If this is your first WordCamp, or your first WordCamp in Salt Lake City, it’s possible you haven’t heard about the local WordPress meetups that happen around the valley.
The WordPress community in and around Salt Lake City has been going strong for many years. In fact, it’s been in the last couple years that it’s expanded to cover more territory. The Salt Lake City meetup happens on the last Wednesday of the month in the new, downtown MOJO Marketplace offices and there’s one at the Utah Valley University campus in Orem that happens the second Thursday of every month. There’s even a casual, “office hours” meetup in Park City every other Wednesday.
Most WordPress meetups will have a specific topic or presenter, as well as time to ask questions from other WordPress users and developers or just hang out with other WordPress people! The topics range from beginner to advanced developer and meetups are a great way to learn more about WordPress and how other people are using and working with it. Meetups are also a great place to practice presenting in front of a group and many — if not most! — of our speakers started out by talking at meetups.
Everything you need to know about the local WordPress meetups is available on Meetup.com — here for the Salt Lake and Orem meetups, and here for the Park City office hours. If you’ve never used Meetup.com it’s an easy way to find local user groups in your community and sign up to attend. All the WordPress meetups are free and often include pizza or other food provided by the meetup sponsors.
We also have an active community on Slack. Slack is a real-time communication platform similar to instant messaging and IRC. The Slack team is free to join and open to everyone — just fill out the form on UtahWP.com to be sent an invite. It’s a great place to meet (virtually) your local WordPress community, find out what’s going on, hang out or continue conversations started at the meetups. In fact, the UtahWP Slack is where we do all our organizing and planning for this WordCamp!
The meetups are always looking for speakers so if you are interested in speaking at a local WordPress meetup, join our Slack team, and then ping @ninnypants (Tyrel) for the Salt Lake City meetup or @supernovia (Velda) for the Utah Valley meetup. Or talk to both of them at WordCamp Salt Lake City!