Category Archives: WordPress

WordCamp San Diego 2012

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It’s time again for WordCamp San Diego 2012. Sat Mar 24 and Sun Mar 25 will be two days filled with WordPress geeky goodness, a full conference on Saturday and a developer hack day on Sunday.

I’m speaking in the Developer track on Saturday at 2:10 pm—my topic is Theme Busters R Us:

Breaking themes for fun?! Crazy talk. Busting your WordPress theme–on purpose–can be both fun and useful. The process is a crucial part of building sites with WordPress, whether it’s for a client project, a personal blog, or releasing an awesome new theme to the world.

See the rest of the talks on the full Saturday schedule; there are two tracks to choose from (End User, Developer) with great speakers and topics.

If you’re not at the event you can still join in, the talks will be live-streamed. Check the WordCamp San Diego 2012 website for details.

WordCamp Phoenix 2012

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It’s that time of year—your favorite WordPress conference is back in the desert!

That’s right folks, WordCamp Phoenix is coming up this weekend, Fri Feb 24 through Sun Feb 26. Three days of WordPress geeky goodness, including full-day workshops on Friday, the conference on Saturday, and an “unconference” on Sunday.

I’m speaking in the “Jumpstart” track on Saturday at 10:30 am—my topic is Navigating the Theme Landscape:

Learn what types of themes are out there, how to find and choose a theme, and dive into basic modifications to your theme so it fits you perfectly.

See the rest of the talks on the full Saturday schedule; there are three tracks to choose from, and lots of great content.

I’ll also be working the help bar Saturday, from 2:15 pm onward. Come say hi!

Let’s talk WordPress, Arizona. More info: http://2012.phoenix.wordcamp.org/

Update Feb 26: Slides and links to all the themes and resources I mentioned are here: http://themeshaper.com/jumpstart/

Update Mar 8: The video of my talk is now online at wordpress.tv: http://wordpress.tv/2012/03/08/lance-willett-navigating-the-theme-landscape/

WPCandy Interview on Commercial Themes

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Hard to believe it’s been 12 months since the last time I was on WPCandy.

I talked last Friday about commercial themes on WordPress.com with Ryan Imel of WPCandy, looking back one year after launching the service. Here are the links to listen to the interview.

Thank you to Ryan and his crew; they do a superb job of covering all the WordPress news and events, day in and day out.

The Move to WordPress.com

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I switched this site to WordPress.com last weekend — it had been self-hosted since 2005, on Dreamhost.

Things went very smoothly — I followed instructions in the WordPress.com Support documentation and in various dashboard screens, and they were very helpful. I especially was impressed with the Google verification steps and how easy it was to add MX records for my Google Apps integration.

Probably the most annoying thing was waiting for propagation after updating nameservers, but there’s not a lot I could have done about that anyway.

A few hiccups:

  • Old email subscribers: I had to email my old list to ask them to subscribe again on WordPress.com (I was using FeedBlitz before).
  • Link importing: I had to split up the OPML file to import with categories, otherwise I’d have a flat import with no categories.
  • I used Textile on my old blog, so I had to run a small PHP script to update the content in posts/pages to plain old HTML.

The plugins I’m going to miss the most are:

Continue reading →

WordPress 3.2, Gershwin

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Last night I shared about the latest and greatest WordPress release at the July 2011 Tucson WordPress meetup.

The focus for the 3.2 release was making WordPress faster and lighter. Highlights include a new distraction-free writing mode, a completely refreshed admin UI, faster updates (only updating files that changed), support dropped for IE6, PHP 4, and MySQL 4, and the new default theme, Twenty Eleven.

Go update now! (3.2.1 is out now, by the way, with some minor fixes.)

Here are the links I mentioned in my talk.

The next Tucson WordPress meetup is scheduled for September 7th, 2011. Mark your calendars, and see you there.

Thanks to Andy Nacin for allowing me to use his slides from WordCamp Columbus as a starting point for my talk.

Break Your Theme, WordCamp Columbus

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I gave a talk called Break Your Theme in June 2011, in Columbus (Ohio, USA) for WordCamp Columbus 2011. I had a blast! The room was packed and I had great questions after my talk and in the hallways later.

Packed house! (Photo by Ryan Imel, WPCandy.)

Here are the slides and notes from the talk.

By the way, Ryan Imel of WPCandy did an awesome job of live-blogging WordCamp Columbus 2011.