Randy Hoyt » wordpress

Presentation at WordPress Technical Meeting

Randy Hoyt — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 01:07:21 +0000

I gave a presentation tonight at a meeting of developers and other technical users of WordPress. I talked about one of my favorite WordPress plugins, ProjectManager, showing how use it to give clients a way to edit snippets of content that don’t really make sense as pages or posts. I have created a page on this site where you can learn more about the group and watch the presentation:

Presentation: Editable Snippets in ProjectManager

Guest Blog Post on WPTavern

Randy Hoyt — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 03:00:05 +0000

I wrote a guest post for WordPress Tavern discussing the benefits of a legacy supported branch for WordPress.org. Members of the WordPress development team have said that providing something like this would be too much work, but I think the benefits are substantial for the WordPress community — especially as that community continues to grow to include more non-technical and business users and as the security of WordPress continues to be called into question.

DFW WordPress Meetup (April)

Randy Hoyt — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 02:00:19 +0000

I had the opportunity to give a presentation at the April meeting of the Dallas/Fort Worth WordPress Meetup group this weekend. Here’s the introduction:

In this presentation, Randy Hoyt demonstrates the techniques, page templates, and plugins he uses to power the multiple-author functionality on Journey to the Sea, the online myth magazine he edits in WordPress. Learn More »

I have added to my site a narrated screencast of the content, a software package for download with all the code modifications, and links to all the online resources I mentioned. It’s not the exact same narration — I re-recorded it after the meeting — but the video is the same and the narration covers all the same material:

Presentation: Multiple Authors in WordPress

This group was established last March after the first WordCamp Dallas conference, a local event devoted to all things WordPress. The group has met monthly all year to promote and prepare for a similar conference in 2009. I have been attending the meetings and offered to speak at the April meeting this past weekend.

Before the meeting, I made a screencast of me applying these techniques to a standard blog theme. During the meeting, I played that video over a projector and narrated it for the group. I was quite happy with how it went, and I received some positive feedback on the presentation from some of the attendees. I met a few people whom I’m looking forward to discussing other local WordPress-related opportunities in the future.

WordCamp Dallas

Randy Hoyt — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 23:00:00 +0000

This weekend I attended WordCamp Dallas, a conference devoted to all things WordPress. WordPress is a free tool for building web sites that I have been using for awhile: I started blogging with it almost four years ago, when version 1.2 came out, and I have been building non-blog web sites with version 2 for over a year now. My friend Ryan came up from Houston for the weekend, and we both had a great time.

The founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, gave the first presentation. He announced the long-awaited release of the new version 2.5, and he talked about the future of the product. Matt stayed throughout the conference, making himself available for questions during the breaks. I never cease to be amazed at the history of WordPress, how Matt turned a free software project into a multi-million dollar company. I asked Matt about all this during lunch on Saturday: he just chuckled and said, “It’s been quite a ride.”

All the speakers I heard were good, but I especially enjoyed Neal and Cali’s presentation about their video blog GeekBrief.TV. They have freed themselves from what they call the “tyranny of the day job” to produce GeekBrief.TV as their primary source of income. (The latest episode, #338, contains an interview with Matt recorded during WordCamp.) The ideas explored during the panel on business blogging were also incredibly interesting. Video from all the presentations at the conference will be posted online in the near future, so check out the WordCamp Dallas site for updates if you are interested.

I plan to upgrade my own installations of WordPress soon to take advantage of the features in the new version, as well as implement some of the new tips I picked up at the conference. I met people using WordPress in creative ways, and I hope to keep in touch and maybe even work with some of them in the future.

WordPress

Randy Hoyt — Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:57:19 +0000

Early versions of WordPress focused exclusively on managing weblogs (personal sites with diary-like updates). With the WordPress 2.0 release, the software has started to add functionality for managing more traditional web sites. I started working with WordPress 2.x at the beginning of the year, and I have been very impressed. The contributors have made great progress making WordPress into a more general content management system.