Having had his introduction to the wonder of WordPress while a student at Temple (go Owls!), Anthony always loves returning to the campus for an event like this. He fills his days engineering happiness on WordPress.com until he has to cook his wife dinner and run clinics in Call of Duty over Xbox Live. You can find him on Twitter at @anthonybubel and his personal blog at http://anthonybubel.com/.
Anthony will be giving a presentation in the User track titled: Stop Worrying, Start Publishing
Peter Baylies is a WordPress developer for Semper Fi Web Design with decades of experience in computing stemming from an innate enthusiasm coupled with having far too much time on his hands.
Peter will be giving a presentation in the Power User track titled: Mastering The Shortcode API.
The Classroom Schedule for WordCamp Philly has been released! The classroom will feature more hands on training sessions. Attendees should bring a laptop or tablet to interact with the classroom sessions.
The classroom will start with 30-minute theme demos. These demos cover iThemes Builder, Startbox, and Genesis. After each class there will be a Q&A discussion outside the classroom. Keep the conversation going with discussions, questions, and anything else that comes up!
The second part of the classroom will be hands on training sessions. These classes will cover using WordPress for Beginners, extending WordPress with plugins and themes, creating your first WordPress plugin, and more! The classroom will also feature a WordPress Optimization class from WPEngine.com and a Gravity Forms demo from Rocket Genius!
Be sure to check out the classroom schedule before the event!
Tom have been working with WordPress for three years. He have been developing WordPress websites and themes for YellAdworks, a King of Prussia based company, for over a year. His company designs websites for mostly small and medium size businesses. He also built a search directory WordPress site for YellAdworks out of custom made theme. Tom love working with WordPress and teaching others how to use it – no matter what their computer skill level is.
Tom will be giving a presentation in the Designer Track titled:Customizing the WordPress Twenty Eleven Theme
A ten-plus year veteran of the IT industry (please don’t hold it against him!) and Linux expert by trade, Doug has been using WordPress since its 1.0 days and has been surreptitiously converting internal websites and coworkers alike over to it for almost as long.
Doug is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. You can find Doug on twitter (@zamoose) and his blog athttp://literalbarrage.org/blog/
Doug will be giving a presentation in the User Track titled: Adding A Social ‘Stache: BuddyPress, bbPress And Beyond
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I’m going to be talking about how you can quickly and easily add a social layer to your existing WordPress installs by using BuddyPress, bbPress and a few other tricks. BP and bbP, like the best of mustaches, really push the Awesome Factor to 11, so come out to find out how to add that Social ‘Stache!
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
I love the fact that Philly is the World’s Biggest Small Town. There are a ton of people that live in the Philadelphia metro area (where ton ~= 1.5 million) and yet, in many ways, it doesn’t feel like a big town. There’s a pretty good chance that if you sat down and talked to any one given person, they’re going to know someone you know, or maybe that someone’s best friend, etc. New York doesn’t have that. DC doesn’t have that.
Plus, I love the variety of neighborhoods and I love the pride and passion that folks in Philly put into their neighborhoods, parishes and the city in general.
Why do you love WordPress?
I’ve been using WordPress since version 1.0 and have watched it grow from a simple blogging tool into a full-featured CMS. It’s by far the easiest publishing tool available today and the variety of plugins and themes is staggering.
All of that is window-dressing, though, when compared with the WordPress community. We’ve had ups and downs, but I’ve virtually “met” and meatspace-met some of my best tech friends through WordPress. That’s what excites me about it and that’s what has me really stoked for WordCamp.
Sam Napolitano is a technology enthusiast and an accomplished website developer. He has been building high profile websites for the past 8 years and has been working with WordPress actively for the last 3 years.
In his most recent role as Manager of Development and QA for the Lawyers.com small law marketing team, Sam has been responsible for the development and maintenance of over 3000 fully custom websites. He was also tasked with designing and deploying an enterprise level WordPress Multisite install that would be the new platform for all websites built by the agency.
After a successful 6 years with Lawyer.com, Sam is now transitioning to AOL where he will be focused on development for the AOL Entertainment web properties and social development for the Huffington Post. You can follow Sam on Twitter @eightamrock
Sam will be giving a presentation in the Designer track titled: HTML5: Just cut to the chase!
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
In my talk I will cover the ‘Beaten Path’ philosophy behind a lot of the new html5 entity tags. Attendees should expect to learn the history, reasoning and understanding of what it is that they are adopting and how to benefit from it today!
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
The cheesesteak! What else is there in Philly? Ohhh.. Also the Liberty Bell and South Street.
Why do you love WordPress?
WordPress is fantastic platform for building website. It is remarkably easy to get up and running even for the technologically challenged. It’s also extremely flexible and extendible for seasoned developers. The community behind it, is probably the strongest and most passionate community behind any open source software. This passion really shines through in the level of sophistication that has gone into it’s development. I love WordPress because quite simply, it’s WordPress.
