Sean Blanda
Taking Over the World with Custom Taxonomies
Sean Blanda is one of the three co-founders of Technically Philly, a news site that covers tech, venture capital and startups in Philadelphia. He lives in Fishtown and can beat you in poker.
Ronald Bercume & Scott Sussman
Using BuddyPress to Change the World
Ronald Bercume is a successful graphic designer and marketing strategist and an aspiring educational author. He founded SeeMore Media, an advertising and design agency, in 1999, while he was attending college. Ronald pursues a specialized agenda within the creative services sector, collaborating with his clients and partners to maintain aggressive branding efforts. He focuses on corporate identity, brand science, marketing consultation, print and multimedia design, and website development. He has a stake in (or ownership of) a growing network of companies and non-profit projects.
Scott Sussman is one of the minds (along with Ronald, above) behind ilivewithadisability.com, a social networking project focused on those with disabilities, their families, friends, and co-workers. The project has been very personal to Scott; at the age of 2, he was diagnosed with Cerebral Palsy. That doesn’t stop him from wanting his community to grow into the next Facebook, however. He attended the University of Miami and graduated with a degree in Marketing and a minor in Sports Administration before completing an internship at NFL Films.
Anthony Bubel
A WordPress Wedding
Having had his introduction to WordPress while a student at Temple, Anthony is proud to return to campus to co-organize and speak at the first ever WordCamp in Philadelphia. By day, he works at Automattic as a Happiness Engineer on the Terms of Service team. He spends his spare time fooling around with WordPress, studying magnetars, and being really terrible at golf. You can read his unimportant blog at anthonybubel.com, follow his strange tweets @fir3, and get owned by him in Modern Warfare 2 on Xbox Live by sending a friend request to BigMommaMilkman (don’t ask about the name).
Jason Coleman
Business Models for Plugin/Theme Distribution. What You Need to Know About the GPL
Jason Coleman is the CEO of Stranger Studios, a web development company specializing in custom WordPress plugins and themes. Jason is also the founder and lead developer of WineLog.net, a community site for wine drinkers. This talk will review the GPL license used by WordPress and the recent debate between Automattic (creators of WordPress) and DIYThemes (creators of the Thesis theme). What can we take away from that debate? How does it affect Stranger Studios plans to release plugins for profit? How does it affect WineLog’s efforts to release plugins that integrate WordPress with WineLog? Are you in a similar position with your business? I will share my thoughts on business models and legal points, but will encourage lots of feedback and discussion from the crowd.
Follow Jason on twitter @jason_coleman
Phillip Copley
Beyond Object Orientation: Increasing Plugin Iteration Using a Modified MVC Architecture
Like many in the field, Phillip’s entire computer education has been self-taught. After receiving a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and working on two presidential campaigns in the 2008 election cycle, he decided to put this education to the test and get a job in IT. He is now the Assistant Director of IT at a legislative information service in Harrisburg, PA servicing over 3,000 public and private-sector clients including legislators, lobbyists, law firms and state agencies. His interests include object orientation, learning new PHP frameworks, actively neglecting phillipcopley.com, and arguing with Ryan Duff about politics. Even though he protected @Phillip_Copley for work, he promises to let you follow him if you ask nicely.
Jim Doran
Twenty things a new WordPress User Should Know
From self hosting your own domain to getting the most out of WordPress.com, this presentation will cover the basics of themes, plugins, search engine optimization, and a look into using WordPress as a content management system. Learn tips and tricks to get the most out of WordPress.
Jim Doran is a Web designer, teacher, editor and speaker who loves Open Source technologies and Web standards. He’s currently a software engineer at Johns Hopkins University and a faculty member at the Community College of Baltimore County. When not hacking WordPress, Jim rides skateboards and makes art which he publishes at http://jimdoran.net/.
Ryan Duff
Productivity 101: Making a Easily Redeployable Dev Environment with Subversion
Ryan has been working with WordPress since early 2004 and was the original author of WordPress Contact Form. As a long time community member, he enjoys exploring new ways to make use of WordPress. Ryan is a SysAdmin and long-time Linux user who likes to hack things to make repeated tasks simpler. Virtualization, configuration management, and version control software are some of the tools in his arsenal. He began making websites since the age of 12 and has been using PHP for almost 10 years. Currently, he is running his own WordPress consultancy, Fusionized Technology (http://fusionized.com), in Harrisburg, PA. He also runs the monthly Harrisburg WordPress Meetup. You can find Ryan online at ryanduff.net or on twitter @ryancduff.
Reed Gustow
Creating a Customized Navigation System in WordPress
Reed Gustow is a board member of the Philadelphia Area New Media Association, PANMA. He co-leads the Web Design group at the Philadelphia Area Computer Society (PACS.) Reed has been working with WordPress for almost 2 years, off and on; he has presented at various BarCamps and PodCamps here in Philadelphia. He has a day job where he doesn’t get to work with WordPress but he does get to pay his bills.
