was so interesting for me was, I was leaving to escape the after party as a non-drinker, when Dan caught me and asked me where I was going, suggesting we have a quite coffee. I really appreciated that gesture. We spoke about some potential working together on one of his projects. Dan is a really nice guy and very forward thinking.

3. Last but not least, Matt Geri(wpgeeks.com), who I’ve been working with online for a while now and who I’ve only ever spoken to via Skype was there and we got to speak in person and get to know each other a bit better. Matt’s gt some really great WordPress dev skills and

What I took out of it

We’ve come a long way. I went on a bit of a nostalgic hunt for some info on some of the very first WordPress meetups we had in Cape Town even before WordCamps hit our shores and found the following article I wrote on the success of the 3rd WordPress Meeting in Cape Town which I hosted back then.

http://www.techleader.co.za/nurahmadfurlong/2008/05/29/wordpress-meet-3-was-huge/

You’ll see some of the same faces were attending back then, including Host of this WordCamp, Ashley Shaw who spoke about BuddyPress back then. We have to go back to the source and thank Callum Macdonald who came to Cape Town on his still continuous World tour with a bag full of WordPress and the clothes on his back quite a few years ago and instigated the very first WordPress Meetup.

A bit about that meet up here - http://www.nomad-one.com/2008/02/18/first-wordpress-meetup-post-mortem/

It just shows, with enough positive energy and enthusiasm and a community spirit, we can take things a lot further, and with people committed to making things happen, it benefits everyone around them. We’ve come a long way in Cape Town, and this year’s WordCamp is something we can all be proud of.

Once again thanks go out to Ashley & The team at Lightspeed.

So 15 September at the Atlantic Imbizo V & A Waterfront is the day.

As far as I can tell from the event site it’s a sell out with no more spaces for speakers or attendees. There’s going to be some really interesting presentations covering a raneg of topics in 2 Tracks for users and for developers which should be interesting.

I’ve scored a ticket for FREE by being the first person to signup for the event via Facebook, it pays to be a geek sometimes yes.

I hope to see you there as well, the facebook page has 116 likes and I believe way more are attending so it sounds like it’s set to be a winner. Check out all the details at http://2011.capetown.wordcamp.org

Creative Cape Town communicates, supports and facilitates the development of the creative and knowledge economy in the Central City of Cape Town.

The WDC2014 Initiative is aimed at getting Cape Town voted as the “World Design Capital 2014″ as a recognition of the advances in use of design to enhance society. Seoul was voted the 2010 World Design Capital and Helsinki for 2012.

Also View some of the Case Studies posted on the official website to see how the vision outlined above is coming to life

• WDC2014 Case Studies

Visit the Following 2 Websites which are currently spear heading the initiative to find out more about the why and how of the project.

• www.creativecapetown.net
• www.capetown2014.co.za

Cape Town’s World Design Capital 2014 bid concept, “Live Design, Transform Life”, focuses strongly on socially responsive design. – www.capetown2014.co.za

Join the Facebook Page and become part of the effort to get Cape Town recognized on the World Design Stage

• www.facebook.com/pages/Cape-Town-for-World-design-Capital/348553012789

Grab your supporter’s badge and be part of the team

• Get the Badge

Now go out there and slap some design on The Mother City! And don’t forget to share!

Take a quick look Design and I’ll explain a bit about what’s under the hood of this one.

Homepage of the fani.am fan accommodation site

I really enjoyed designing this one and also trying out a few CSS3 features like rounded corners & Text Shadows. IE6 users, there’s a special treat for you as well.

Custom Fields

The most hectic part of this site by far was the wordpress wrangling which takes place in the background. Using loads of WordPress custom fields, some for data and some for associating certain post types like matches, with accommodations and with the teams playing the matches, we were able to weave separate categories of posts into an intuitive mixture of information. Custom field have been managed entirely by the flutter plugin’s write panels, which helped make this site extremely easy for novice user to populate with content.

Fan i am Team Facts sidebar widget

Conditional Statements

Using WordPress conditional statements, as well as some conditional Custom field statements we were able to easily pull the correct set of posts for each team, venue or accommodation. The sidebar also gets populated with related widgets displaying content for each type of page you arrive on.

Associated Matches, accommodations & attractions

Dealing with images

I was a little disappointed about the current state of the built-in WordPress gallery system. You’re still not able to easily pull individual images based on their order in the gallery and can only really pull an entire gallery. The attached image plugin helped pull the first gallery image which was great. Flutter’s image management and upload functionality was ok but could do with the auto generation of thumbs & other sizes which the built in WordPress image uploading performs. Flutter’s image crop & resize functionality just doesn’t work at the moment, though the rest of it’s functionality, mainly write panels played a hige role in this website’s configuration.

