Wednesday, May 15, 2019: Getting good with Gutenberg
JR Tashjian will be walking us through core Gutenberg components and how they can be used inside and outside the Gutenberg editor.
Note: we’ll be in the Susman Room this time (next door to usual room).
Wednesday, April 10, 2019: Creating and managing custom Gutenberg Blocks
We’ll discuss building custom Gutenberg blocks and all that it entails.
Hope to see some happy faces! 😀
Thursday, September 20, 2018: WordPress Meetup: September
No description.
Thursday, August 16, 2018: WordPress Meetup: August
This meetup is open to anyone interested in WordPress: newbies, developers, designers and administrators. All are welcome.
Typically we discuss current projects that we are working on, have a problems and solutions section where you can raise issues you are having and offer advice to others about their problems. We try to have a focused topic of general interest at each meeting.
Agenda:
- Current projects (20 minutes) – Introduce yourself, tell us what you are working on at the moment and what you are learning about.
- Problems and Solutions (60 minutes) – Bring us your current problems and we’ll use groupthink to try to solve them. If you have a laptop to demonstrate your issue, bring it and we’ll plug you into the projector.
- Favorite plugins (30 minutes) – There are 50,000+ plugins available for WordPress. Which of these are worth installing? Let us know which ones you use, and trade tips for finding good plugins.
- Decide next meeting topics (10 minutes)
What to bring
You may wish to bring a laptop to take notes or to share your screen on the projector. You need a HDMI port if you want to share your screen.
Thursday, July 12, 2018: WordPress Meetup: July
This meetup is open to anyone interested in WordPress: newbies, developers, designers and administrators. All are welcome.
Typically we discuss current projects that we are working on, have a problems and solutions section where you can raise issues you are having and offer advice to others about their problems. We try to have a focused topic of general interest at each meeting.
Agenda:
- Current projects (20 minutes) – Introduce yourself, tell us what you are working on at the moment and what you are learning about.
- Problems and Solutions (60 minutes) – Bring us your current problems and we’ll use groupthink to try to solve them. If you have a laptop to demonstrate your issue, bring it and we’ll plug you into the projector.
- Favorite plugins (30 minutes) – There are 50,000+ plugins available for WordPress. Which of these are worth installing? Let us know which ones you use, and trade tips for finding good plugins.
- Decide next meeting topics (10 minutes)
What to bring
You may wish to bring a laptop to take notes or to share your screen on the projector. You need a HDMI port if you want to share your screen.
Thursday, June 14, 2018: WordPress Meetup: Show-and-tell and Help Desk
This meetup is open to anyone interested in WordPress: newbies, developers, designers and administrators. All are welcome.
Agenda:
- Show-and-tell: Leo will do a quick demo of the custom block builder he built. (30 minutes)
- Help Desk: A few seasoned WordPress aficionados will be available for one-on-one questions on WordPress related topics. We encourage anyone to volunteer as either a Help Desk attendant or attendee 😀 (1 hour)
- Decide next meeting topics (10 minutes)
What to bring
You may wish to bring a laptop to take notes or to share your screen on the projector. You need a HDMI port if you want to share your screen.
Wednesday, May 16, 2018: WordPress 15th Anniversary Celebration
WordPress will be 15th years old this May 27th, 2018!
On Wednesday, May 16th, we’re planning an event celebrating the WordPress 15th Anniversary with WordPress community groups around the world.
You are invited! We’ll meet at the address listed on this event to enjoy some refreshments and celebrate 15 years of WordPress. We’ll be sharing our party photos and love for WordPress with the rest of the world via the hashtag #wp15.
Don’t forget to spread the word, let’s make this WordPress birthday memorable 🙂
We’ll also cover our usual ground while we celebrate…
Agenda:
- Current projects (20 minutes) – Introduce yourself, tell us what you are working on at the moment and what you are learning about.
- Problems and Solutions (60 minutes) – Bring us your current problems and we’ll use groupthink to try to solve them. If you have a laptop to demonstrate your issue, bring it and we’ll plug you into the projector.
- Favorite plugins (30 minutes) – There are 50,000+ plugins available for WordPress. Which of these are worth installing? Let us know which ones you use, and trade tips for finding good plugins.
