WP Houston

At the November 7th, 2011 meetup at the UCTC location we had a great speaker Monica Danna (she’s @cosmopolitician on Twitter), about 30 participants, and one young baby (mine) in attendance.

Monica walked us through an e-commerce theme, WP FlexiShop. Here is the tutorial from her presentation:

Thank you to Christopher Smith from DesignBigger, Chris Valdez from Primer Grey, and of course Monica Danna from COLAB for making this meetup happen!

P.S. Do you have an idea and would like to speak at the next event? We’d love to hear from you – contact us here.

The Houston WordPress meetup was back in full force this Monday! We had a fully packed room of 50 people at UCTC, snacks and drinks, two terrific speakers, plenty of questions and answers, and a good time. Thank you to everyone who came out and participated!

Thank you, merci, gracias

Extra gratitude goes to Chris Smith of DesignBigger who made the meetup possible by renting the meeting room, and for being our gracious host for the night. Kudos to Chris Olbekson and Eric Rasch for the presentation smarts. Sparklepoints to Jackie D’Elia, Carol Valk, and Raymond Campbell for bringing the foods and sharing them with everyone!

Presentation slides

The speakers kindly uploaded their presentations on Slideshare, so that you can review the slides and look up the links — enjoy!

How can we make it better for you?

We’ve got a couple of active polls that we’d like you to chime in on. This will help us make each meetup better than the next! Please let us know your opinions on:

• Beginner WordPress training
• Subjects to be covered at Meetups

In our first meeting of the year, we found ourselves in a new location, with the biggest attendance since we’ve started meeting!

Eric Rasch provided a detailed and enlighting breakdown of the John Ritter Research Program website. Eric was tasked with building a functional site on a very short deadline, and with the power and simplicity of WordPress, he was able to complete the task. You can check out the slide deck from his presentation below.

The second presentation was a quick overview of what’s coming in WordPress 3.1. The most notable feature is the addition of Tumblr-like Post Formats. We’ve attached the slides below.

For the purpose of upcoming WordPress Meetups, we’ve got a poll to help find out what everyone is most interested in. Please take a moment and cast your votes if you haven’t already.

As always, please let us know if you have any feedback. We are always looking to improve the quality of our meetups. You can leave your thoughts on the meeting page for the February 21st meetup.

We’re looking forward to seeing everyone at the next WordPress Meetup!

At the December 6th meetup, we split into three groups to discuss Theme Frameworks vs. Child Themes, Making Your Site Social, and Getting WordPress Help.

While the interactivity and opportunity to ask questions was appreciated by many people, there were also some concerns about the acoustics and the format. We value feedback: rate the past meetup or email us your suggestions.

Chris Olbekson shared his experiences and lead a discussion about pros and cons of using theme frameworks vs. child themes. He is @chris_olbekson on Twitter.

Bruce Robinson lead a conversation about making your WordPress site social and created a fascinating infographic to illustrate his point, with detailed explanations in his post. He is @orchmarketer on Twitter.

Brett Morrison lead a discussion about getting started with WordPress and wrote a very detailed post, with a ton of useful links, on his blog. His write-up covers:

• WordPress.com or WordPress.org?
• First places to go for help
• Resources: blogs, forums, tutorials, and more…

Head over to Brett’s site to view the complete text of his write-up. Brett is @brettmorrison on Twitter.

Our Houston WordPress meetup on November 15th was attended by 25+ die-hards who braved the rain and made it to the loft for an evening of talks and discussions about WordPress. Thank you for coming! (And if you could not make it, not to worry. There will be another time! And of course, you are welcome to join the group if you have not already.)

Presenters came prepared with well-thought out talks and beautifully designed slideshows, Carol brought extra chairs and snacks (thank you, Carol!), smart questions were asked and answered, and internet was mostly up.

Jean-Marc, Chris, and Eric were awesome and put up their slides on SlideShare. And as part of my WordPress homework, I learned how to embed slideshares into WordPress. Everybody wins!

 
Comments
Have tips, questions, or your own experiences to share related to the topics above? Please leave them in the comments!