Category: Blog

This talk shows how to make your mistakes on paper or simple desktop and online tools before you commit to a server. Fast, Good, Cheap; Choose two. Do it Good and on the Cheap. It may take a little longer but it will be Right.

Todd O’Neill has been doing some form of electronic media his entire career. He is a connector of dots and a fan of bright shiny objects. He began in corporate video then transitioned to CD-ROM multimedia for clients like The AFKAP (Prince), then on to online as the an initial team member for a Fortune 200 financial services firm, finally landing at his own firm in San Antonio; DoingMedia; consulting and preventing disastrous communication and social media mistakes. Todd now corrupts young minds as an Assistant Professor of New Media at Middle Tennessee State University.

This talk walks you through organizing content through posts and pages, best practices for making your content reader friendly and a few tips to make life simpler for you on WordPress.

Kelly is the Director of Client Marketing at Rockhouse Partners, an Etix Company. He helps clients’ with their digital presence to sell tickets, extend awareness and turn visitors into repeat fans. The hub of this digital presence is the client’s WordPress website.

This session will show you how to use custom post meta data and the body_class filter to define custom layouts for both static pages and single blog posts. As a bonus, this will show you how to use custom post metaboxes, rather than forcing users to deal with custom fields.

Chip has been using WordPress since 2005, and has been a hobbyist web developer since the mid-90s. He has developed WordPress Themes and Plugins, and is a minor contributor to WordPress core. He is the community rep for the WordPress Theme Review Team that reviews/approves Themes for inclusion in the WordPress Theme Repository. He can often be found in the WordPress.org support forums and at WordPress StackExchange. He is also a part-time freelance WordPress developer.

You can find him online at http://www.chipbennett.net

You will get to know how to build widgets, extend the widget class and all the basic parts needed to build your own widget.

I’m a Nashville-based WordPress developer who’s worked with WordPress since 2007. I develop at Slushman Designs and work at Belmont University doing web development and computer administration for the Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business. I am the author of several plugins, including ArtistDataPress and BuddyPress Profile Widgets.

What is clean code? This talk provides some answers to this question, and introduces some good habits that will help keep your code clean, such as the use of meaningful names for your variables and functions, and the Single Responsibility Principle.

Mike Toppa has been coding for the web since the days of HTML 1.0, when web pages were first painted on cave walls with bison blood. He’s a developer for the civic engagement startup ElectNext, and previously was the Director of Development for WebDevStudios. He’s also worked at U Penn, Stanford, Georgetown, Ask Jeeves, and E-Trade, and is experienced working in Ruby on Rails, Java, Python, Perl, and of course, PHP and WordPress. You can find him online at toppa.com and @mtoppa.

This talk discusses how best to debug your project using tools like Debug Bar and Chrome Developer Tools.

Hey! My name is Nathaniel and I’m a Front End Developer from Nashville, TN. I’ve been developing with WordPress for the last three years. With a degree in Media and Communication Studies, and a background in Video, Print, and Web, I have a pretty diverse perspective and hope to use that to better educate others in both their professional and personal lives. Whats the point in working if you don’t live, too?

You can find him online at Fight the Current

This talk is a personal experience working as a developer. Discussion topics include the best practices for blending into a good workflow, how to prepare for your first developer job, and the expectation vs reality about working with a team.

A web designer who loves to learn about the latest trends in web design, wordpress, and coding languages. I play the violin, enjoy baking and eating chocolate cakes, and running long distance. I’m currently working at Ahso designs as a junior developer and attending the Art Institute of TN, majoring in web design and Interactive media.

This month we asked Kenneth White of sprclldr.com to speak on Freelancing.

Everything you need to be a successful WordPress business owner (yes, as a freelancer you are a business of one!), from setup to growth. What do you need to be legal? How much should you charge? What should your business model be? How can you find clients?
~ Kenneth White

• sprclldr
• Nashville Geek
• Ah So Designs

You may love it or hate it but SEO – Search Engine Optimization – isn’t going away.

Yes, it changes, and panic ensues across the land every time Google updates how it evaluates websites. Yet the foundational basics remain. Knowing them helps any WordPress user, designer, developer, content creator, small business owner or entrepreneur improve site traffic.

Join us at Belmont University on Monday, Nov. 18, for a joint meetup with the SEO and Internet Marketing MeetUp, led by Ross Jones of 2 the Top Web Design and Promotion. Ross is a frequent speaker around Nashville, teaches at Belmont and is active in the WordPress community.

He’ll cover basic SEO and how simple steps can make a big difference. Among them: naming pages so Google sees something other than “about” on an About Us page and using only 1 main headline on each page so search engines understand the content of the page. Using multiple H1s to decorate a page is a really bad idea. So is leaving your default blog post setting to “uncategorized.”

This MeetUp will touch on the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. The goal, however, is an overall understanding of basic SEO principles and how to leverage them in putting a site together.

We’ve had some great WordPress Nashville MeetUps this fall, so let’s keep the momentum going. Join us at Belmont for SEO Basics.

RSVP Here: SEO Basics for WordPress

MeetUp Details
Monday, November 18, 2013
7:00 PM
Belmont University, McWhorter Hall Rm 114
1499 Wedgewood Ave, Nashville, TN
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Enter Belmont’s Inman Center/ North Garage (the building next to Massey on Wedgewood). Follow signs to Visitor Parking on level P1. Take McWhorter Elevators from P1 to Floor 1. Turn right out of the elevators. McWhorter 114 will be about 100 ft.

Click on the WordPress link at themeforest.net and you get nearly 3,400 theme options. There are themes at templatemonster.com and a half-dozen other sites.

Often users and developers work with themes from one major source – such as Genesis and Studio Press, Woo Themes, Elegant Themes, ThemeFuse, and Themify. Custom developers will dispense all of it and build each theme from scratch, tailored to client needs.

So where does a WordPress user start?

The WPNashville October MeetUp, at 7pm on Oct. 21, will present a panel discussion on themes and theming. Panelists will cover two major theme foundries, Studio Press and WooThemes, as well as one of the largest marketplaces on the web, ThemeForest.

Panelists will spend 30 minutes touching on the three topics below followed by 20 minutes of Q&A.

• Introduce the foundry or marketplace
• Why this particular marketplace or foundry
• Showcase some of the finer features

Please join us.
RSVP through WPNashville MeetUp