- Decide next meeting topics (10 minutes)
What to bring
You may wish to bring a laptop to take notes or to share your screen on the projector. You need a HDMI port if you want to share your screen.
Thursday, April 19, 2018: WordPress Meetup: April Open-house
This meetup is open to anyone interested in WordPress: newbies, developers, designers and administrators. All are welcome.
Typically we discuss current projects that we are working on, have a problems and solutions section where you can raise issues you are having and offer advice to others about their problems. We try to have a focused topic of general interest at each meeting.
Agenda:
- Current projects (20 minutes) – Introduce yourself, tell us what you are working on at the moment and what you are learning about.
- Problems and Solutions (60 minutes) – Bring us your current problems and we’ll use groupthink to try to solve them. If you have a laptop to demonstrate your issue, bring it and we’ll plug you into the projector.
- Favorite plugins (30 minutes) – There are 50,000+ plugins available for WordPress. Which of these are worth installing? Let us know which ones you use, and trade tips for finding good plugins.
- Decide next meeting topics (10 minutes)
What to bring
You may wish to bring a laptop to take notes or to share your screen on the projector. You need a HDMI port if you want to share your screen.
Wednesday, March 21, 2018: Getting Started with Unit Testing
We will get started with unit testing your plugins using PHPUnit on a local server. Eric will give a presentation walking through how to install it and set it up to work locally, then we will go into how to write and run tests for your code.
Wednesday, February 21, 2018: Visual Regression testing with Ghost Inspector
When you’re constantly making changes to your site it is sometimes hard to keep track of every page. Automated visual regression testing can help notify you of breaking changes.
We’ll step through how to set up and leverage Ghost Inspector to monitor pages, forms or even particular section of your site for breaking changes.
Wednesday, January 10, 2018: Get into Gutenberg
Lets dive in to Gutenberg!
Have you worked on it, experimented with it, or know nothing about it?
We will be installing it and leading a discussion on the topic of Gutenberg tonight.
If you have any specifics you would like to talk about please leave them in the comments below!
See you all in January!
Thursday, May 19, 2016: Giving Back to WordPress
Contributor Night!
If your interested in giving back but don’t know how tonights the night for you! there are things that you can do to help the WordPress project at all levels and of all types. Come and help WP518 give back to the WordPress project!
Leave a comment below on anything you might like to do, maybe we can get a couple of groups of people on different topics.
Also, as always, were looking for speakers for upcoming meetup so if you have an idea of something you might like to talk about hit me (Eric Frisino) up and Ill get you scheduled in! If you would like to talk but don’t know what we are interested in.. check out this forum topic all about meeting topics:
Thursday, April 28, 2016: Hack Night!
Hey Everyone, I’m setting this up as a hack night because I have been having a hard time getting people to talk, but I think it is important that we Meetup and chat about what were up to and get caught up.
If anyone has anything they want to talk about let me know, we will get you scheduled!!
Tuesday, January 12, 2016: A Walk Through Caplyso
Ben Lowery will take us on a trip through Automattic’s new wp-calypso project, a JavaScript and API-based way to work with WordPress.com (http://wordpress.com/) and Jetpack sites. We’ll cover the architecture of Calypso and lessons learned building the project.
Thursday, December 10, 2015: Let’s Learn About the New REST API
Matt Banks will be giving an overview of what REST API’s are and showing some small examples (with code) of how to do things with the REST API. He will also cover pros and cons of the current WordPress implementation and possible applications for it. Matt will also introduce you to some different rest clients such as paw, Postman, and Calypso.
This Meetup will be given in our normal room at the library, but it will also (for the first time ever) be streamed live over the internet via Google Hangouts! if the library internet supports such an activity. we will defiantly try! Either way we will be posting the video to the internet a day or two after for you to enjoy if you couldn’t make it.
If you would like to stream this Meetup, please RSVP that you are attending and submit your email in the rsvp question 🙂 this month we are going to privately stream and see how it goes, if it works out we will start streaming it publicly after we have a couple of successful events!
