Help the WordPress DC Community

After a number of very successful meetups over the last year, the local WordPress community in Washington, D.C., is growing fast in both size and strength.

The group offers some great education and networking opportunities, and the local community is becoming very involved. We’re very proud to have some great local sponsors and supporters, including Graph Paper Press, Site5 Hosting, Accessibility DC, and our hosts Fathom Creative. Next week, somewhere around eight local users and developers are presenting lightning talks. Not only are we typically seeing 40 or more at every meetup, we live-stream and record our events, too.

We’ve hosted some prominent community members, including Mitcho Erlewine, GPP’s Thad Allender, Theme Lab’s Leland Fiegel, and of course, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg. We want to host more awesome events, and we also want to become a strong resource for the community.

While co-organizer Aaron Jorbin and I have worked hard to organically grow a community with local roots, the two of us are also heavily tapped into the WordPress community as a whole, and we hope to bring some of that awesomeness to D.C.

How can you help? Here’s some ideas:

If you’re coming to town, let me know. Our meetups are typically the second Tuesday of the month, but we’ve scheduled special meetups when awesome people are in town, and want that to continue. We’ve done all sorts of formats: presentations, town halls, demos, lightning talks, and social gatherings. Well, social gatherings happen after every meetup, but we’ve done those standalone too.

Send along a book: I’m giving away a copy of Professional WordPress Plugin Development next Tuesday, and the winning developer will be asked to review the book. There are a number of relevant and awesome books I’d love to offer to our members.

Send along some swag: While my more than two dozen WordPress shirts helps my stated goal of wearing a different one to every meetup, I’d love to spread the love a bit. Other items are welcome, too.

Send along a product or promotion: Lots of premium themes, plugins, and services are out there. Ideally, if we’re giving away a free product, I’d like to be able to also offer a promotion to everyone there. Contact me if you’re interested in supporting the community this way.

Provide a micro-sponsorship: Thanks to the amazing generosity of Fathom and others, we don’t have much in the way of costs. But we’d like to provide pizza and beer when possible, since not everyone has time to grab a six-pack on the way over to restock the Fathom fridge.

That’s about it for now — please contact me if you’re interested in anything. And seriously, don’t forget to let us know if you’re ever coming to town. We have a great group.

My DC PHP presentation

Via @DCPHP.

Last night I spoke at the DC PHP August meetup, hosted by Fathom Creative near Logan Circle.

The topic was WordPress 3.0, covering custom post types and taxonomies, multisite and the MU merge, and advancements in theme development. I also spilled the beans that we’re moving to PHP 5.2 with WordPress 3.2 (gasp!). I shared our development and release philosophies, and also had an engaging talk about security, BlindElephant, and shared hosting, which is always fun.

It was a great group (about 30 people) and a good warm-up for my WordCamp presentations this weekend at Savannah.

The presentation was 68 slides in all and lasted about 75 minutes. Without hearing the talk though, you wouldn’t know that the second slide was my first patch ever, but there you go. (I’ll be talking much more about that this weekend at Savannah.) You also wouldn’t know that I actually go into a spirited defense of shared hosts after boldly declaring they suck, so don’t read into the slides too much:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/36135238/WordPress-3-0-at-DC-PHP

My meetup presentation on WordPress 3.0

Last night I introduced WordPress 3.0 to about 15 individuals at a D.C. meetup. It was a resounding success and I had the chance to meet some very interesting people from a number of different backgrounds with a wide range of talents.

The slides I presented, which are below, can be technical in nature, but that’s only because it’s far easier to show the technical drivel on a slide and then talk at a less-technical level. There were a few individuals who had very little experience in WordPress — plugin developers were in the minority — but I was able to work my way even through custom post types and taxonomies and it was very well received.

I am sure I will be blogging more about some of the new features in 3.0 in the coming weeks and months, and I know the event organizer, Erik Rapprich, wanted to cross-post my notes and perhaps a voice-over to wordpressdc.com. I doubt I’ll get around to re-doing my presentation for a microphone, but the slides are a start.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/27495466/meetup-wordpress