Some Thoughts on Local WordCamps

WordCamps are, by definition, local events. There are many opinions about this within the community, some of which conflict with the guidelines set down for WordCamps. With that in mind, I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on it all from the perspective of a long-time WordCamp organiser who used to be critical of many of those guidelines but now works on the WordCamp Central team.

What WordPress means to me

“WordPress is web software you can use to create a beautiful website or blog. We like to say that WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.” That’s how WordPress is introduced on WordPress.org – a humble introduction for software that powers a huge chunk of the internet. Not only that, but to many people (myself included) WordPress is more than just ‘web software’ – it enables and signifies something far greater than that. This is what WordPress mean to me.

Setting up my WordPress development environment

Plenty of posts have been written about setting up a local development environment for WordPress, but when I moved to a new Macbook (running OS X Yosemite) I couldn’t find a post that contained all the instructions I needed. After some searching I got everything up and running and thought it would be worthwhile to share my process and tools here for posterity.

Better bbPress admin icons

After recently training a client on how to use their new bbPress-powered site, I discovered that the default admin menu icons for bbPress are not very intuitive and the client found them slightly confusing, so I improved them.

Storing snippets in Gist

I’ve been using Gist for a while, but only as a way to quickly share snippets of code with people. I’ve now decided to change that a bit and make better use of the service – as a result I have added all my snippets from this blog to my Gists and I will continue to add even the smallest snippets as I develop them.