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A new year means planning starts for our next Nashville WordCamp. The tentative date is set for May 3, again at Nashville School of Law.

Join us Monday January 13 at 6:30pm to 8pm, voice your ideas and collaborate to help keep the Nashville WordPress community on a roll. We seek input and volunteers. We’ll have sign-ups for collaboration teams and no previous WordCamp experience is required.

This will be the third Nashville WordCamp and we want this celebration of all things WordPress to be the best yet and work for the army of Middle Tennessee WordPress users and developers.

As an open-source platform, WordPress is all about collaboration. So should be the planning. Whether you are a familiar face or a new one, please try to make it on Monday, January 13.

This talk walks through some basic customizations like uploading images and galleries through the new Media Manager, using widget areas to publish all kinds of content, how to install and customize a theme.and ending with a discussion on how to choose a theme that’s right for you.

D’nelle Dowis is the owner and mastermind at Berry Interesting Productions, Inc., a digital marketing consultancy that provides WordPress development & coaching, email marketing, social media management and content creation.

2013 has been a great year for the group and we’d like to thank everyone for coming out and supporting the speakers and planning group. Did you know that the group is at 689 members, and 316 of those signed up in 2013 alone. We grew a lot this year, and we have high hopes for 2014!

Here are a few of the reasons we believe the group has grown so much this year.

• Consistent Meetups – 11 meetups
• Quality Speakers
• Consistent Location
• WordCamp
• Creation of the planning group »
• Communications

Moving forward in 2014 we would like to get keep it fresh and we’d like to keep the group vibrant! However, it take a community effort to keep things moving forward which means we need your feed back and your ideas.

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This panel discussion gives a variety of perspectives from SEO, Content Management, Design and Coder.

Pamela Coyle » @ContentRocks
Alex Patin » @patin__
Ross Jones » @2theTopDesign
Joel Norris » @joelrnorris

This talk is for people new to creating themes. It goes into the basics for creating your own theme. It’s simple and to the point, easy to follow and understand. Just the basics, an introduction to creating custom themes.

Steve Wilkison is an Associate Professor at Watkins College of Art, Design & Film here in Nashville where he teaches numerous courses on web design and development, including a class dedicated to WordPress, PHP & MySQL. Wilkison is also the owner of Digital Vision Media, a small Nashville web development company specializing in custom WordPress sites. A veteran of the music industry, Wilkison has been designing and building websites for almost twenty years.

You can find him online at stevewilkison.com

In this talk learn how to protect your site from four different hacks with solid, best practice safeguards.

Judy Wilson has been designing and building professional Web sites since about 1995 when living in the epicenter of all things Web — San Francisco. In 2000, she returned to Nashville, her home town, and went to work for as Webmaster for the Owen School at Vanderbilt. In January, 2004, she opened Site Shack Web Design. She also teaches WordPress classes at The Skillery. Hobbies (besides the Internet)? Design, writing, photography, history, dachsunds, cats, gardening, food, wine. Passions: life, friends and family of all definitions. And once again: The Internet.

This talk steps you through how to properly use the Yoast SEO plugin to get maximum exposure for your WordPress website.

Specializing in SEO since 1997, Ross offers web design and consulting through his agency: 2 the Top Web Design. Ross is organizer of the Nashville SEO & Internet Marketing Group, one of the most active SEO special interest groups in the nation. Ross is also an Adjunct Professor at Aii.edu and has guest lectured on Digital Marketing at Vanderbilt and Belmont Universities. For more information about Ross, please visit his website 2theTopDesign

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