Saturday, November 21, 2015: WordCamp Saratoga Springs 2015
Info: https://saratoga.wordcamp.org/2015/
Tickets: https://saratoga.wordcamp.org/2015/tickets/
Tuesday, October 20, 2015: WordPress CMS: Career Making Service
Cliff Rohde will be joining us this month to discuss how to create a business from WordPress from scratch. What do you need to consider? What do you need to know and what can you learn as you go? What no- or low-cost services allow you to accomplish essential business functions? How should you deal with pricing and scope of work? We’ll cover, rapidly, the vital issues you face as you begin your WordPress business.
Cliff Rohde is owner of GoatCloud Communications LLC. Passionate about the intersection of communications and technology, Cliff assists businesses, nonprofits and individuals to thrive online. For over 25 years he has been deploying digital techniques strategically to advance real world goals.
After the Cliff is finished speaking Eric will give a quick update on WCToga and getting everyone up to speed on whats going on.
Wednesday, August 19, 2015: Best Practices in WordPress Development
Over the last several months we have heard about plugin and theme development. It is only fitting that we talk about the coding standards and best practices we all should use to build the best software. These things are important because our code affects other programmers and the security of WordPress. There are many aspects to writing good code for WordPress. This month Allen Case will be discussing the following topics:
– Why we have coding standards
– General overview of the coding standards for PHP, HTML, CSS, and Javascript
– General best practices
– Best practices for Plugins
– Best practices for Themes
Wednesday, July 15, 2015: Customizing with the Customizer
In Part I: Theme Customizer: Help Me, Help You Understand (http://www.damonacook.com/customizer/) It we went over the historical milestones of the Customizer. This is the next part, which will focus on the Theme Customization API (https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Customization_API), and creating custom Settings in the Customizer.
Be there, or be square [].
Wednesday, June 17, 2015: Theme Customizer: Help Me, Help You Understand It
Presenter: Damon Cook (http://www.damonacook.com)
Recently, the Theme Customizer has become a hot topic in the WordPress community. First, the Theme Review Team announced (http://wptavern.com/wordpress-org-now-requires-theme-authors-to-use-the-customizer-to-build-theme-options) it would be mandated to replace all theme options for future theme submissions to the .org theme repo. Now, there is controversy around the proposal (https://make.wordpress.org/core/2015/06/03/feature-plugin-merge-proposal-menu-customizer/) for the Menu Customizer being merged into the Theme Customizer in the upcoming WordPress 4.3 release.
As a front-end developer I’ve had little interaction with the Customizer, but have always wanted to become more experienced with its functionality.
This presentation with be an overview of the Customizer, and I’m encouraging feedback for any specific areas attendees would like covered. Please answer the Meetup.com questionnaire when you RSVP, and can’t wait to see all your beautiful faces!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015: Hack attack
We do not have a presentation scheduled this month. Have no fear, we’ll still be gathering to hack code and chat all things WordPress.
Thursday, March 19, 2015: Building and Maintaining Plugins
Tom Harrigan will be joining us this month from New York City to talk about building, releasing and maintaining plugins.
Tom spoke at WordCamp Saratoga on the topic of the power behind Post Formats to display your posts in ways you never thought possible, you can view his talk here: http://wordpress.tv/2015/01/20/tom-harrigan-supercharge-your-sites-like-power-publishers-do/
If you have any questions for Tom or anything you would like him to touch on specifically, post it here!
please note: we will be upstairs in the H. Dutcher Community Room this month.
Wednesday, February 18, 2015: Hook or Be Hooked!
Jonathan Christopher, co-owner and developer at Iron to Iron (http://irontoiron.com), will be joining us this month to talk about Hooks in WordPress plugins!
Hooks in WordPress are a foundational reason for the success of the platform. WordPress hooks (actions, filters) are essential for extending WordPress in your themes and plugins without interfering with the core code base. If you want to write future-ready code, hooks are your best friend. There’s a slight learning curve to hooks but we’re going to cover that, the philosophy behind utilizing/implementing hooks, and (way) more. If you have any questions you’re hoping get covered, be sure to post them at least a few days before the meetup and we’ll be sure to make sure you have answers!
Wednesday, January 14, 2015: Taking WordPress Development to the Next Level with Object-Oriented PHP
Kevin Fodness will be joining this month to speak! Kevin will provide a path for moving your procedural theme and plugin code into object-oriented PHP. Using OOPHP helps you to keep your code organized and prevents collisions with code in other plugins and themes.
