WordCamp Orange County 2012

Looking for the slides from a particular session from this year’s WordCamp?  Look no further.  As more of the slide links come through we’ll add them to the list below.  Keep checking back.

• WordPress I: Introduction to WordPress – Se Reed – details – slides
• Getting Started with Contribution! – Mike Schroder – details – slides
• Fun With Gravity Forms – Lucy Beer – details – slides
• Enterprise Class WordPress – Jake Goldman – details – slides
•  Let’s Build a Custom Theme – Andy Stratton – details – slides
• End-User Awareness – Tony Perez – details – slides
• Building a CRM on WordPress – Bill Erickson – details – slides
• Tips on how to use BuddyPress – Wes Chyrchel – details – slides
• Getting Started with WordPress Multisite – Steve Zehngut
• How to use WP-Cron – Ben Lobaugh – details – slides
• Optimizing WordPress for Speed and Scale – Ben Metcalfe – details – slides
• The Pursuit of Actionable Data – Getting the Most out of your Google Analytics – Kelley Koehler – details – slides
• Getting an eCommerce Website Up and Running in 30 Minutes – Todd Miner – details – slides
• REST/JSON API – Mike Adams details – slides
• Controlling User Access in WordPress – Alex Vasquez – details – slides
• WordPress Emergencies – Tabby Chapman – details – slides

So that happened.  Thanks to everyone who came out – speakers, sponsors, friends and especially all the attendees.  WordCamp Orange County 2012 turned out great and we are already looking forward to next year.

We are currently processing the video to put all the presentations up on WordCamp.tv (and we mean it this time).  We are also trying to collect all the presentations so we can aggregate them on one page.  We’ll post here when we have it.

Finally, if you had a great time and are super jonesing for more WordCamp action, WordCamp LA is on September 15th this year.  We’ll surely be there and hope to see you there too.

Hit the logistics page if you still don’t know where to go.  Hit the schedule page if you still don’t know what to expect. Badges will be waiting for you at registration. Look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow and have a great camp.

DreamHost (http://www.dreamhost.com) is proud to be a sponsor of WordCamp Orange County 2012! This is not only because we love WordPress, but also because we’re headquartered right here in the OC!

Hosting over 600,000 WordPress sites, we’re constantly looking for ways to make our hosting more WordPress friendly.

Supporting Open Source is a huge part of our core philosophies, and we contribute back to the WordPress core and plugin developers.  You can see our progress on many projects at GitHub (https://github.com/dreamhost).

We’re hiring both a WordPress Hacker (developer & contributor) and WordPress tech support!  Check out our postings (http://dreamhostcareers.silkroad.com), or chat with Mike Schroder (DH-Shredder/@GetSource) while at WordCamp.

About DreamHost:

DreamHost is a leading web hosting and cloud services provider with over 330,000 customers and 1.2 million domain names hosted worldwide. The company offers a wide spectrum of web hosting and cloud solutions including traditional Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, and Domain Name Registration. DreamHost is the principal sponsor of the Ceph open-source distributed storage system. Please visit http://www.dreamhost.com for more information.

Coming to WordCamp from outside the area? The great folks at Vanguard University are opening up their dorms to our out-of-town guests! They are offering lodging in the dorms for $27 per person per night, and an optional linen package of $3 per person.  See the logistics page for contact details

If you use WordPress to build things for other people, we want to make your life easier. No matter whether you freelance on a solo basis, lead a small web shop, make plugins in a dark closet, or crack the whip at a large design firm, our aim is to become your go-to source of information and resources to help you expand your WordPress skills and know-how. To make you better at what you do. To make it easier to make your living and look great doing it.

You’re part of a tribe of WordPress designers and developers over 10,000 strong, spanning the entire globe. CodePoet.com aims to bring the working knowledge and real world strategies of those people into one place, for you tap into.

Hey there Orange County!  WP Engine is coming to hang  out with you guys for your WordCamp.  We’ll have some shwag to give away, and be looking to hang out with you guys and talk all things WordPress.

