Sessions at WordCamp San Francisco 2011 on Friday 12th August

New to WordPress, or trying to convince someone to use it who is? This session is for you. An introduction to the WordPress ecosystem and how some organizations are working within it will be followed by examples and case studies of large-scale installations who are using WordPress to do great things.

Lead BuddyPress developer will walk through the code changes in the latest releas of the popular social networking plugin.

There are many challenges when it comes to convincing your company that WordPress is a true CMS — and once you have convinced your company to make the switch to WordPress, there are challenges when it comes time to port 100s of 1000s of records/posts/content types and expose that data to world. Get a guided tour of the issues and considerations that came into play during eMusic’s recent switch to WordPress and learn what you can do to make your own process as smooth as possible.

This talk will discuss professional WordPress development, scaling up and out to meet demand, and strategies for deploying everything that will keep you sane. Topics for discussion: Apache, Memcached, APC, nginx, NFS, rsync, Git, Capistrano.

“Nice site!” “Great theme!” “Buy Cialis!”

Some spam is more obvious than the rest… But what is it doing on your site? How did it get there? How did it defeat the Captcha, and why didn’t that nifty invisible javascript stop the spam-bot anyway?

Can you tell the spam from the ham? Find out how (and why) spam finds your site. And learn the best practices for managing it.

In June of 2011, Observer.com relaunched on WordPress, joining Betabeat.com and PolitickerNY.com to form a network of WordPress sites. Why was WordPress chosen to replace Drupal, the site’s CMS since 2007, and what are the comparative advantages of each system for a newsroom? How were 100,000 articles migrated from Drupal to WordPress, and how did the new site stand up to heavy load? Which plugins crashed the site, and which saved the day? This talk will range from a high-level business overview to a deep exploration of individual files in WordPress’s core.

About 2/3 of the world population speak more than one language and most of the world doesn’t use the Internet in English. This presentation will cover what components are needed for a successful multilingual WordPress site. We’ll compare different set-ups, review key plugins and examine common pitfalls. Then we’ll look at advanced features like e-commerce and email marketing.

Thanks to cloud-based services and Open Source technologies, IP is not only changing, it is being redefined and it is helping increase the value of many a start-up (and service) like never before. I am the founder of Tabletracker, a restaurant booking service whose arms, legs, and many other organs are powered by cloud based services. The brain of our service is our technology, and data-base management software, but at its heart, we have used WP and BuddyPress to power-up a community of restaurant lovers, foodies, and critics to create stickiness and brand loyalty. Our beta service combines feeds and API’s from various services such as Qype, OpenTable, Google Maps and others. We use BuddyPress and have enabled reward points, activity badges, restaurant reviews and recommendations and more in one beautiful service that pushes the boundaries of what each of these services can do. Our commitment to the WP community is to give back as much of our knowledge as possible, and to encourage users and WP novices to look into the power of open source as the example to follow when building “Monster” companies and services of your own. Because, quite frankly, why would you want to re-invent the wheel, when building a beter car?

Like most universities, Carleton University had, after a decade of the web, a group of villages instead of a city representing it on the internet. And so with a small team Computing and Communication Services at the university used WordPress to rebuild all 200 of its front-facing informational sites in a little under 2 years. Andrew Riddles explains the background to this project, outlines how the team achieved buy-in from the Carleton community and management, and describes how the new system was implemented.

Query, Rewrite, etc. Nobody knows how this stuff works. More importantly, nobody knows how deeply pluggable everything is. I will begin by posting a request on my blog in June. The audience will pose questions about how things work or how to get certain things done. I will take the best questions and build a presentation around them.

This presentation focuses on breaking down the communication barriers that can make working with a developer more difficult than it needs to be. The presentation will cover

• Interviewing Your Potential Developer
• Planning & Project Management
• Using A Version Control System
• Bug Reporting.

The session will give the audience a reality check on how to go about working with a developer to get a custom WordPress site (or any digital project) built on time and on budget. After attending this session, the audience will have a better understanding of what goes on in the mind of a developer. Armed with this knowledge, clients can contribute to a more effective development process. This will help to reduce costs and save precious time.

It goes without saying that WordPress is not just for blogs but also the ideal platform for CMS applications.* In this talk I’ll show how WordPress can be used to build very specialized, custom CMS applications. Along the way, I’ll talk about the content-related considerations which go into rolling out a CMS application and illustrate with some of my recent work at MIT.

• Sorry I said it.

WordPress provides an excellent platform for non-profit organizations to build out their web presence. In this joint session, two unique non-profit projects will be showcased, and questions about both projects and/or why using WordPress is such a benefit to non-profits will be answered by both presenters.

CURE International

Learn how CURE International moved to WordPress to become an award-winning website as well as providing their constituents with the world’s first social sponsorship platform (cure.org/curekids). This talk will also cover the release of Personal Fundraiser, an open source (GPL) WordPress plugin that provides organizations the ability to allow their fans and constituents to create their own custom online fundraisers using Paypal donations and other payment methods.

UNICEF in Uganda

We built a very graphically oriented custom theme for UNICEF in Uganda. The product is a information portal that includes resources about health, education, workers rights, and more. We get our content from the Uganda Ministry of Health, Ministry of Education, and other in-country partners. The portals are deployed in rural community centers. These centers have spotty internet at best. We wanted to keep all the systems sync’ed, so we devised a process that includes:

• a centralized WordPress “master” install, where content creators & administrators add new resources
• a custom script that packages the “master” install into a distributable format — on CD-ROM or USB Stick.
• a custom script that installs (and updates) WordPress onto the community center machines.

This script installs a full system to support WordPress (Apache, MySQL, PHP) and the system runs locally on the machines. The community center machines are updated periodically, when new content becomes available on the master machine and someone is available to drive to the rural off-the-grid areas, or automatically for those machines that have infrequent internet access. We think this is a really unique way of using WordPress, and it creates a lot of social good. We’re pretty happy with the results — it’s a really cool looking application, with some amazing materials.