Beneath the colorfully tattooed skin and lanky frame beats the heart of a competitor, a guy whose eclectic background as code geek, athlete and punk-scene lifer has coalesced into a fiercely creative, independent and energetic methodology. He knows the languages. He’s a digital alchemist; Norcross has thought of the things the clients haven’t, because – all together now – that’s his job.
Andrew will be giving a presentation in the Designer track titled: Polishing the WordPress Admin
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
My topic is on customizing the admin panel, or “White Labeling WordPress”. I plan on going through various hooks, functions, etc that can be used to give clients a personalized experience. While there are plenty of plugins out there that do some or all of this, I want to show how easy it can be to go the extra mile and give each site it’s own look and feel on the back end as well as the front.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
I have no idea….because I’ve never been. But I’m a fan of the sandwiches. BIG fan.
Why do you love WordPress?
What’s not to love? It does everything I need it to and more.
Pete is a Front End Web Developer working at O3 World in Philadelphia. Before coming to O3, he worked as a Web Developer at Inverse Paradox in Feasterville. In addition to working full time, he also freelance as a WordPress Developer where he develop sites for Curious and Company and others. Pete has been using WordPress for 3 years, and has developed dozens of sites using WordPress as a CMS.
Pete will be giving a presentation in the Power User Track titled: The Power of the Loop: Using Custom Post Types to Create a CMS based Portfolio Site
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
At WordCamp I will be speaking about using custom posts to create a portfolio website. I’m going to try and focus more on the loop and functions like query_posts and WP_Query, as well as WordPress’s theme hierarchy. I feel that if you can understand the loop really well, and use proper themeing conventions, you can really build any website. I find that trying something new is always best when you have something concrete to practice on, and what better way than to spruce up your own portfolio site? I’ll try and show examples of both frontend, backend, and admin UI of some powerful sites I’ve produced that I think are really easy to use and maintain.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
My favorite thing about Philadelphia is that people have so much pride for the city. Most of the people that live in the city have lived here all their lives, and have deep rooted traditions. Whether its from sports, history, or food, everyone can connect with each other because they all share the same memories. Our city of brotherly/sisterly love is truly a great place to be a part of.
Why do you love WordPress?
I love WordPress for the same reasons I love Philadelphia. The community that surrounds this great platform is unmatched. So many people, like me, got their start from trying to customize their free WordPress theme, back when it was just considered a blogging platform. Now with WordPress 3+, our devotion to this powerful blogging platform has transformed into a full-fledged powerhouse CMS, and has been the basis for many careers. It’s exciting to be a part of something that’s so accessible, and popular, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for WordPress.
Aaron Jorbin is an engineer with Clearspring where he works on AddThis and a WordPress Core Contributor. He has spoken to multiple User Groups and at WordCamps in four time zones. When he’s not busy creating and fixing bugs, Aaron helps run an educational simulation conference for over 1500 college students. He’ll gladly toast to the GPL any day of the week and happily will discuss whisky, quality beer, or the upper peninsula of Michigan anytime he can.
Aaron will be giving a presentation in the Developer Track titled: Moving Beyond jQuery and into Javascript
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
JavaScript! Specifically moving beyond being a implementer of jQuery plugins and into being a JavaScript developer.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
It’s the only place on the east coast to get Russian River.
Why do you love WordPress?
Contributing to WordPress has had more of an impact on me becoming the developer that I am then any other single action. Reading WordPress code taught me how to code. Contributing to WordPress taught me to code well.
Andres “Dre” Armeda, CISSP is a web designer with a security habit. Dre is the founder of CubicTwo, a web solutions company. He gets his web security fix as Co-Founder of Sucuri Security.
CubicTwo is a web solutions company based in Riverside County, California. CubicTwo stemmed from over 10 years of consulting and creating web and graphics solutions.
Sucuri is a security company that concentrates on being the leader in web integrity monitoring and web malware removal. Sucuri offers web integrity monitoring and alerting capabilities to small, large, and enterprise web networks.
Follow @dremeda on Twitter, or say hi at dre.im.
Dre will be giving a presentation in the Power User Track titled: WordPress End-User Security
What are you speaking about at WordCamp Philly?
I am giving a go at a strategic approach to WordPress End-User Security. It starts well before your site is online, and it’s important to think big picture.
What is your favorite thing about the city of Philadelphia?
That’s an easy one, Brad Williams is my favorite thing about Illy Philly, Cheese Steaks are a close 2nd 😀
Why do you love WordPress?
A better question would be what do you not love about WordPress, it’s more challenging to answer 🙂
WordPress is more than a platform, its a way of life. It’s a community, a vibe, a connection between all things right on the web and open source software. These are the core things I love about WordPress, the list can get really long if I keep going!
WordCamp Philly 2011 is over. Check out the next edition!