Author Archives: Siobhan

About Siobhan

Siobhan is the lead organiser of WordCamp Whitley Bay, her hometown in the North-East of England where she spends a lot of time on the beach with her dog and kids. When she's not organising WC Whitley Bay she's the COO of Human Made and runs WP Includes.

A Big Thank You to WooThemes!

woothemes_logoWooThemes is supporting WordCamp Europe as a Platinum Sponsor, so a huge thank you to them for their support. You’ll see all of the WooThemes folks running around at WordCamp Europe as they’re having their annual WooTrip at the event. Be sure to say to them.

And watch out at the after-party, because WooThemes have organised an extra surprise for all of the event’s attendees.

WooThemes is an international, market leading, bootstrapped business providing a platform to extend standard WordPress-powered websites via a range of innovative themes and plugins. With WooThemes businesses and individuals can get professional WordPress sites launched quickly and affordably.

Welcome to .Me as a Platinum Sponsor!

me.Me is the country code top level domain for Montenegro, although it’s popular all over the net because of the multiple meanings of the word “me”. As fans of the .me domain, we’re really excited to have them on board as a platinum sponsor. Without the support of companies like .me, WordCamp Europe wouldn’t be possible.

Shortly after Montenegro gained independence in June of 2006, the ISO 3165 Maintenance Agency assigned the emerging nation the country code ME. Proud of the country’s new-found sovereignty, the new government of Montenegro took important additional measures to formalize the country’s fledging independence. One such step was to submit an application to IANA for delegation of .Me as the country’s Top Level Domain (TLD). The delegation was finally approved and took place in September 2007.

Understanding that “ME” has multiple meanings and has mass appeal as a word, the government of Montenegro embarked on generalizing the .Me name space so that anyone and everyone could enjoy obtaining a .Me for themselves. As a result, in November of 2007, a formal public RFP was issued to find a Registration Agent who could provide a world-class registry platform, run operations for an international registry, and deliver marketing expertise to make .Me a worldwide success. The contract was eventually awarded to doMEn, d.o.o., a Montenegrin joint venture (doing business as .Me Registry), whose partners include Afilias Limited, GoDaddy.com, Inc., and ME-net d.o.o.

Thank you to Site 5!

site51-1A big thank you to Site5 for supporting WordCamp Europe as a Diamond Sponsor. Diamond sponsors are the cornerstone of WordCamp Europe, providing all of the support that we need to get the event off the ground. We’re really happy to have the on board.

And to sweeten the deal, Site 5 are offering one year’s free hosting to all WordCamp Europe attendees. Be sure to stop by their table and find out how you can sign up.

Site5‘s hosting is designed from the ground up for designers and developers as well as their clients. Our backend control panel is easy to use, and features a custom user management system so that you can add additional contacts with specific access levels on top of a cPanel-based system.

This makes it easy for clients to add their designer or developer onto a specific project and easily jump between accounts. Plus with our global focus, our customers have the choice of more than 15 hosting locations around the world for shared hosting, reseller hosting, and VPS services.

Thanks to W3 Edge for being a Diamond Sponsor!

20090725-q9h4d8dsqec1d9texrqd2prw8tA huge thanks for W3 Edge for supporting WordCamp Europe as a Diamond sponsor. WordCamp Europe wouldn’t be possible without the generous support of companies like W3 Edge. Make sure to stop by their table, say “hi”, and thank them for being such an important part of the event.

Return on investment (R.O.I.) centric web professionals live here. We love building social media oriented web applications, defining and executing your online marketing strategies and helping you re-define success as you move forward each year.

Over the years we’ve served many companies and brands you may know: ASOS Adorama, AIGA, Brian Softs, Center for Disease Control, Constant Contact, CVS Pharmacy, Envato, Hyatt, Jonathan Snook, Kodak, Lord & Taylor, Mashable, Microsoft, Neil Patel, Pearsonified, Sanyo, Sherwin Williams, Smashing Magazine, Southwest Airlines, Staples, Sony, R.E.I., Weight Watchers, Yahoo, Yoast

From branding and interactive design to web application development and marketing, we’re the only web design company you need to hire — let’s develop your ideas into a business.