This site relies heavily on plugins for various features, which is one of the great things about WordPress. I know some geeky developers who swear they never use plugins, and that’s fine with me, though I or one love the fact that so much freely available functionality is just lying around ready to take advantage of.

Plugins I’ve used & abused Include:

• Flutter – custom write panels
• Live Coundown Timer – counting down time to the Kickoff
• My Favourite Posts – allows user to add their favourite accommodations to a sidebar bucket
• Send to a Friend
• Tweet News – Footer feed of tweets about FIFA
• Google News – feed of news about the world cup from google
• Twitter Widget Pro – Worked better than Twitter Tools
• IE PNG fix – no need to fiddle with code
• Sidebar Login – check the login panel top right
• Cforms II – contact & booking forms
• DISQUS – Advanced commenting system
• WP Table Reloaded – Check the Match Schedule (quick & easy manageable tables)

So far it’s been a really great project and Phase 2 promises to include some even more exciting social media additions. What do you think of this one?

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.

2,848 cities, towns and municipalities in 84 countries have already committed to VOTE EARTH for Earth Hour 2009, as part of the worlds first global election between Earth and global warming. – www.earthhour.org

The concept is simple, at 08:30pm on Saturday 28 March, if you’d like to cast your vote for the planet, switch off all your lights and go without electricity for an hour to do your little part for the environment.

Global issues like poverty are extremely complex. There is no simple,
clear answer. By asking thousands of different people to give their
viewpoints and opinions, Blog Action Day creates an extraordinary lens
through which to view these issues. Each blogger brings their own
perspective and ideas. Each blogger posts relating to their own blog
topic. And each blogger engages their audience differently.

Blog Action Day 08 aims to focus the lens on the issue of poverty and change the conversation on the web on one specific day. The idea is to stimulate discussion, debate and hopefully come out with some solutions to tackling Poverty woldwide.

Bloggers are playing an increasingly important role in tackling social issues through awareness campaigns and by influencing activism. This year’s blog action day has taken the effort a step up by providing resources for bloggers to understand the issues which contribute to poverty.

If you’re interested in participating in this event you can register your blog to notify the site that you will be participating. The next step would be to work on your personal part of blog action day by writing a post/s, creating a podcast or video cast, and then posting these on 15 October 2008.

Some Big web 2.0 names ave gotten behind the event this year including Tech Crunch & Read Write Web so make sure you join the effort to tackle Global Poverty blogger style.

At the same time, in your local setting don’t forget to make the life of a poor person easier in whatever way you can by feeding, clothing or facilitating ife for them in some way.

This month’s Heavy Chef session will see Rob Stokes, author of the e-marketing textbook and founder & CEO of Quirk e-marketing, giving an introduction to e-marketing.

Heavy Chef sessions are run by the guys at World Wide Creative on a monthly basis. They’ve been hosting top events for the last 1.5 years. I missed the last one which focused on e-commerce but definitely don’t want to miss this one.

Here are the details:

Aug 31 (Cape Town), 5.30pm – 7.30pm:introduction to eMarketing

Speaker: Rob Stokes, CEO of Quirk eMarketing

Want to attend? Email Rowan to enquire about booking your seat.

Seeya’ll there!

I’ve become so bogged down with client work lately that doing this little T-shirt Design for the upcoming WordPress meetup was a nice little break from the norm.

I’d like to know what you guys think of the design. Those attending will be receiving a free T compliments of the Sponsors (FormFunction, Radiiate & World Wide Creative), thanks to our generous sponsors. We’ve catered for 30 people attending.

To register for the WordPress Cape Town Meetup which will be happening on 28th May, 4 – 7pm at the Bandwidth Barn, click here and add a comment saying you’ll be there.

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.

The 2008 South African blogs awards ceremony will be hosted on Wednesday 2nd April 2008 at Cape town.

Time: 6:30 for 7pm
Dress: Smart casual
Address: UCT Tennis club
Programme: Formal awards between 7 – 9pm

RSVP: If you’re planning to attend, please head on over to the SA Blog Awards Wiki and put your name on the list. Also, please indicate whether or not you drink alcohol or not and if you’re a vegetarian.

I’ve got a new haircut for the event, meaning, all my hair is gone, but I’m not much of a smart casual dresser so will have to go the extra mile to fit into the smart category, I’m usually extra casual as far as I can help it.

Hope to see some of the more established bloggers in the community there, I’m not expecting to feature really though as I’m a bit of a newbie but it’s great to have received nominations and votes. Competing with Adii is a bit of a bummer in most cases, he’s got an army behind him and has been at this for way longer adding much more value than I do. I reckon he might take the category I’ve been nominated for, (ie – Best Blog about Design) though both of our blogs are not really exclusively about design.

To those who are attending, I’m looking forward to chatting to each and every one of you so don’t be shy, I’ll try not to be, come over and say hi if you see a bald headed guy with a beard strolling around looking a little lost, that will probably be me .

See you all there.