A Message From the Organizer
WordCamp San Diego 2016 just wrapped up and it was our biggest and best camp yet! As lead organizer, I may be a bit biased…but our feedback so far has been tremendous, and the whole team is super excited!
We really wanted to focus on “The WordPress Community” this year and went with the theme, “Make Waves”. With 600 attendees and a campus-like venue, we thought it was important to have a singular area to pull everyone together. So, we set up a community-centric room where we strategically placed our snacks, coffee, internet access, and sponsors. This allowed us to provide our sponsors with the exposure they deserved while encouraging the speakers and attendees to make new and meaningful connections. It was great to see this space come alive with conversation, laughter and smiling faces throughout the weekend!
Despite all the long months and countless hours of planning, there are still nervous butterflies going into these weekends. As the chaos of day one starts to dwindle, and feedback has made its way up through the ranks…that’s when you finally start to have an idea of what’s been accomplished. All of these insanely awesome people have come together – and they’ve made this amazing thing happen. And it’s more than talks and ideas and learning. It’s friendships and connection, a sense of community, and a real purpose! The people who inspire that to happen are the ones I’d like to thank: the sponsors for their generosity, the speakers for their knowledge, the volunteers for their selflessness, my fellow organizers for (too many things to even list, ha), and last but not least the attendees who are the glue that makes all of this a big, sticky glob of nerd-tastic fun.
We will be back bigger and better than ever in 2017 and we hope to see you all, plus 2 or 10 of your friends, next year!
Chris Perryman
Meet a Plugin Author
Over the course of the weekend, insightful conversations with the community at our local WordCamp made it an enjoyable experience. We met developers. site admins, and agency owners who shared a variety of insights and ways we might continue product and feature development.
WordCamp San Diego is especially important to our team because it’s in our home town. Our founder Devin is an organizer, Matt Cromwell is leading the Beginner Track, and I also volunteered as the Social Media Manager for WordCamp. We also were able to sponsor and I know Jason had fun giving our swag out.
With over 10,000 active installs in the first year, Give is the leading cause marketing and donations tool for WordPress-powered web properties. Upon activation, Give provides you with robust features geared towards helping your nonprofit or crowdfunding cause. We welcome you to read our Give Stories to learn more about how people are using Give.
WordCamps are also an opportunity for us to meet friends and customers who are now using Give for online donations. To be with so many of them at one time was special. We also received many thanks. I’m also sure we have lots to discuss moving forward to continue improving and growing our business.
– Bridget Willard, WordImpress
Meet an Attendee
My name is Richard Geiger and I live and work in Anchorage, Alaska. I own Geigabyte, a web design, and social media marketing company. I began working with WordPress in 2010 while finishing up my coursework at Sessions College for Professional Design.
WordCamp San Diego 2016 was my first WordCamp. I attended the San Diego WordCamp because the website was informative and class offerings appeared to be quite interesting. When I attended the event it was well organized and it had excellent speakers. The best part of the WordCamp was being able talk to other WordCamp participants and speak with the vendors about their products and services.
I found some very useful classes that the WordCamp offered. The classes on “Understand HTTPS and Transport Layer Security (TLS)” were very informative. I realized that majority of the websites using TLS are not correctly setup so these website are not secure. The presenter gave us a website to test our TLS setup. When I returned to my hotel room that night and ran a test on my client’s sites that use TLS I found they were all setup correctly! I was very pleased.
I also found the session “WordPress Development Environments” informative. I did not realize that there were so many options besides WAMP or MAMP on which to develop a WordPress website.
The session ”Dude, Speed Up That Website!” was a great education. I implemented most of the speaker’s suggestions using compression plugins on the sites I manage. At the beginning of the lecture I did not fully understand some of the compression settings on various plugins. But, by the end of the session, I had a good grasp on the settings so that I could get even more speed on existing websites.
I am going to use my WordCamp experience to help a group of WordPress users and developers in Anchorage, Alaska to bring a WordCamp to Anchorage. So far I have not been successful but in the future when I apply to bring a WordCamp to Anchorage, I will be able to say I have been to one and understand how camps are set up.
My favorite WordCamp story is when I was taking a session on “Wrangle the WordPress Template Hierarchy Like a Boss.” After the instructor’s presentation, we began asking questions. The instructor requested that the people with questions come up and state their names and question so that they would be on WordPress TV. I think most of us were trying to avoid being on TV so we avoided asking additional questions. The instructor was aware of that and she was quite amused at our reluctance to appear on TV. She had excellent motivation skills because I gave in and went up to ask my question.
