I had the pleasure of attending the Southern California WordPress Meetup at Kleverdog Coworking in Chinatown along with Media Temple CS Rockstar Amanda Winston. The meetup was well attended by over 55 people.
Automattic Theme Wrangler, Konstantin Obenland, presented on the changes in WordPress 3.5 and the new default theme, Twenty Twelve. I was the only person in the group currently using the new theme for their blog, so my website was demonstrated to the group. The mobile responsiveness of Twenty Twelve was shown using a handy online mobile site emulator, which can be found here.
The second part of the meetup included a Show and Tell from the members of the group. I was able to present how I used the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to easily create meta boxes to display recurring information on my website, Thinkspace Gallery. WordCamp LA Organizer Austin Passy showed off his site, http://extendd.com/, a plugin marketplace that he is working on. Joseph Karr O’Connor demonstrated his website, Accessible Joe where free Section 508 accessible compliant themes for WordPress can be found. BuddyPress developer @modemlooper demonstrated his work in progress on Status App which allows you to update your BuddyPress status right from a mobile device. Another great site that was shown was http://buildyourwpsite.com/, which is a guided tutorial on how to get set up with WordPress and a domain.
This was an excellent meetup and I look forward to my next visit! Thank you to all that were involved in sponsoring and putting this meetup on, it was a great success!
I am the (mt) Media Temple WordPress Evangelist. (mt) Media Temple is a developer-friendly web hosting company, in Culver City, California, where I am known as “mt_Suzette”. I keep (mt) Media Temple support up-to-date on the latest in WordPress, I also speak at WordPress Meetups and WordCamps nationwide, blog at suzettefranck.com, and I am also a regular contributor on WPWatercooler.com. I have been a part of the WordPress Community since 2011, when I first spoke on BuddyPress at OC WordCamp.
I am hand-coder at heart, and I have been in love with web development for over 18+ years, including surviving the table layouts and font tags of the 90′s, up through coding my own PHP and MySQL content management system in 2000 before CMSs were in wide use. I discovered WordPress five years ago and I have used it to develop over 200 WordPress custom themes, mostly from the Twenty Eleven default theme.
I have always embraced new technology and I am eager to learn new things and show them to the world. I am an advocate for open source, wiki and documentation, and web standards. I am passionate about teaching others on the wonders of WordPress, and my hope is to inspire others to collaborate and share their knowledge.
Great recap Suzzette, I was very impressed by the work you did on Thinkspace Gallery. Its a great example of what you can do with a child theme of Twentyeleven.
Appreciate the mention of buildyourwpsite.com (also a child theme of Twentyeleven) and looking forward to seeing you at future meetups!
Thank you for the kind words, Belsien! On thinkspacegallery.com, I actually forked the Twenty Eleven theme code and made it my own. It is a better practice to use a child theme, as you mentioned, to ensure maximum updatability. I am currently working on a simplistic child theme for Twenty Twelve, and I am looking forward to digging in the stylesheet. The codex has a great article on building child themes: http://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
Thanks for the shout out on Extendd!
So wished I could have attended this fine event. Thanks, Stephanie