 

Sign up for the Contributor Day

The WordCamp Europe Contributor Day will take place on 7th October in De Waag, Leiden, 11am – 7pm. The Contributor Day is an opportunity for people to get together to contribute to WordPress. It’s for both seasoned contributors and people making their first foray into getting involved. Everyone is welcome, but please note that numbers are limited to 150. So please do not register unless you plan to attend and you plan to contribute to WordPress. Here are some of the things you’ll be able to do:

  • contribute your first patch to core
  • fix bugs
  • test
  • translate WordPress or WordPress plugins
  • write documentation
  • help out on the support forums or IRC
  • contribute to BuddyPress
  • contribute to GlotPress
  • get involved with accessibility

Please sign up using this form. If you sign up and then are unable to go, please drop us an email to let us know.

 

Speaker: Floor Drees

dreesFloor Drees is originally from The Netherlands, but moved to Vienna, Austria 2 years ago. She is an experienced event organiser, having organised a number of Rails Girls events, co-organising vienna.rb, and the WordPress user group in Vienna. She’s a tech reporter for inventures.eu and a developer evangelist at usersnap.com. After working as a community manager for over 5 years, she missed making stuff and started to learn programming last year. In her presentation “Working towards great version control for content creators”, she’ll merge her interest in programming with her interest in creating content.

As someone who writes with other people, I often encounter the same problem: you either email tiny changes to your article to the one who’s ultimately responsible for the website, which is bound to go wrong. Or you log into your CMS, make some changes to your piece and save it, while one of the other editors does the exact same thing, just using another shiny laptop. Changes get lost. Stuff gets added twice and you end up frustrated because the preview doesn’t reflect your work. Now this is annoying as it is, but if you program a bit on the side (like I do) and you use version control, you know that there is a solution for that. For WordCamp, I’ll gather my thoughts on what would make a great version control tool for WordPress and test existing plugins by these requirements.

Speaker: Sean Herron

seanherronJoining us from Washington DC is Sean Herron. Sean is a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House working on Open Data Initiatives with the Food and Drug Administration. Sean is a digital strategist, web developer, and policy expert dedicated to creating easier ways for citizens to interact with their government. Most recently, he served as a Strategist in the Open Innovation office at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), where he spearheaded open data and open source initiatives for the agency. Sean is responsible for one of the first deployed WordPress instances in the U.S. Government, openNASA, and frequently works with other agencies to advise on best practices for WordPress security, community building, and open source participation. He has a passion for web standards and responsive design and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Public Policy from the Maxwell School at Syracuse University.

His presentation will be “WordPress as a Platform: Empowering Civic Change through Code”.

The growth of WordPress across the internet has brought phenomenal change in the way organizations are able to interact with their audiences. Beyond simple website generation, the flexibility of WordPress as a CMS has enabled governments and civic groups to rapidly create tools used by millions of citizens to better understand and interact with their communities. Discover how organizations like NASA and the White House are using WordPress to catalog and share open data, offer electronic services, and solicit feedback from citizen, and learn best practices in security, usability, and performance when designing WordPress platforms designed to scale to millions of users.

Speakers: Mike Schroder and Marko Heijnen

WordPress 3.5 saw a transformation in the way media was handled in WordPress. We’re lucky to have two of the core contributors behind wp_image_editor at WordCamp Europe to talk about it. Based in Los Angeles, Mike Schroder works at Dreamhost where he spends his time making sure that WordPress runs as smoothly as possible. He’ll be joined on stage by Marko Heijnen, a developer based in the Netherlands, who is active in WordPress core and the GlotPress project. A great example of transnational collaboration, Mike and Marko will be talking about “Perfect your Images using WordPress.”

In the past, image manipulation in WordPress was an alchemy of mixing GD functions and WordPress functions together to (hopefully) turn out the desired result. In WordPress 3.5+, GD is abstracted out, and a new class, WP_Image_Editor, allows easy manipulation of image files. This lets you perform simple resizing, crops, flips, rotates, and real-time streaming of those results using Imagick or GD. But, that’s not all! You can also easily extend WordPress’ classes to add your own functions, or replace the entire engine with your own.

This session will walk through what’s changed for image manipulation in 3.5, and explain ways you can take advantage of the APIs, both through using them directly and extending them for plugins of your own.

Speaker: Bram Duvigneau

Bram is a freelance software developer and accessibility consultant from Arnhem, the Netherlands. While not coding, tinkering with technology or doing other geeky stuff, he likes to walk with his dog.

Blind from birth, Bram is in the perfect position to explain accessibility related issues in a way that make sense to developers. He’ll be presenting on the topic “Practical WordPress Accessibility.”

In this presentation I would like to give an overview of the current state of WordPress accessibility and why building accessible software is important.

Through some examples I will show how certain accessibility techniques influence how assistive technology is reading a web page.

I’ll give some tips and pointers to theme and plugin developers and finish with a Q&A session.