Tag: Nashville WordPress

  • Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages

    Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages

    This month at the Nashville Meetup we walked through the 3 sections of the WordPress admin. Widgets, Custom Menus & Settings Pages. Now, because there is already a wealth of WordPress knowledge out there I decided to find some well done tutorials on the subjects.

    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.

    [youtube width=”630″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rM3XfwxjQ-4[/youtube]

    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.

    [youtube width=”630″ height=”380″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDW8OTDUIDI[/youtube]

  • Nashville WordPress Meetup August 2011

    Nashville WordPress Meetup August 2011

    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.

  • Nashville Meetup – Meeting Format

    Nashville Meetup – Meeting Format

    The Nashville meetup group has been meeting since January of 2011, and over the last 8 months we’ve seen quite a bit of fluctuation in attendance. In an effort to be more consistent I thought it would be helpful to put together a meeting format I will follow anytime we are not having a special presentation.

    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.