You can check out Kevin’s site here: http://www.kevinfodness.com (http://t.co/ijSbRIIihZ)
And he is on twitter here: Kevin Fodness @kevinfodness (https://twitter.com/kevinfodness)
Here is a link to Kevin’s talk that he gave at WordCamp Saratoga 2014 on object-oriented PHP: http://www.kevinfodness.com/presentation-slides-object-oriented-wordpress-theme-development … (http://t.co/2Wuaw3oCVD)
NOTE: we will be meeting in the H. Dutcher Community Room this month, not the Glassy Room
Thursday, December 11, 2014: When NOT to use WordPress
Our very own Leon Shelhamer will be giving is first talk at WP518 this month about those situations when using WordPress may not be the best solution..
In 2003, WordPress launched. Ten years later it was used by 22% of the top 10 million websites. It’s relatively hard to imagine a scenario of when not to use WordPress. This talk explores the downsides of WordPress based on extensive research.
Tuesday, November 25, 2014: Grids on the Web — Defining the Right Set of Constraints
Paul Kinchla will give a talk on how grids have long been part of graphic design and have become an important part of design on the web in the ever-growing landscape of devices, viewports and experiences. This talk will give a brief history of grids and explore the current challenges that revolve around using grids effectively and efficiently within our designs both within WordPress and beyond.
Motivated by a need to craft great experiences that honor content across all devices and viewports Paul Kinchla (http://paulkinchla.com/) is a front-end designer currently living in Troy, NY.
We look forward to another fantastic evening and hope to see some new faces, as well as you regulars. 😉
Saturday, October 11, 2014: WordCamp Saratoga!
Our very first WordCamp in Saratoga Springs!!!
WordCamp Saratoga is a conference about WordPress. It will be held October 11, 2014 at the Saratoga City Center in Saratoga Springs, NY.
Our speaker line-up boasts over half local speakers, 33% women, one core committer, and one lead developer from Automattic. We’re so excited to have such a talented set of WordPress experts leading the charge at the first ever WordCamp Saratoga.
Saratoga Springs sits smack dab in between New York City, Montreal, and Boston in beautiful Upstate New York where the Fall leaves will be turning in early October, where the food is amazing, and an incredible local group of tech lovers and entrepreneurs—many of whom use and love WordPress.
The city slows down just a bit after the horse racing season ends, and the Fall is a great time to visit or just get out and enjoy the local WP518 WordPress community we hope to see lots of this October.
Check out our Speaker Lineup: http://2014.saratoga.wordcamp.org/schedule/
And Snag your Tickets: http://2014.saratoga.wordcamp.org/tickets/
Wednesday, September 17, 2014: An Accidental Career In WordPress
This month we will be hosting Clinton Warren, a guest speaker from Connecticut! Clinton Warren left a career in finance to become a personal trainer, only to get sidetracked by a career in web design. When he stumbled upon WordPress he dove in headfirst, building a freelance business before forming Stacked Agency (http://www.stackedagency.com/) and Illuminate WP (http://www.illuminatewp.com/), a WordPress educational business.
His talk will focus on his unusual path to build a career around WordPress, and the amazing people he has met along the way. He has worked alongside some talented professionals and incredible mentors. In this talk he will share what he has learned as he’s built two businesses around WordPress, what opportunities lie ahead, and why he feels the fun is just getting started.
Thursday, July 24, 2014: Give a Talk!
Why, What About and How; Simon Ouderkirk discusses the compelling reasons to present at gatherings big and small, explores topic discovery and presents a step-by-step plan to go from zero to speaking in record time.
We are hosting our first annual WordCamp Saratoga on October 11th and we want you to talk! Come to this meet up and get inspired!
Thursday, June 19, 2014: Creating and Implementing Custom Fonts in Your WordPress Themes
Eric Frisino and Shane Boland will cover everything you need to know about creating, exporting, finding, and implementing custom fonts for typography or iconography in your theme. Eric will cover tools used to create and export your own custom fonts from scratch both from a typographic and iconographic point of view, and prep for the web. Shane will pick up from here and speak about how to use these fonts on your websites, how to find/use existing icon fonts, and also how to best implement icon fonts on your webpages.