Before we get into all of that, WP Engine want to give a big thanks to all the organizers for their hard work putting this together.  A big conference like this one takes a few months of prep work, and all of the organizers have done a fantastic job to make the whole event possible, and we’re grateful.

WP Engine is sending a couple of really awesome folks to the OC for the WordCamp: Ben Metcalfe, and Jason Cosper.  Both of these guys are going to be attending the events and will be looking to talk to developers about their sites, maybe giving a few WordPress pointers, and definitely sharing stories about WordPress lore.  They’ve both been part of WordPress since very early, and have some great stories to tell.

Both Ben and Jason will have free accounts for life to give out, along with T-Shirts and maybe some lanyards for everyone who can track them down and find them.

How to Spot Ben and Jason

• You’ll be able to spot Ben Metcalfe by his often orange hair, as well as his very cool British accent.  Ben has been active with WordPress since it was called “B2,” and has unique insight into how the platform has become a global powerhouse.  Follow Ben on Twitter @dotBen, to see what he’s up to.
• Jason Cosper’s beard should be back in full force, so look for the guy rocking WP Engine gear underneath a beard to find Jason.  Jason has been developing since 1995, and on WordPress since 2005, and has become a WordPress specialist over the years.  Follow Jason on twitter @boogah, to see where he’ll be!

This is the part where we talk about how awesome WP Engine is, so prepare yourself for a full-frontal attack of marketing that no mere mortal can withstand:

You’ve heard the rumors of pages being delivered in milliseconds, blogs scaling instantly when they get featured in the New York Times, and top-tier security.

This is WP Engine – the premier, managed WordPress hosting company. WP Engine serves 125,000,000 requests daily, each one carefully and continuously tuned for speed, scalability, and security. As a hosting company, WP Engins is beloved by hundreds of bloggers from huge, popular sites down to small company home pages who care about their SEO ranking and their users’ experience. Perhaps best of all is their tech support.  Only WordPress experts answer questions and solve support tickets, with a first response within 30 minutes.

Don’t take our word for it though.  Test how much faster your WordPress could be at speed.wpengine.com and let us prove it to you.

Now, here’s a picture of a LolCat.

Looking forward to seeing you guys there!

Wordnik helps both bloggers and casual readers find and discover meaningful content. Our first product,wordnik.com, is the world’s largest online dictionary, powered by our “word graph” technology which understands the complex relationships between all the words in the English language. Now, we’re bringing our word graph and discovery technology to WordPress.

We are designing unique and ground-breaking WordPress plugins that will take your blog to the next level. With our content discovery engine, we can help your readers discover interesting content and help you, the blogger, add related content to your posts. Together, these tools will help you understand your readers better, turn casual readers into engaged members of your community, and help you build a community of bloggers with shared interests and linked posts.

Interested in learning more about our product? Take a quick survey that will help us make it even better and sign up for our beta release.

The tentative schedule has finally been posted!  There may still be some final tweaks to the line up, but it’s pretty solid at this point.  You can also find out details on each of the sessions on the sessions page, and bios of the speakers on the speakers page.

We are super excited to bring you this line up.  We are proud that so many of the presenters represent Orange County and the OC Meetup Group.  We really have some a long way since Steve Zengut and Jeff Turner started the meetup over two years ago.

Also, we are trying something a bit different this year with the tracks.  We did not list the tracks with the usual Designer and Developer titles.  Rather, we only tried to pair up presentations that seemed like they’d split the audience.  (Granted, there are many pairing that could be tough calls.) The idea is to break down the designer/developer paradigm a bit and encourage more cross-pollination and mingling.

Looking forward to seeing everyone at the event!

I had one thing I wanted to do today – post the initial speaker schedule.  But it’s starting to look like that will have to wait for Monday.  But just know that the joint chiefs of camp got together last Tuesday and created a schedule.  The schedule has been reviewed and approved, and is ready for posting.  Some of the speakers have already announced themselves, so if you are watching Twitter and Facebook, you may find some clues.  So next week, look forward to the big reveal so you can start planning which sessions you are going to attend.