To be involved head over to the meetup group and RSVP »

Here is a short list of what we will be covering.

• WordCamp Theme & Design
• Sponsorship
• General Finances
• Day of Planning & Volunteers
• Speakers & Sessions

Our goal is to solidify a group of Volunteers and divide up the tasks so that we can all to our part. One of the overall goals is to make the event as enjoyable for those of us putting it on as it will be for the attendees.

Our Meetups are as important to us as they are to you, and we hope that you will come out to be involved in the making of Nashville’s first WordCamp. If you have never heard of WordCamp or think it’s just another conference please read up, you will like what you find!

http://central.wordcamp.org
http://2012.nashville.wordcamp.org

Wow, that was easy! Mom's going to love this post about her spaghetti!

If you are new to WordPress and are looking to get your feet wet here is my personal suggestion. The best solution is a combination of good resources and a good old fashion clicking. Do your homework! Surprise! some advice right, it’s that simple.

In an effort to keep the meetups from being a continual beginner class I think it would be good for us here at WPNashville to continually post new resources we find and hear about. If you have suggestions, please leave a comment. There are so many resources it can be hard to keep up on all the good ones.

Video Resources

A huge resources that you may not realize exists is WordPress.tv. A few words of caution, be patient and you’re going to find a whole lot more than just tutorials. WordPress.tv is a massive pool of videos from users all over the world. Go to WordPress.tv »

I came across this focused video series while looking for WordPress Tutorials. This series is from author “Deltina Hay“. These tutorials were made when 3.0 came out and they are definitely still relevant.

Deltina does an amazing job of walking you through many typical items you will encounter on a regular basis when using WordPress. Don’t shy away just because her video’s are over 7min, you really can’t expect to get a good thorough explanation with out putting in the time. View the complete series: “WordPress 3 Tutorials” by Deltina Hay »

If you would like to add to the resources here leave a comment and we’ll add them into our next related post.

Saturday night we had a great after party in downtown Birmingham at Pale Eddies Pour House. We had the whole upstairs and just enough beer to get us all loosened up, what blast!

It's not the best picture, but you can tell we were having a good time!

If you own a website that is on WordPress and you’ve never attended a WordCamp you really should. It’s not another social networking conference, it’s an all day (or 2 day) conference focused on helping you learn how to use your site as it was ment to be used. No matter what level you are, beginner, intermediate or advanced I can guarantee you will hear something new.

A huge thanks needs to go out to the group who put together the WordCamp! @SaraCannon & Crew you did a great job, and we hope to see you next year!

As some of you may know, a handful of us with the local WordPress Meetup are working hard to put together our fist WordCamp for Nashville. Our goal is to bring you the best Nashville has to offer on WordPress. For more information be sure to signup for the Meetup group and come out to the monthly meetups.

Nashville WordPress Meetup
Nashville WordCamp 2012

Here are a few pics of the 2012 Birmingham WordCamp

Nashville WordPress Meetup in 2011

2011 was the first year of the Nashville WordPress Meetup group and it was quite an experience. We tested out a lot of options and tried a few tricks with our meeting format, but we have finally landed on something I think we’ve all enjoyed. 20min presentation, 20min Q&A followed by 20min Show & Tell, how can you go wrong. With more interaction and less one-way conversation, you can be sure there is an opportunity to get your question asked.

Meetup Locations

I think we can all agree that finding a solid location has been our biggest hurdle, and I can safely say it is at the top on my priority list! Many thanks to our sponsor CoLab for allowing us to use their space, it’s an awesome building with really cool, laid-back people. However, many of our users are not city dwellers and the hunt for parking was leaving our groups waning. We also spent a brief night at ESpaces thanks to a secondary sponsor MetaCake, but it was short lived and we are on the hunt again. Be sure to always check the location when attending a Meetup.

What’s in store for 2012?

We have our goals set pretty high this year. On top of monthly meetups we are working hard to put together Nashville’s own WordCamp! I’m really excited and hopeful about this.

If you have never heard of a WordCamp or you’ve only heard rumors, then you need to see and read it for yourself. http://central.wordcamp.org

This is not another social networking conference, this is the world of WordPress that lives in your local community. We are all working hard to publish our thoughts, so don’t let inexperience slow you down or scare you away. It’s almost a guarantee that you know at least a donzen people that manage their sites using WordPress so there is no excuse, find those friends and come out to meet the group.

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. WordCamps are open to WordPress.com and WordPress.org users alike.

~ WordCamp Central

For information and current planning for the upcoming WordCamp visit the official WordPress hosted site @ http://2012.nashville.wordcamp.org. As well, we will be discussing our WordCamp planing goals and needs at the mothly meetups, be sure to attend, you won’t regret it.

1. A presentation on “WordPress.com to .org” – 20 minutes

   “I’m an online chemistry tutor and promote my service through blogging. After about a year of blogging I was starting to run into some of the limitations of a wordpress.com site and I needed to migrate to a wordpress.org platform. This was scary for me, as I’m not very computer savvy. In this talk I’ll briefly go over the story of how I hired a developer to build a new site for me and how having a wordpress.org platform is giving me opportunities to grow my business beyond services to products.”

   ~ James Ashenhurst of masterorganicchemistry.com

2. Presentation Q&ampA – 10 minutes

3. What’s everyone working on? – 10 minutes

   We’ll take a couple of volunteers and let them showcase their site.

4. WordPress business around town. – 10 minutes

   Wrap it up with a brief chat about the locally in the WordPress community and what is in store for 2012.

5. Questions and dismissal. – 5 minutes

Location Change
We have changed the location of this meetup to ESpaces.
This is NOT permanent, so please always be aware of the location for future meetups.

