WordCamp Philly 2011

Brian is the creator of the StartBox theme framework, a long time designer, avid photographer, and general all-around nice guy. He’s been using WordPress since 2007 and have helped launch well over 60 WP-powered sites over the last 4 years.

Brian will be giving a presentation in the Designer Track titled: A base framework won’t box you in

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
Frameworks Don’t Box You In — A look at the rapid development and extreme flexibility you gain by building things exactly the same every time. Many people have formed the misconception that frameworks are very stringent, sterile development tools. I know from experience, however, that they provide and amazing launching pad for extreme creativity. Using just CSS I’ll demonstrate how you can take a vanilla install of StartBox and produce a beautiful and unique site.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
Having never visited, I’m going to say my favorite thing is visiting somewhere new. It sounds like a really cool town with a lively and varied atmosphere.
Why do you love WordPress?
WordPress offers an unmatchable level of customizability and ease of usability, both for myself and my clients. The massive community is amazing — constantly producing training resources, plugins, themes and more — is tremendously helpful and inspiring. I can’t imagine building with or using any other platform.

Andrew is a Happiness Engineer at Automattic where he replies to support requests for WordPress.com users every day. He’s also involved in developing Edit Flow, which he spoke about at WordCamp Philly 2010. He’s been in customer service jobs for the last 9 years in various industries.

Andrew will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Getting Support in an Open Source World

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I’m speaking about how to find and get the best support possible with open source software. Working as a Happiness Engineer at Automattic I help people with WordPress all day long so I see a lot of really great support requests but also some that need more information, clarification, and direction.
My talk will help answer the question of “If I need to get help with ___ in WordPress where should I ask and what should I do?” Sort of tips and tricks to getting the best support possible.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
The history and its ties to early self-publishing in the U.S.
Why do you love WordPress?
It allows millions of people to publish freely on the web in an easy to use way that can be seen by anyone. It has a fantastic community of people around it who are friendly, caring, and genuinely want to do great things for the web.

Jake Goldman is the owner of 10up LLC, a web agency focused on content management and awesome WordPress implementations. At 10up, Jake works on exciting and wide ranging WordPress projects, like TechCrunch, 9 to 5 Mac, Hip2Save, and m62 visualcommunications. Jake is a writer and expert reviewer for Smashing Magazine, and has authored over a dozen highly rated WordPress plug-ins. Jake founded and continues to organize the WordPress Providence meet up, and has spoken at WordCamps around the country, including Boston, New York, Mid-Altantic, Chicago, and Miami.

Jake will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Editing the Visual Editor

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I heard great things about last year’s WordCamp Philly, and consider one of the organizers a friend. I love spreading new ideas at WordCamps, and this one isn’t too far from my home base in Rhode Island. I also think Philly is a beautiful city, and am bringing along my wonderful girlfriend, who lived here for a year, and still has friends in the city.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
The history!
Why do you love WordPress?
I love building websites; I’ve been doing it since the mid-90s. I’ve worked with many publishing platforms and tools, and today’s WordPress is by far the best. We can do amazing things with a fraction of the effort it took not 5 years, with lesser results. Today, WordPress represents the overwhelming share of my company’s work, keeping all 4 full time employees, plus contractors, quite busy.

Yasmine Mustafa’s two main passions are123LinkIt.com and GirlDevelopIt. 123LinkIt is a blog advertising company with the #1 mos tdownloaded WordPress affiliate tool. The software scans blog posts and transforms product keywords into affiliate links. GirlDevelopIt aims to repair the wide gender gap in development by focusing on helping women learn how to program in a supportive and fun environment. When she has free time, Yasmine enjoys people watching and playing poker.

Yasmine will be giving a presentation in the User Track titled: How I Made over $15,000 from One Blog Post

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I’m going to use an old blog as a case study and discuss how I earned thousands of dollars through in-text advertising. I’ll go through best practices and little tricks I’ve learned along the way.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
I love to eat so I have to say the restaurants. Plus, there’s *always* something going on.
Why do you love WordPress?
As a non-techie who wishes I could code, I feel empowered using it because I can make changes and customizations I otherwise won’t be able to.

Nile Flores is a mother, pro blogger, as well as a WordPress Designer and Developer. She has been in the WordPress community since its b2 days. Her goal has always been to help people rock out their websites.

Nile has spoken at several WordCamps since 2010 and it is not uncommon to see her in the WordPress support forums or on Twitter fielding questions. He passions are to teach and help. These are reflected in both her websites, Blondish.net and WPAddict.net.