Vasken Hauri
Mama CAS: Leveraging WordPress for Enterprise Authentication
Vasken Hauri is a web developer at Plymouth State University, where he has worked for the past 5 years. Ill-prepared for a career in IT with a B.A. in German Studies from Haverford College, but motivated by a strong desire to continue eating despite holding a mostly useless degree, Vasken has held several different jobs with Plymouth State, ranging from tech support to Linux server administration. When not working, Vasken is actively involved in WordPress plugin development and somewhat less actively involved in updating his blog (http://neverblog.net). He and his wife currently have three dogs, three snakes, and a cat, and are probably fostering another dog for adoption by now even though they weren’t when this bio was written. He can be reached via twitter at @vaskenhauri.
Munir Mandviwalla
Re-imagining higher education as an open source community with WordPress and BuddyPress
Munir Mandviwalla is the founding chair of the Management Information Systems department, and Executive Director, Institute for Business and Information Technology, Fox School of Business, Temple University. Dr. Mandviwalla has published articles on collaborative systems, social media, virtual teams, software training, peer review, and globalization. His publications have appeared in the leading journals and conferences of the information systems field and his work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Bell Atlantic, IBM, Microsoft Corporation, CIGNA Corporation, Advanta Corporation, Lotus Development Corporation, and Lilly Endowment, Inc. His personal motto is “just do it!” More information about Munir at http://community.mis.temple.edu/mmandviwalla/
Raphael Mudge
Write with Style: Blogging in Plain English
Raphael, an Automattic code wrangler, is out to raise the quality of writing online. Raphael’s plan is simple: (1) disguise an automated writing tutor as a grammar checker and (2) add it to programs like WordPress, Firefox, and Google Chrome. This fancy writing software is known as After the Deadline. Raphael develops AI and NLP in his Sleep. Raphael is based out of Washington, DC.
Yasmine Mustafa
Starting a Startup with WordPress
Yasmine Mustafa is the founder of 123LinkIt.com, a software company that builds online tools to help bloggers streamline their advertising process. She started with a WordPress landing page in May 2009 to collect emails of interested parties and just recently launched a WordPress affiliate plugin in March 2010. The Company recently walked away with First Place in Temple University’s Be Your Own Boss Bowl.
Andrew Nacin
To Be Announced
Andrew Nacin is a contributor to WordPress, currently living in Washington, D.C. Contributing since 2009, he was named one of the core developers in February and has been hard at work. He’ll come up with a fun, advanced topic in the developer track soon enough, perhaps related to his Google Summer of Code project, which involves theme revisions. You can find Nacin online at andrewnacin.com, on Twitter (@nacin), or on Trac, where he’s usually buried up to his neck in patches and tickets.
Hal Stern
Parsing Strange: How WordPress Translates a URL into SQL
“Parsing Strange” delves into how WordPress dissects a URL and selects content from the underlying MySQL database. If you’ve wanted to change the default behavior, are trying to add your own custom database tables to the content selection equation or want to work with custom post types in more advanced ways, then you’ll find this session covers the basics with a minimum of SQL grammar. On the other hand, you may just want to be able to use “Cartesian table product” in a sentence (properly), and that’s another reason to attend.
Hal Stern is a co-author of Professional WordPress and has been using WordPress to write about hockey, baseball, golf, loud music, spicy food and life in NJ for the past five years. After more than 20 years with Sun Microsystems, he’s now a technology free agent, working on everything from a comic book company (facebook.com/amphibimen) to record labels (facebook.com/revivermusic) to the technology advisory board for Curriki to building tube amplifiers. On the technology side, he’s thinking about big data, security, cloud computing, content management and building technical communities. Find him @freeholdhal or snowmanonfire.com
Doug Stewart
Making WordPress Work AT Work
A ten-plus year veteran of the IT industry (please don’t hold it against me!) and Linux expert by trade, I’ve been using WordPress since its 1.0 days and have been surreptitiously converting internal websites and coworkers alike over to it for almost as long. I live just outside of Philadelphia and currently make my living consulting for a Fortune 100 company. You can find Doug on twitter (@zamoose) and his blog at http://literalbarrage.org/blog/
Brad Williams
To Be Announced
Brad Williams is the CEO and Co-Founder of WebDevStudios.com. He is also the co-author of Professional WordPress from WROX. Brad is also a co-host on the SitePoint Podcast. He was one of the original co-hosts on the WordPress Weekly Podcast and still joins the show on occasion. Brad has given presentations at various WordCamps over the past few years on a wide range of WordPress topics. He is also the organizer for the New Jersey WordPress Meetup Group. Brad has been developing websites for over 14 years, including the last 4 where he has focused on open-source technologies like WordPress. You can find Brad online at strangework.com or on Twitter @williamsba.
Owen Winkler
Be One of Us: The WordPress Community
By day, he’s Owen Winkler — a developer for Rock River Star, an internet consulting company in suburban Philadelphia. By night, he’s known by his IRC nickname, ringmaster — an emeritus developer of WordPress, and current project management committee member of the Habari Project. From 2005 and 2007, Owen was the organizer of the Philadelphia WordPress meetup, at the time, the world’s largest regular monthly WordPress meetup. These days, he writes about stuff and junk on his personal blog, Asymptomatic.