July WordPress Meetup at AJ’s Cafe

The Wifi connection was a little slow, so I didn’t do live blogging using P2 (as I posted last time).

Thanks for coming to this month’s meetup!
Tim, David, Trevor, Ed, Dave, Brad, Jessie, and Andrew

David took notes and I posted some links on FriendFeed.

Topics we talked about (some overwraps with FriendFeed):

• Do we want to plan a WordCamp here?
  • We need sponsors, speakers, & venue – exploring some possiblities
  • Work with other groups – BarCamp? “Tech weekend”? “Blogger week”?
• It would be nice to have a2geeks.org type of local community for our area.
• Ed mentioned some other groups
• Dave demoed a BuddyPress onStar site that his team has been working on (no link – it will be live next week)
• BuddyPress vs Ning: BuddyPress is much more customizable (especially in blog template) and can be easily learned by devs who use WordPress already
• Andrew’s question: “what’s the best way to attract blog audience?”
  • Start communicating from your side. Comment on other people’s blogs
  • Build good content
  • Integrate other tools – e.g. Twitter, FriendFeed
• Good Twitter plugin?
  • Simple Tweet – posts to Twitter when there is a new post
  • Twitter Feed – posts to WordPress (supports cron, local cache and multiple accounts)
• What do you don’t like about WordPress?
  • Media upload handling (looking forward to 2.9!)
  • WordPress.com = less customizable for js/flash widgets than Blogger
• What do you love about WordPress?
  • very extensible
  • easy and fun to customize
  • nice admin UI

June WordPress Meetup at AJ’s Cafe

Here’s my notes from yesterday’s meetup. Next time, I’ll try using real-time update on P2 theme (probably using this blog).

Roll call:
Naoko, Tim, Shawn, Raphael, David, Trevor, Ed, Matt

We talked about…

• WordPress 2.8. Not everyone has upgraded yet – waiting for 2.8.1?
• Facebook content is kind of “scattered around”. Shawn said he started a WordPress blog wanting to write more.
• Windows Live Writer/Ecto – desktop apps for blogging
• WordPress Stats. WordPress.com has built-in stats, which is also available for WordPress.org [screenshots]
• Tim (@hogpath) said Role Scoper plugin for role management. Looks like a nice alternative to Role Manager. The author lives in Michigan 🙂
• Talked about BuddyPress… You can test it out by signing up on BuddyPress.org or bp-dev.org
• Raphael (@rsmudge) is presenting his project/WordPress plugin “After the Deadline” at the Ann Arbor New Tech June Meetup (today!).
• Some discussion about WordPress.org/MU merge.
• WordCamp San Francisco. Video will be up on wordpress.tv soon, I recommend Tim Ferriss’ presentation if I need to pick one to watch (besides the Keynote “The State of the Word”)
• Matt (@lincolnwebs) talked about setting up 2 sites using 2 DBs and one WordPress install: using conditional statement based on the domain in wp-config.php.
• He is looking into Vanilla forum software for integrating with WordPress.
• Also Matt’s PHP book recommendation: Visual Quickstart Guide (beginners) and Visual QuickPro Guide (intermediate) by Larry Ullman, and an Apress advanced PHP book (not sure which)
• Detroit Area PHP June Meetup is on Saturday, June 27th.
• Ed mentioned JavaScript: The Good Parts book.
• David (@Admore) stareted a FriendFeed Group for the meetup. Ferndale WordPress Group

Thank you all for coming.

Reminder to myself: send a reminder on the night before the meetup!

May WordPress Meetup at AJ’s Cafe

Happy 6th Anniversary to WordPress! Did you know WordPress just turned 6 years old today? (their first version 0.7 was released on May 27, 2003)

We had our third Ferndale WordPress Meetup at AJ’s yesterday.
I decided to start a WordPress blog here for this group to share links and keep track of things we talked about.

• Tim is building a site for his client using a custom theme and plugins like Mass Edit Pages, Contact Form 7, and Faster Image Insert
• Tina is working on a home page design for her church web site. I (Naoko) suggested using something like JQuery Cycle Plugin for slideshow (note: this is not a WordPress plugin!)
• Raphael’s project After the Deadline is now released to the public and available as a WordPress plugin. He also mentioned usability testing site Feedback Army which he had built
• Trevor said he custom-built his server and have it hosted at a hosting company that has a local location. Sounded like an alternative to self-hosting for having your own reasonable and reliable server.
• Joe mentioned a couple of PHP-based community site building tools, Dolphin and Elgg that he had used. Maybe something to compare BuddyPress with?
• We also briefly talked about WordPress 2.8 – it will include improved Widgets and one-click Theme install.
• I showed some comps from my past project as inspiration for blog designing. Making iterative changes is good, and launching fast & making more changes after feedback is important.

Kirk & David, I was sitting too far away from you guys… please add things I didn’t catch!