All posts by Chris Reynolds

About Chris Reynolds

I am a Developer Advocate at Pantheon and have been working with WordPress since my first foray as a freelance web designer and developer specializing in 2007. Since then, I've worked with Event Espresso, WebDevStudios, Human Made and Altis and I wrote of a bunch of WordPress-centric online training courses for Pluralsight. When I'm not writing code (or, these days, blog posts, GitHub actions, or videos), I run and play Dungeons & Dragons, occasionally make electronic music and cheer for Utah Royals FC.

Thank you to our Splendid Global Community Sponsors

Sponsors

The Global Community Sponsorship Program allows companies who want to support every WordCamp in the world — or in a particular region — to do so. Every WordCamp — not just Salt Lake City’s — owes these companies a huge debt of gratitude for their generous contributions in helping support WordCamps.

The Splendid Sponsor level is the third highest level in the Community Sponsorship program. We’re honored to welcome a representative from one of them as a speaker (Mika from DreamHost)!

 

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OnTheGoSystems is the author of WPML and Toolset plugins.

WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites.

Toolset plugins allow you to develop WordPress sites without PHP. They work with any theme and with other plugins.

OnTheGoSystems is always looking for exceptional people to join the team. To learn more about our products and open positions, visit:

http://www.onthegosystems.com/

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DreamHost is a global Web hosting and cloud services provider with over 350,000 customers and 1.2 million blogs, websites and apps hosted. The company offers a wide spectrum of Web hosting and cloud services including Shared Hosting, Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Server Hosting, Domain Name Registration, the cloud storage service, DreamObjects, and the cloud computing service DreamCompute. More information can be found at http://dreamhost.com.

Meet Wapuutah, the WordCamp SLC Wapuu

Announcements

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This cute little guy is Wapuutah, the WCSLC Wapuu. What’s a Wapuu? Well, legend has it that one day, when WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg visited Japan in 2009, the Japanese WordPress community asked him if they could design a WordPress mascot. After all, Drupal has the droplet guy, PHP has an elephant, Github has the Octocat, but WordPress…well, we just had a big W. Matt said, sure, so long as it’s GPL and is designed by someone who understands the open source community. Some time later, Wapuu was born, designed by Japanese illustrator Kazuko Kaneuchi (who had previously designed the NetBeans mascot Neko-Bean) and made his (or her) first appearance at WordCamp Fukuoka in 2011.

Since then, Wapuus have come in many shapes and sizes, with WordCamps adopting the cute, furry critter and adding some local color specific to their WordCamp. You can browse through a gallery of past Wapuus on the Wapuu Archive page (my personal favorite is Wapuunk from WordCamp London).

For WordCamp SLC, our little Wapuu takes the camp part of WordCamp literally, and is decked out with everything she needs for a trek through our beautiful mountains visible from the site of WordCamp SLC 2015. Wapuutah was designed by Velda Christensen — you can follow her on Twitter at @supernovia and, when she’s not Engineering Happiness at Automattic, she occasionally blogs at LegendOfVelda.com.

Thank you to our Superb Global Community Sponsor

Sponsors

The Global Community Sponsorship Program allows companies who want to support every WordCamp in the world — or in a particular region — to do so. Every WordCamp — not just Salt Lake City’s — owes these companies a huge debt of gratitude for their generous contributions in helping support WordCamps.

The Superb Sponsor level is the second highest level in the Community Sponsorship program. We have one sponsor at the Superb level and it’s a name I think you should be familiar with.

 

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GoDaddy’s mission is to radically shift the global economy toward small businesses by empowering people to easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. With more than 12 million customers worldwide and 57 million domain names under management, GoDaddy gives small business owners the tools to name their idea, build a beautiful online presence, attract customers and manage their business.

Thank you to our Outstanding Global Community Sponsors

Sponsors

The Global Community Sponsorship Program allows companies who want to support every WordCamp in the world — or in a particular region — to do so. Every WordCamp — not just Salt Lake City’s — owes these companies a huge debt of gratitude for their generous contributions in helping support WordCamps.

The Outstanding Sponsor level is the highest level in the Community Sponsorship program. We’re lucky to have one of them local in our state (Bluehost).

 

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Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over one million WordPress sites. Their goal is to provide outstanding hosting services and customer support for the best possible price. Bluehost is also constantly innovating and upgrading their services and infrastructure at no additional cost to their customers. Join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how they can help you with your site.

 

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From its inception in 1998, (mt) Media Temple has been on a mission to help people and businesses succeed online.

Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in our 24/7 customer support. Our customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

More information can be found anytime on the web at http://mediatemple.com or on Twitter @MediaTemple.

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Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me.

 

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WiredTree provides Managed VPS and Managed Dedicated Servers to WordPress users worldwide from our Chicago-based data center and offices. Every WT server is backed by 24×7 telephone support, ticket support with 15 minute average response times, and is fully managed and monitored by WiredTree to maximize uptime and minimize frustration. All servers come ready-to-run with cPanel/WHM and are optimized and security hardened with firewall and anti-spam out of the box. With experience in SSD technology, MariaDB, Memcached, WordPress plugins, server optimization, and LiteSpeed Web server, WiredTree can take your site’s performance to the next level.

 

A huge thank you to all of our Outstanding Sponsors!

Workshop Presenter Announcement: Brent Jacobsen

Workshops

Brent has been using WordPress since 2005 and is the founding partner of WPSlopes, a WordPress website agency. Brent has an MBA from a top 25 business school, and focuses on helping businesses grow through growth hacking and marketing technologies.

Brent’s talk will help users, business owners and developers have a better understanding and get the most out of analytics.

Workshop Presenter Announcement: Joel Jenkins

Workshops

After an unexpected layoff from NuSkin 10 years ago Joel fell into Website Design and hasn’t looked back. Currently he is Freelance for his own LLC and focuses on Design & Development of Websites and iOS Apps. He’s been hacking around WordPress for about 5 years now, and his bread and butter are full custom designs and from-scratch WordPress themes for his clients. He also has an App called FiveThings in the iOS App Store (http://apple.co/1dn0wmV ) that he designed and built himself that is currently ranked somewhere in the bottom millions. Joel is a Utah native and lives in Pleasant Grove with his wife and 1.75 children (#2 is due October 15). He loves being creative, Toyota Land Cruisers, Cruises, and Japan. He can be found on twitter @unculturedswine

New at WordCamp SLC: Workshops!

Announcements

We’re doing something new this year for WCSLC — workshops. What is a “workshop”, you say? I’m glad you asked!

Workshops are informal, low-key, demo-based presentations. They will be held in a smaller room, with more time for direct interaction with the presenter and one-on-one questions and answers. The format will be a lot like a presentation you might see at a WordPress meetup. It also gives us a way to provide more options for you guys who want to see great content and presenters. Some presentations work better in this smaller, more intimate format and we’re excited to be offering something new.

Over the next couple weeks we’ll be introducing you to our workshop presenters like we did for our speakers. Stay tuned!

Speaker Announcement: Lindsay Bayuk

Speakers

Lindsay lives in Phoenix, Arizona where she leads the product  team at PureChat, a live chat API and WordPress plugin that is designed to help small businesses generate leads and get more sales (managed WordPress hosting provider, Pagely, recently published an excellent review of PureChat here). Before joining PureChat in May, she lead the product marketing and product management teams at Infusionsoft. She has a long and decorated history with product design and marketing and is passionate about entrepreneurship and helping small businesses succeed.