Everyone has a\u00a0story to tell. Maybe it was the first time you climbed up in the Uintas and you never thought you’d make it to the top but you pushed on and finally reached the top of Bald Mountain and celebrated your success by gazing out at the amazing view of the valley. Or maybe you have a story like me about the first time you went to a professional soccer game and, even though we lost 5-0, the excitement of the crowd, the chanting, the energy in the stadium, the “Believe” chant all combined to make you a diehard, lifelong fan of Real Salt Lake.<\/p>\n
Everyone has a\u00a0WordPress story, too. That time your website was hacked and how you fixed it. The first time you wrote a plugin or a theme. Submitting a theme to the\u00a0WordPress theme repository and going through the review process. Committing a patch to\u00a0WordPress core. Submitting documentation to the\u00a0WordPress Codex or developer docs. Setting up\u00a0WordPress for the first time for your business. Creating an online store with WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads.<\/p>\n
WordCamps are\u00a0about<\/em> stories. The stories we tell each other when we introduce ourselves, the stories we hear from speakers, and the stories we share among our friends, peers and community.<\/p>\n This year, we’re doing something new and we want to hear your stories. That’s why this year we’re doing lightning talks<\/a>. They are short — even if you are fantastically introverted or suffer from severe stage fright, you’re only up there for five minutes which is less time than it takes to get a filling at the dentist — so you know there are worse things \ud83d\ude09. They don’t need to be technical, in fact, it’s probably better when they aren’t — it’s way too hard to get a lot of technical information out there in five minutes. And they encourage storytelling.<\/p>\n Some things that would make great lightning talks would be getting started with using WooCommerce, development tools that help theme or plugin development, how to write a Grunt file, what to look for if you think your site may have been hacked. We all have something we’ve been through that we can share, and we all benefit from learning from each other’s experiences.<\/p>\n If you haven’t already, I’m asking if you would consider presenting a lightning talk at WCSLC 2017. Don’t think of it as a presentation. Think of it as an opportunity to share an experience that you learned from with a group of friends, so we all can learn with you.<\/p>\n