Nile will be giving a presentation in the Designer Track titled: WordPress Design and Development For the Client In Mind

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
As a designer and developer, it is always a challenge in finding a way to make using a site easier for each individual client. For many, WordPress might be new to them or they may not be very web savvy.
It can be frustrating and sometimes time consuming. Let me help you take away some of those future headaches.
I am going to cover ways you can make it easier for you to address these challenges and hopefully inspire you to add improved techniques to your WordPress design and development so your clients are more comfortable with using their websites.
I will be holding at the end Q & A session for anyone who has questions.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
Well, truhtfully I have not been to Philadelphia. Funny since I grew up a military brat that I had not gotten the chance to travel through there, but I am a history buff and Philadelphia is a city that appeals to my love of learning about Philadelphia and seeing some of the landmarks that were involved in shaping our country. While I may have not been there, I will be taking suggestions on places to visit and even places to eat. So please, feel free to strike up a conversation and let me know more about Philadelphia from your own experience. 🙂
Why do you love WordPress?
I love WordPress for many reasons. I have been in the community for a long time and saw its growth from its b2 cafelog days to what it is today. Learning the nooks and crannies of not just blogging, but designing and developing with it has been a real treat. Through WordPress and blogging, I have met a lot of great people, and taught a lot of people that I am proud to see doing so well using WordPress. What is not to love? WordPress is a CMS a fan girl and designer’s dream to use and work with.

Mike Toppa is the Director of the web application team for Penn’s School of Medicine Information Services. He has been coding for the web since the days of Mosaic and Netscape 1.0. His 16 years in web application development range from academic experience at Georgetown, Stanford, and Penn, to dot com experience at Ask Jeeves and E*Trade. Mike is the author of several free WordPress plugins and assists in managing web sites for several non-profit organizations. Although his current responsibilities are in management, he maintains a passion for code and is an advocate of Agile coding practices.

Mike will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Applying Agile Coding Techniques to WordPress Plugin Development

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
The latest version of my “Shashin” plugin is designed to let you mix and match photos and videos in WordPress, from Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, etc. I will present it as a case study of the possibilities and challenges with applying “clean code” techniques to WordPress plugin development. Clean code “always looks like it was written by someone who cares” and “reads like well written prose.” It is all about writing software that is optimized for maintainability, reliability, and future enhancement. I’ll discuss the use of meaningful names, the single responsibility principle, dependency inversion, the facade pattern, unit testing, and how to apply them to WordPress plugin development.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
There’s a t-shirt that sums it up: “I’m not angry, I’m from Philly”
Why do you love WordPress?
The gigantic community that provides themes and plugins for WordPress let you make it do almost anything you could want, and look like anything you want, and you don’t have to be a programmer to enjoy it all.

Jayvie is a freelance web designer who has been using WordPress since its initial release, 0.71. In addition to making websites, he coaches his clients on content creation for the web, and speaks at WordCamps about design. He’s also known for the occasional contrarian editorial, although his inner Thomas Paine is on vacation. His speaking engagements and writing focus on common sense approaches to design, development and project management.

You can follow Jayvie on Twitter @onefinejay

Jay will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Workshop session: HTML to WordPress theme conversion

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I will be holding a workshop session on converting HTML files to WordPress themes, with a focus on better practices on when to use Template Parts, widgetized areas, etc.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
Geno’s and the USS Olympia on Penn’s Landing.
Why do you love WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress since the day it came out, and b2 before that. I can’t even answer this question. WordPress is like a body part to me now. It’s like trying to explain why I like having two ears and ten fingers and two eyes. 🙂

Dave Konopka is a full stack web developer based in Philly who loves hacking on backend and frontend code. He knows his way around WordPress custom plugins and themes, BuddyPress community sites, and Multisite installations. Dave also organizes Build Guild Philly, a monthly social meetup for web nerds who enjoy adult beverages. You can find him on Twitter @davekonopka.

Dave will be giving a presentation in the Designer Track titled: Get control of WP with version control

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
How to make the most of source code revision control tools like Subversion and Git for WordPress projects, whether you’re setting up sites or developing custom themes and plugins.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
I love the contrast of all the fun restaurants, bars, and urban scenery alongside all the green outdoors space. That and all six Rocky movies.
Why do you love WordPress?
Usability. WordPress is one of the few pieces of web software that non-tech-folk use and love immediately.

Reed has been working with WordPress for 2 years or so, making websites and teaching, and I’m the Principal of a web development company, Delta Angel. He’s the co-leader of the Web Design group of the Philadelphia Area Computer Society and a board member of the Philadelphia Area New Media Association.

Reed will be giving a presentation in the Power User Track titled: Custom menus and navigation

What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I’ll be doing two workshops at the Beginner level – In the morning session, I’ll show the key features and options for creating content, and in the afternoon, the key administrative options for managing your site. Also, I’ll teach an intermediate level session on customizing menus and navigation, using the Twenty Ten theme as a model.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
We have an amazing community of tech/creative people who share information, put on wonderful events, and improve the quality of life for everyone.
Why do you love WordPress?
WordPress is flexible and useful to many different kinds of people: bloggers, developers, designers, content producers, and people in business; it also has a reasonable learning curve for such a powerful platform.