Wednesday, May 14, 2014: Strawberry Custom Fields Forever
Matt Banks will give a talk on leveraging the power of WordPress custom meta boxes and fields to better organize your site, make it easier to update content, and manage your data more efficiently. He will cover how to set everything up in code using native WordPress functions, plugins that will speed up the process, as well as ways to display all the data on your website. He will also touch on the new Metadata API being developed as a feature plugin in WordPress Core to see what’s coming in the future.
Wednesday, April 16, 2014: Custom Theming with _s and LESS
Want to get started with theming, but not sure where to begin? Damon Cook and Eric Frisino, both front end web developers, will show you how to get started writing your very own custom theme using Automattic’s _s starter theme and a LESS drop-in. We’ll cover some basics, like : grids, custom typography, LESS, and more. We will leave time a the end for questions and discussion. Hope you can join us
Wednesday, March 19, 2014: Building WordPress Plugins: Best Practices for Beginners and Veterans Alike
Jonathan Christopher will be discussing WordPress plugin development whether you’ve been working with WordPress for years, or have absolutely no idea what a plugin really is and how they actually work. Let’s talk about the purpose of plugins and how WordPress makes building plugins wicked awesome.
Topics will include:
- A general overview of what plugins are and what they’re meant to do
- WordPress Hooks (actions and filters) as the lifeblood of plugins
- Best practices, WordPress conventions, and good habits to get into early in your plugin development career
- Putting your plugin on WordPress.org (http://wordpress.org/)
- Collaborating on plugins (GitHub)
- Hopefully a live demo based either on audience suggestion or one of my half started plugins
Bring plugin ideas!
Tuesday, February 11, 2014: Guest Speaker Justin Shreve – Using the REST API with WordPress.com & Jetpack
In the past, to manage and control your WordPress data from other apps, you would have to use insecure username/password authentication and sometimes difficult to use XML-RPC APIs. Now you can use a JSON based REST API and authenticate using OAuth2. Supported by all WordPress.com and Jetpack (that means self-hosted!) powered blogs. This talk will talk about basics of the API (what it offers, what the future will hold, etc), how to get started (registering an application, getting a client id/secret, etc), and provide some examples of what you can do. Included is a Q&A & discussion about what you would like to see in the future.
Justin works on APIs and partnerships for WordPress.com. He did two Google Summer of Code (GSoC) projects for Automattic, has mentored for GSoC and Gnome Women’s Outreach Program, and worked on the WordPress.com REST API avail. at http://developer.wordpress.com/
Wednesday, January 15, 2014: Developing Locally with WordPress: No More Cowboy Coding
We will discuss how to setup a local development environment for WordPress and why you want to develop and test locally. Find out how to fix problems like “it works on my machine” before they happen, and how to test updates and changes without cowboy coding and breaking your website.
Matt Banks will discuss Local Development for about 45 minutes and then the floor will be open to questions and discussion on the topic. Please come with questions and be ready to discuss!
Wednesday, December 18, 2013: WordPress & Accessibility
We will discuss general accessibility principles to make the web more accessible for users with disabilities, followed by a more targeted discussion of how to make WordPress themes, widgets, and plugins generate more accessible outputs. We will also discuss overlap between accessibility and SEO, and the role of clients in curating accessible content after the site is built. After the presentation, there will be an open discussion on the role of accessibility in modern web design and development.
Wednesday, November 13, 2013: Counterculture SEO and WordPress
We will start off with two short (15 minute’ish) talks from different view points on SEO and WordPress by Karen and Sheri. Their talks will set the stage for a moderated group discussion following their talks.
First Karen Shanley about her experiences and position relative to dealing with SEO with WordPress and shed some light on what her clients think, questions that they ask, things they mess up, etc.
Sheri Bigelow will follow giving a talk about her experiences at Automattic working with WordPress.com and her experiences with SEO there.
Following this we will open the floor to a moderated group discussion about WordPress and SEO, plugins, etc. Come ready to speak to your experiences!
Here are some questions to get you started thinking!
- Have you been witness to an SEO disaster?
