WPCandy will be at WordCamp Miami this weekend (see all of our coverage), and of course it wouldn’t be a proper WordCamp without a WPCandy liveblog. This is the post to bookmark and watch: we’ll be updating this liveblog from now until we head back on Sunday. The real interesting stuff will come during the speaker’s sessions tomorrow, of course, which is when we’ll really be updating for the most part.
WPCandy Liveblog
I think that does it for us here. We’ll have a number of followup posts from today, don’t worry.
Thanks for watching the liveblog today! We’ll see you next time.
Series of giveaways right now: PollDaddy subscriptions, VideoPress subscriptions, WordPress.com starter pack, WordPress.com premium pack.
Thanking sponsors now. Hey, thanks Adii Pienaar for making it possible for WPCandy to be here. It was great!
Over 400 #wcmia tweets since 8am. Over 330 people in attendance this year, after 220 in 2010.
Also: exhausting day 
.
Sitting in for the WordCamp Miami wrapup session.
Very much an intro to development session. Great for beginners.
Sounds like the turnout rate today was 95%, bringing the total attendees number to around 320. via
“One of the WordPress gurus actually came up and pointed out issues with my code.”
“One of the WordPress gurus” = Nacin.
Now in the “Intro to Plugin Programming” session with David Carr.
Now a short bit about bbPress.
Five minute warning for this session.
Nacin says the code for setting up Multisite automatically (without editing your config file) but they haven’t put it into core. He says it’s because they want that to be a barrier to entry, because multisite isn’t for everyone.
Jaquith has a wishlist for Multisite. Right now you have to choose between subdomains and subdirectory setups when you install. He would like to be able to mix and match, use what works when it works.
Question about multisite popped up, asking about its future. Jaquith giving a background of MU/Multisite now.
Dezmon Landers put up his slides for his earlier presentation “Solid Marketing for WordPress”.
Nacin also demonstrated his Log Deprecated Notices plugin.
Nacin says he uses Firefox as his non-JS browser. So whenever he needs to test something with Javascript not running, he fires up Firefox.
Jaquith: “So Firefox is like your gimp?”
What Jaquith has coming this year.
Giving a lengthy demonstration of the new Debug Bar plugin, including the Debug Bar Console.
“Debug bar is like Firebug for your WordPress.”
Noticed that both Mark and Andrew have referred to “custom post types” as “custom content types”. I like “content” better myself.
Fielding questions from the group now.
Mark Jaquith on Joost’s plugin killswitch (earlier this year): “I thought it was very clever. And it creeped me out a little bit.”
Nacin: “It won’t happen again.”
Mark Jaquith is working on a membership site that will offer training, support and tools focused on WordPress security. More info coming shortly.
Mark Jaquith is explaining nonces, or a “number used once”. Or, an “action-, object-, and user-specific time-limited secret key.”
The current audience in the developer room.
Mark is talking about how to avoid SQL injections right now.
Brief callout to fight the fake logo.
Now swapping to Mark Jaquith and his “Secure Coding with WordPress” presentation.
“WordPress 3.2 will be available to beta in 2, 3, 4 months… sometime in 2011.” — Andrew Nacin
More than half the room is in freelance consulting, according to a show of hands.
“[Contributing to WordPress] is a great way to up your fees.” — Andrew Nacin
In short, a good example of how not to submit bug reports.
“The only code I ever insult is my own, from six months ago.” — Andrew Nacin
Easiest way to contribute to WordPress: ideas. Good example was “what should be in 3.2″ a few weeks back. Translating is another way to contribute.
“In construction terms, Nacin digs the ditch and I hold the clipboard.” -Mark Jaquith
Nacin’s first contribution to WordPress was 11 characters.
First will be a short “Contributing to WordPress” talk.
Getting set to liveblog the Andrew Nacin/Mark Jaquith Q&A double feature.
He’s now tossing out Rackspace coozies and t-shirts.
“BackPress is a little bit behind WordPress. Not a lot of bit behind, just a little bit behind.” — Matt Martz
Lots of questions about what BackPress is and is useful for. I’m guessing it’s because we’re in the marketing room. He did warn everyone at the beginning
“BackPress is basically WordPress, minus the themes and the administration layer.” — Andrew Nacin
He also proposes a file sharing site using WordPress. Could be done.
WordPress tattoo spotted in the wild! via
He’s now walking through what BackPress is. It’s a PHP library of core functionality for web applications, and grew out of the WordPress project. It’s the core of bbPress and GlotPress.
He also recommends BuddyPress, RoloPress, and Tagul as examples of cool uses of WordPress.
Matt also made his current presentation using a child theme of Twenty Ten, some CSS, jQuery, and custom shortcodes. Boom.
