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.