- Are there any WordPress SEO plugins you swear by or ones that have brought you crazy success?
- Bring stories about your favorite (or least favorite) SEO plugins because we want to hear about them!
Thursday, September 5, 2013: Themes, Themes, Themes
It’s a themes extravaganza. Bring your theme questions, theme projects, and theme stories! We’ll start with a (very short) presentation on theming tailored to the skill level of those who show up (speaker applications welcome!) and then we’ll hack the night away and come up with some brilliant theme-alicious code.
If you would like to speak, post a comment and let us know. 🙂
Thursday, July 18, 2013: Patches! A Short Demo on Testing Patches in Core WordPress
Meeting Location: Glasby Room (http://www.sspl.org/services/meeting_rooms/rooms/glasby.php)
We’ll walk through a basic demo of testing a core patch (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/attachment/ticket/13237/alot-of-patches.jpg) and commenting on a Trac ticket with the results. Then we’ll level up by showing how to create and apply svn patches from a git repository. All developer levels welcome. No matter what your level, you can find help getting involved in core WordPress at this meetup.
After the demo, the rest of the time will be spent hacking on and talking about WordPress. Join us!
Call for Speakers: are you interested in speaking at the WP518 WordPress group? If so, we’d love to hear from you! Our main focus is on WordPress development, but topics on writing and design are welcome too. We’d like to involve everyone in the WordPress community and we are open to topic suggestions.
Thursday, June 27, 2013: InstallFest + Hack-a-way, Part II
We liked it so much last time that we thought we’d do it again!
goal = patches for core.
Hope to see you.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013: WP518 April 2013 WordPress Meetup – Local WordPress Development Setup
Have you ever wondered how to get your own WordPress development environment where you can install any plugin, theme, or fix bugs? We’ll show you how to get up and running with a local WordPress development environment, and perhaps even submit a bug fix to WordPress core.
Wednesday, December 5, 2012: WP518 Dec 2012 WordPress Meetup – What’s New in 3.5
We’ll go over what’s new in WordPress 3.5: new features, fixes, and new theme. Also, maybe do some hacking time.
Zone5 is gracious enough to host this meetup. It is recommend that people park on Monroe St. where there is a dirt lot, and it is free. There are signs for Zone5 in the lobby, and take the elevator to the 3rd floor.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012: WP518 Nov 2012 WordPress Meetup—Contributing to WordPress
There are WordPress contribution opportunities for all skill levels in various areas like writing, translating, designing, testing, or coding. Anyone can help! We’ll have a short presentation about contributing, what it takes and how to do it, followed by some hands on work.
Thursday, July 26, 2012: July WP518 Meetup
We might try a new format this time…
Brief presentation (tbd) General Q&A and WP Geekery Let me know what you would like to see at these meetings?
Thursday, March 29, 2012: March WP518 Meetup
Come one, come all. WordPress designers, hackers, n00bs, developers. Let us drink coffee/tea and discuss the fine, open-source goodness that is WordPress.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012: Tech Valley Mobile Developers
I saw this event but couldn’t find the Meetup group to RSVP. Is anyone going to this at ITT? http://www.tvmdn.org/… (http://www.tvmdn.org/index.php/services/) We will be meeting on the 1st Wednesday of each month from 6:00PM 8:00PM, please check this website for the latest information before each meeting. Food will be served. Meetings up to the Public Meetings Held at ITT Technical Institute in Albany
Thursday, January 26, 2012: WP518 WordPress Meetup in Albany – 26 Jan 2012 – What’s New in WordPress 3.3
We’re a new WordPress meetup group, and we’d love if you joined us for a short presentation about what’s new in WordPress 3.3. We’ve been meeting since September 2011 and have tried some different locations in the past. This month, we’ve decided to get together in Albany on the last Thursday in January at the Hudson River Coffee House.
WP518 WordPress Meetup in Albany
Thu 26 Jan 2012
Hudson River Coffee House, 227 Quail St, Albany, NY 12203
http://www.hudsonrivercoffee.com/locate.htm
Come tell us your WordPress stories! Hope to see you there.
—
The WP518 Organizers
Damon Cook (@dcook), Sheri Bigelow (@designsimply), & George Gecewicz (@ggwicz)