He made pastebin with WordPress using the Prologue theme, custom rewrites, custom template files, custom taxonomies, Geshi, and Javascript.
Never mind, Matt is working on making that happen as well.
Matt made a fully functional pastebin our of WordPress. WordPress can also be used as a presentation platform.
Apparently WordPress can do everything, except make coffee according to Matt Martz.
He loves WordPress because it’s easy, outrageously flexible, and he loves to develop with it.
Matt, of course, is a WordPress contributing developer. Been writing plugins for about five years.
Matt is throwing stuff through the air. Can’t really tell what it is. Smaller than a breadbox.
“The Women of WordPress”, via
Getting set for Matt Martz’s talk right now. Lunch was tasty.
Wrapping up Austin’s presentation, heading to lunch. Interview time
“Being in a room with too many WP core developers is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever.” — via
Austin’s example widget will grab your most recent tweet and show it in the sidebar.
“Parse error on line 20. To be fair I found that when I downloaded your code, I didn’t just spot it on screen.” — Mark Jaquith
Meta liveblog: This afternoon, after lunch, we’ll be liveblogging Matt Martz’s “WordPress as a Development Platform”, Andrew Nacin and Mark Jaquith’s “WordPress Development FAQ”, David Carr’s “Intro to Plugin Programming”, and David Gewirtz’s “Migrating a Massive Legacy CMS to WordPress without Losing Your Mind”.
Austin’s walking through code on the screen, which you can see on his site (link is below).
We’re going to be working with the widget class API, which has been in WordPress since 2.9 2.8 (thanks Nacin).
You can follow along with Austin’s presentation on his site, right now.
Gearing up for Austin Passy’s presentation, “WordPress Widgets”. I wonder what he will be talking about?
Meta liveblog note: Currently opting for some interviews right now, just a heads up to everyone
For instance, currently they are demonstrating a contact form plugin, and how it can be used.
So the mystery session is largely an open plugin forum, actually, rather than a specifically female developer panel.
Tammy Hart’s slides are up for Don’t Forget the Milk: Handing your client a website they can use.
So this is happening… What are the prizes, I wonder?
“Anything done by Automattic is going to be automatically great” – Tammy Hart.
This is the part of the client-focused presentation that becomes more of a support group, sharing war stories and everything. We should all hug.
Tammy started a new company called CleverRocket, design and dev shop. Very cool site.
Now into the question and answer period of Tammy’s client talk.
“Any questions?”
(silence)
“Is that a good sign or a bad sign?”
(laughter)
That last image was courtesy of this tweet.
Someone snagged a covert photo of Andrew Nacin and Mark Jaquith working on WordPress during a session.
Recommending BackupBuddy, VaultPress, the WP DB Backup plugin, and other backup options that work well with WordPress. We also have a comparison coming that should help make choosing which to use easier.
Ptah’s slides on How to be a WordPress rockstar are up.
Using the link videousermanuals.com/miami will save you on the video user manual that Tammy recommended for quickly training clients. She also recommends just sitting down and answering your client’s questions, over coffee.
Meta liveblog: images are uploading at a decent pace, but aren’t super fast. Using them sparingly so it doesn’t slow down the info.
Recommends article at bit.ly/wl-manual to make white labeling WordPress easier. Also bit.ly/wl-plugin, a plugin that takes care of most of it for you.
She also recommends not making clients admins unless they are power users. Otherwise, just pick and choose what they can do.
Tammy recommends using the Screen Options within WordPress to hide things your clients don’t need to see. Either log in as them and change it, or use a plugin (reference coming soon) to hide certain stuff for them.
Slides just went online: Kevin Zurawel’s “Responsive Web Design” presentation form the Marketing/Design track last hour. (via)
Tammy had a hard time with the Flutter plugin, and it caused her six months of pain.
“Hacking core code is a cardinal sin.” — Tammy Hart.
It’s one of those things that is said a lot, but could probably be said even more.
Tammy is encouraging the audience not to be afraid of plugin development when they can’t find what works for them. This is great advice—we’re actually working on a tutorial specifically about wetting your feet in plugin development. It doesn’t have to be scary.
Tammy’s getting rolling now. Opening slide with a nice modern milk illustration.
WP101 giving away free lifetime memberships
These just went up: Slides for the Introduction to Plugin Programming presentation, by David Carr. (via)
All set in a new room with Tammy Hart, for her presentation “Don’t Forget the Milk: Handing Over a Complete Site to a Client”.
Sivel just chimed in to recommend checking out phpdoc.wordpress.org, which will display all of the comments in the WordPress source code.
Fun news: Ptah is starting a WordPress training class in South Florida. We’ll have to talk to him more about this.
