3 Evenings – Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – January 17, 18 & 19
6:30 – 8:30 PM (FULL)

Join us for a 3-session class in which we’ll build a basic website using WordPress, a friendly tool for creating and managing blogs and web sites. We will use WordPress.com, a free hosting provider for the WordPress software, which means no pesky software installation or hosting requirements.

The January session of this workshop is full.  We will be repeating this workshop in March if you missed it on this go-round.

What you will learn:

You’ll learn how to plan your site, choose a design, and create pages with photos, videos, and text.

At the same time, you’ll be learning about WordPress, the leading open source tool for building simple web sites and blogs.

We’ll be using a pattern for a 3-page professional site with a blog, and following step-by-step instructions for creating:

• A Home Page
• About Us, Products or Services Page
• Contact Form
• Blog

Register

Lesson overview

• Session 1: Why Use WordPress, Planning Your Site
• Session 2: Choose a Theme, add your content, working with the editor
• Session 3: Working with widgets, contact forms, and next steps

Fridays, 2:00 – 3:00 PM (after the WordPress Support Group)

Cost:  $10

The public demands it!  We will now be offering a CSS clinic on Fridays, immediately after the WordPress Support Group.  Bring those pesky things that don’t line up, questions about fonts, colors, and more, and get help with your site.

Monday Evenings, 5:30 PM – 7:30 PM

Join us for a 5-week course that will get you started with the WordPress blogging platform.

We will cover the following subjects:

Week 1: November 15 – Why WordPress? WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org, and how to install.  How do decide what you want to build.
Week 2: November 22- The basic components of WordPress content:  Posts, pages, Categories, Links, and Media. How to think of your site to take the most advantage of WordPress.
Week 3: November 29 – Choosing a Theme, and WordPress theming.
Week 4: December 6 – Plugins, Widgets, and other ways to extend your site’s functionality.
Week 5: December 13 – Basic Customization of your site – Graphics, CSS, fonts and more.

Each session is $20, or you can register for all 5 in advance for $90 (a 10% discount).

You can pay in person, or register online using PayPal. Class is limited to up to 10 students per session, so register soon!

Number of classes

All 5 classes $90.00 Individual Class $20.00

Thank you for participating in our Learn WordPress workshops!  Presentations from each session will be available here for download.

Session 1: Why WordPress? And Getting Set Up… (PDF, 1.3 MB)

Session 2: Posts, Pages, Attachments – The WordPress Dashboard (PDF, 2.0MB)

Session 3: Learn 2 WordPress-Session3-Themes (PDF)

Session 4: Plugins.  An extremely useful resource for this is at http://eastbaywp.com: Plugin Picks. This is a constantly updated google spreadsheet.

Session 5: Customize and Maintain your WordPress Site

If you have any questions, please feel free to add them below in a comment.

I gave this presentation at the East Bay WordPress meetup in September. It’s about developing a Plugin for a Custom Post Type for use by podcasters.

The project is not yet complete, but here is the presentation for your perusal.

This is a presentation that I gave at the San Francisco WordPress Meetup group in June of 2010.

Here’s one from my email:

I’ve done nothing on my WordPress site in ages but am about to put up a story. I see (and had heard) 3.0 was available to download.

Do you think I dare do it, here with nobody to help me if it all screws up? My feeling is that it should be OK as there must be millions in the same boat, but don’t want to if I am wrong!

I think you can do it!  The longer you wait, the more people will have found bugs and fixed them, but if you have time to focus on it it’s very doable.  Before you upgrade, you should make a backup of your site – either the content (through Tools -> Export) or the database (through the WP-DB-Backup Plugin).

Here are detailed instructions:  http://codex.wordpress.org/Upgrading_WordPress

Just follow the instructions carefully, and don’t panic.

You may have issues w/ your theme, or some plugins that will also need to be upgraded. If so, your backup will help you get fixed up. If you are worried about a particular theme or plugin, simply do a Google search for your theme name and “WordPress 3.0 upgrade” to see if anyone has posted words of caution to the internet.

About 25 WordPress users, programmers, designers, and enthusiasts came to Tech Liminal for the monthly East Bay WordPresss Meetup.

The main topic of the day is custom theming, but we also spent some time discussing backup and security issues, especially in light of the recent “pharma hack” (read more about this at Chris Pearson’s site). This is a hack that corrupts your database, ruins your search results, and makes Google mad at you.

Lori Berkowitz followed up the security discussion with her presentation on building custom themes, using a child theme of the new 2010 framework released with WordPress 3.0.

You can view the full presentation here.

Some interesting points that came from the discussion:

You don’t need to know a lot of PHP to customize templates: you can start with an existing theme and modify the Template Tags to chug what you show on your pages.

WordPress 3.0 will bring custom post types that allow for even richer custom templates for posts of different categories or types. Custom post types are defined in the functions.php file of your theme – which means content types in WordPress are going to be theme or plugin-specific. For custom post types, you can eliminate certain editor functionality, and define a custom taxonomies for selecting information about a post.

We’ll be working with the new features of WordPress 3.0 at Tech Liminal in the next few weeks – even before the official release in the next month.

If you want more WordPress help or advice, join the East Bay WordPresss Meetup .

Today’s Bloggers’ Support Group was a bit chilly due to a broken furnace, but we were pretty excited to meet and make progress towards our end-of-year blogging activities.

There are 20 days left to finish our 10-post Blogging Challenge. How are you doing?

Wanda suggested looking at past success. What have you accomplished in the last 12 months of blogging?

As for technologies, we discussed a couple of useful tools:

• Print-on-demand books, which are available from a number of places.  The link takes you Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site, which aggregates and reviews a number of choices.
• For Mac users, there is a community of iWork template creators (iWorkCommunity.com).  You can download great templates for Pages, Numbers, and Keynotes for things like books,

Anca taught us about Jing – a tool for Screen Capture and Screenshots.

• Uses Jing to annotate screenshots
• It’s good to rehearse to get it just right
• Likes to specify the size of the screen grab – you can shoot an entire window, or just a little bit.
• Now it can do webcam recording, too!
• Great for working with clients– showing them how to do things.  Anca uses videos to teach people how to do technical stuff with their sites.
• Does image capture
• Can annotate images
• Upload to YouTube, Flickr, and other sites.

An alternative to Jing is Skitch, which does screenshots, annotations, and uploads to your favorite sites as well.

Both of these tools have a hosting service where you can upload your files and share them with others.

Ted’s favorite plugins this week:

Google Ajax Translation – puts a link into your blog posts that connect them up to Google Translate, so your readers can get your content in something roughly resembling their language.

Ajax Plugin Helper – Sets up your WordPress installation to activate and deactivate plugins via Ajax, saving you time when it comes to configuring your blog.

Social Grid – produces a grid of social networking sites that you connect to your blog.

This week’s suggested exercise – Top 10 Lists

One thing that many sites are doing at the end of the year is creating top-10 (or more) lists.   This is a great way to produce something of value for you readers (and maybe a bit simpler for you to write).

Send us your Top 10 list and we’ll post it for everyone else to read.