November’s Meetup Event

Join the group and come and learn! »

This is a joint meeting with the Nashville SEO Group run by Ross Jones of 2 the Top Design. Ross has been a professional SEO consultant since early 1997, 6 months before Google even registered their domain name.

Ross will give a short presentation on WordPress SEO and lead the discussion on topics such as:

• Why is WordPress Good for SEO?
• Easy Steps to Improve Your WordPress SEO
• How the Right Plugins Can Help Your SEO
• How the Wrong Plugins Can Hurt Your SEO

There were to very well done tutorials done by Deltina Hay who has put a lot of time and effort into these these. (they are well worth the watch, or listen if you have other things todo) As for the settings pages we simply went through each page and clicked on all the options and updated all the fields to see how they effected our test site.

I believe that learning WordPress is much like learning any other web application. Learn from trial and error, word of mouth and doing your home work. (search the web at all hours of the night to find that one bit of information to complete your masterpiece)

Widgets & Sidebar

By Deltina Hay

This tutorial is a bit long because she goes into a lot of detail.

Custom Menus Tutorial

By Deltina Hay
This tutorial starts off a little slow but only because she does a great job of going through step by step. This is perfect for those of you have not yet worked with the WP Custom Menus.

Our August Meetup went pretty well, we had about 15 people come together in CoLab’s Nashville location. We started off with a brief introduction on “Why WordPress” and then moved into a demonstration on the text-editor and publishing a post. As a bonus we were fortunate to have Ross Jones in attendance who was continually helping us out with SEO questions through out the demonstration. Ross is the organizer of the Nashville SEO Group.

We also had plans to do a short demonstration on how to move a WordPress installation from server to server, but our developer attendance was a little low so we extended the text-editor demo. In the extension we briefly touched on the difference between pages and posts, permalink settings, bulk editing of posts and some random questions.

A person goal of mine is try and cultivate Nashville wp-developers community to a point where we can have our own meetup to discuss building for WordPress. We could talk about some of the basics of template hierarchy, template tags, the loop, using menus, building widgets and plugins. We could also get into some heavier subjects based around a more CMS approach using custom post types and taxonomies beyond the norm. I believe that there is large number of Nashville developers out there looking to break into WordPress, but just need a place to meet. If that describes you then signup for the group and post on the message board!

September’s Meetup

At this point the September meetup is still open to suggestion. At Augusts meetup there was a group of member that express interest in learning how to move from a .com account to self hosted installation. As well, I think there is definitely a need for a demonstration on the Navigation Menu system as well as the Widgets page.

Required

• wp admin access
• ftp access or control panel access
• phpmyadmin access or database access
• Domain Names are all ready in place and pointing in the right direction.

Basic Outline

1. Download WP
2. Export SQL
3. Upload WP
4. Import SQL
5. Update DB

Download WP
Download your all files that in the directory where WordPress is located. Most of the time this will be your root directory. Optionally, if you have a control panel like cPanel, you can use compress all the wp-files in to one compressed file to make this process extremely faster and easier.

Download SQL
Export your current database. You may do this from either phpmyadmin or if you do not have access you can use a plugin like WP-DB-Backup.

Upload WP
Upload the your files or your zipped file. If you zipped your file you will need to decompress the file and be sure that the wp-files reside in the directory you intended them to be in.

Import SQL
Access your database via phpmyadmin or another database application. Import the sql file that you exported. If your exported file is a zip be sure to decompress it before uploading.

Update DB
The tricky part. Start by doing a search for the old-domain this will allow you to see exactly how many changes are going to be needed and where they are at.

NOTE: From my experience the method we are using will not work on serialized data so be sure not to run the following script on any row that uses a serialized format to store data.

Here are the two most common sql sting you will need. As a personal note, I NEVER run this type of sql on the options table. I do those manually, typically there are only about 4 values that need changing. Notice that I am only using the bear necessities for the domain name. there is no http:// or training slash. Keep it simple and strait to the point. The only time you may need extra is if you are dealing with an installation that has been placed in a sub/directory.

UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace( post_content, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com' ) ;
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace( guid, 'old-domain.com', 'new-domain.com' );

To perform these lines of sql click on the sql tab of the phpmyadmin and enter these lines into the textarea. Hit Go! The admin will notify you of your updated rows.

I like to keep an ongoing file that holds all the different type of updates I’ve done to make workflow faster. UPDATE sql

Special presentation are always welcome and we are always looking for anyone who is interested in getting involved with speaking or doing demonstrations. However, if we do not have anything special planned you can expect the following.

This format should meet the basic needs of most users ranging from curious to beginner, bloggers to website owners and wp-hacker to wp-developer.

Here is a short list of what I have planned.

1. 5-10min intro to WordPress.
2. 30min demo on the WordPress admin, pre-determined or requested.
3. 30min demo on WordPress Development php, css, html – pre-determined or requested.

Extended descriptions

1. 10-15min intro to WordPress.

• Intro to WordPress – Paraphrased blurb from .org “About” page.
• Why – Stats and facts about usage, seo & community.

2. 30min demo on the WordPress admin, pre-determined or requested.
The general concept is to help people learn WordPress to perform the basics of what the system is designed to do; publishing content.

• Pre-Determined – Editing and publishing content, Settings and options, ect.
• Requested – Something specific that you would like to learn with in the standard WordPress admin.

3. 30min demo on WordPress Development – php, html – pre-determined or requested.
Some Ideas:

• Transferring a wp-install in less than 15min.
• Turning static html into a theme.
• Template Tags
• Using WP_Query and the Loop.
• WordPress functions to know.

If you have a request leave a comment below or post it to the Meetup Message Board.