Ptah is recommending getting to know other WordPress rockstars as well. You can find a number of folks worth meeting over in our WPCandy interviews. < / plug >
Then there’s his contribution to WordPress menus in 3.0. Lots more files effected, and he says lots more things broke too
Ptah’s last contribution to core was a simple patch correcting a CSS class name that was spelled wrong. Even the little things
Ptah recommends Notepad++ for Windows users looking for something like Textmate (which is Mac only).
He’s demonstrating how he uses Textmate’s “Find in Project” to search through all of WordPress’ core files to see where functions are used.
Ptah suggests using the WordPress source code as your new Codex. He says the one online is great, but a little outdated. Browsing source is best.
So far fairly mile-high point of view, but helpful for learning what you should spend more time on.
Now WordPress UX, or taking advantage of all usability features baked into core.
Now he’s explaining the plugin API. Actions and filters.
By the way, he’s presenting on this stuff with Andrew Nacin, Mark Jaquith, and other solid WordPress pros in the audience. Talk about daunting, right?
Sharing his choice development plugins and wp-config.php development constants.
Sharing his technique for having multiple versions of WordPress running on his local machine all the time.
Now he’s talking Subversion 101, showing some basic commands for using SVN.
Sorry, he likes those apps. Typing too fast
Ptah is talking about development environments. Like Textmate and Eclipse (which I’ve never heard of, actually).
Nice intro slide for Ptah Dunbar’s presentation. Looks like a photo taken at WordCamp Phoenix.
Taking a minute to fight the projector, then we should be rolling along.
Sounds like the developer track will be the popular one this time around. (via)
Seated in Ptah Dunbar’s developer presentation, “How to be a WordPress Rockstar.”
“The rumor that Charlie Sheen is the mystery guest is not true, I don’t know where that came from.” -David Bissett.
Organizer: “Power outlets are to the right of each of your seats.”
Audience: “Oooooh…”
Organizer: “That’s as close to an Oprah moment as you’re going to get!”
The after party tonight will be held at Bougainvillea’s, a tavern downtown. Rumor is free drinks to the first fifty or so people to show up.
David’s killing the opening. Laughs and solid Google images for his slides.
“Our speakers do this out of the kindness of their hearts. And bribery.” — David Bisset
Thanking sponsors for the camp right now. Hey, probably a good time to say thanks to Adii Pienaar for sending WPCandy to this event.
Last year just over 200 people came to WordCamp Miami. Over 300 are coming this year. And it seems about 200 of them are stuck on i-95 right now.
Obama trying to stop Word Camp Miami…
“Welcome to, ah, WordCamp, I guess. You can clap now.” — WordCamp organizer David Bisset
The WordCamp Miami schedule is available online in a nice mobile format at http://wpcoder.com/wcmia/ (via)
People filling in for the opening words, music playing. I wish I could tell you why Burn Notice is on those screens, but I can’t. Then again, why wouldn’t it be on the screens?
A few photos of the venue for WordCamp Miami, the School of Communication at the University of Miami. It took us a minute to find it, but it’s pretty cool now that we’re here.
Seeing mentions on Twitter that i-95 is closed southbound at 103 Street. Could make it interesting to get to the venue I guess?
Ooh, and a preview of the WordCamp Miami t-shirts. (via)
A brief, dark look at the WordCamp Miami speakers’ dinner last night. (via)
Only one good way to start off a day of WordCamp: early.
Getting prepped for WordCampMia!
Getting prepped for the morning.
Ate, now chilling at O’Hare waiting for the flight down to Ft. Lauderdale. Did I mention I love airport wi-fi?
Just getting the ball rolling here. Sitting at the indy airport waiting for our gate to start boarding. Should be in Florida in about seven hours.
Post Revisions:
- 6 March, 2011 @ 4:16 [Current Revision] by Ryan Imel
- 4 March, 2011 @ 10:28 by Ryan Imel
Whoa! Didn’t know you were coming! That’s great news, I can’t wait to hang out again! It’s going to be a blast!
Yeah man, looking forward to hanging out again! You’ll have to show me a good time in Miami
Pro
Looking forward to it, I’ll be there!
I’m looking forward to this. Thank you for providing an inside look. Have a good flight.
Would you happen to be the mystery guest?
I like your thinking
But no, we’re not the mystery guest. We’ll get a post up about who that is, though.
Wish i could be there. Is there any way to watch this online??
Nothing streaming, no. Just the liveblog here, and interviews we’ll be putting up later.
Thanks Ryan, you are doing a good job, waiting for full coverage.
You’re doing a good job with the coverage of the event. I like the mix of live blogging sessions with photos sprinkled in. Loving the idea of monitors in the back of the room to see the slides as opposed to everyone having to look up at the main screen. First time I’ve seen that.
Austin’s presentation site http://austinpassy.com/presentations/wordcamp-miami.php looks a lot like http://youzee.com/en ??