Thank You! Thank You! Thank You!

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The organizing team would like to send a massive thank you to everyone for attending WordCamp Calgary 2015.

This year’s WordCamp was a fantastic day of great content, networking and community building for the WordPress community in Calgary. With a sold out crowd of 150 attendees, 3 full tracks of great content and an amazing after party we hope everyone left last saturday with some more great knowledge and ideas.

And as the organizing committee transitions into the decompression and wrap up phase, we have a few tidbits of information to pass a long.

Photos, Photos, Photos

Our photographer Reg Tiangha has posted all of his photos from WordCamp Calgary on to his Flick account. So have a look and relive all the great events from WordCamp 2015. Also show him some love by giving him a retweet and liking his photos on Flickr.

Continue The Learning

If you want to continue learning about WordPress, please make sure you support The Calgary WordPress Meet-up Group and consider joining a learning session through our good friends at The Chic Geek.

Also make sure you follow the other great tech communities in Calgary – such as our good friends at Pixels and Pints and YYC js.

Thank you to our volunteers

A massive, massive thank you to all our volunteers for their hard work and dedication for making WordCamp happen. Without our team of dedicated volunteers working the registration table, recording the sessions and running lunch this conference wouldn’t have been what it was.

So from the bottom of our hearts, thank you!

Thank You to Our Speakers!

We also want to thank our speakers and panelists for not only giving up their time to prepare and give their presentations, but for also providing the top notch content to make WordCamp Calgary so great. Without our Speakers and Panelists we wouldn’t have had the content to make this day possible.

So thank you to:

  • Calin Yablonski
  • Chris Garrett
  • James T. Swanson
  • Jeffrey Kahane
  • Jennifer Feurer
  • Lindsey Wiebe
  • Marshall Stevenson
  • Meghan Somers
  • Mike Tighe
  • Nicolas Beique
  • Paul Thompson
  • Re Carlson
  • Kevin Brennan
  • Russ Fee
  • Tim Hamilton

Take a minute and show them some love by following them on twitter and/or visiting their websites.

Thank You To Our Sponsors!


And of course a massive thank you to all our sponsors, without your support the conference wouldn’t be possible.

Local Sponsors

National Sponsors

… And last but not least, we want to thank you once again for attending, participating and supporting WordCamp Calgary 2015. You are all brilliant, amazing and spectacular.

We look forward to seeing everyone at WordCamp Calgary 2016.

John, Mike, Tony, Re and Connor.

WordCamp Calgary 2015 Slide / Presentation Decks

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Thank you to all the attendees from WordCamp organizers, volunteers, and speakers. We will be continually adding slide decks as they are sent into us:

Meet Our Local Sponsors

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WordCamp Calgary wouldn’t be possible if it wasn’t for the amazing generosity of our sponsors. In particular, our amazing local companies and organizations that are supporting WordCamp 2015.

wc2015-sponsor-email-collage

So why not show them some love and give them a click or send them an email thanking them for their support!

24 Hours To WordCamp Calgary

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With less than 24 hours until WordCamp Calgary kicks off, we figured we would post a few things to do to get you excited and ready.

  1. Familiarize yourself with our schedule and plan out your day.
  2. Explore the archives of WordCamp.TV to get a feel for all the great content you’ll be exposed to on Saturday.
  3. Make plans to enjoy a tasty beverage at the after party at Loco Lou’s.
  4. Start warming up those tweeting fingers and get to know the Wordcamp Hashtag – #WCYYC.
  5. Review our Code of Conduct so everyone has a wonderful time at WordCamp.
  6. Show some love to our wonderful sponsors who make WordCamp Calgary happen.
  7. Follow us on Facebook, so we can send you any last minute changes.
  8. … and of course rest up. It’s going to be a fantastic day.

Special Thanks to PetroTech Printing

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For 2 years now, PetroTech printing have been helping the ‘digital-focused’ organizing team here at WordCamp with all the printed materials we need for the conference, including:

  • Standing Banners
  • Directional Signs
  • Lanyard Badges
  • Printed Conference Schedule

So to our attendees & sponsors. If you are ever looking for a great printer who gets things done. Check them out: http://www.petro-tech.ca/

Earlybird Question: Building courseware in WordPress

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Question

I have just created a website from the Divi Themes from Elegant Themes. I do not have any programming experience and I am just learning WP.

I have an online program with lessons that include video instruction, MP3’s, and worksheets. The programs will be a one-time purchase, and I would like a 6 month access window to them.

I am looking for a plugin that will enable me to:
use Woo Commerce – (I currently have Paypal, but will be moving to Stripe),
give timed access to the lessons,
have an expiry date to access to the lessons.

I don’t want a membership type of access, if this is possible. this would create a conflict if they purchased more than one program and at different times.

I have looked at Sensei, Scholar Press, Simple Course, LFE, and Namaste (which has come to the closest to what I am looking for).
I don’t want the commerce portion to go through the plugin because I will be selling products from the site as well.

I have even considered having a link to the page and have it automatically expire.

Answer

Thank you for your question Melissa. This is a pretty big one and we’ll answer what we can, but we encourage you to talk with conference attendees and find some experts to discuss this with.

The 3 primary features that you are looking for include:
– Learning management system (lms)
– Courseware
– e-Learning

The biggest thing that we would bring to your attention is that to execute this at a high level is a pretty advanced setup. At some point, it might require some advanced configuration and/or development if you want all the separate parts interacting with one another smoothly.

We have included some resources below, some of which you are already indicated researching.

With that said, without some form of custom development, you are basically going to need a all-in-one solution that is a pre-built theme or service.

Sometimes avoiding the bigger price tag of custom development means you need to make compromises with how things function an interact with one another.

Resources:
– http://chrislema.com/elearning-on-wordpress-wp-courseware-learndash/
– https://flyplugins.com/wp-courseware/

We wish you the best of luck, and again – talk to people at the conference, there are tons of experts there.

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Three Reasons To Pick-up A Ticket For WordCamp Today

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Besides the obvious answers of great content, fantastic swag, an after party and amazing networking opportunities – here are three reasons why you should pick-up a ticket to WordCamp Calgary today.

  1. To make things easier for catering and badge printing the team will be forwarding on official numbers later this week (Thursday May 21st). By registering early it ensures we have your food preferences order in and that you’re not one of those attendees with a hand written badge.
  2. Although we may take some registration at the door, we will still require you to purchase a ticket online [no cash tickets at the door]. So why not save yourself the headache by reserving a ticket before hand.
  3. Oh! And one last thing. There are also less than 20 tickets available WordCamp Calgary. So picking a ticket up before hand will guarantee a spot before we sell out.

Earlybird Question: Determining Theme Quality & WP Site Deployment Tips

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Question

When browsing themes in say, Themeforest, how do you know if a theme is coded well or not prior to purchasing?

Also, say you have an exisiting website and you are replacing it with a WP site. Is there a way to install it on the main directory yet still have old site displaying? That way you don’t have to mess with transferring directories. If there is no way to do that, is there a plugin/program that will help with the transfer of the site from staging to live? I found this, anyone ever try these? http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/8-plugins-for-safely-moving-wordpress/

Answer 1: Determining Theme Quality & Performance

You have just found one of the biggest risks when buying a theme, and it’s not just about code quality, but rather how the backend of the WordPress site itself is setup. Many times complex template modifications systems are put in place, which while they sound incredible end up being poorly supported and leaving customers frustrated.

Here are a few suggestions for weeding through themes:

  • Run Google Page Speed on the theme. While I wouldn’t expect an incredible score, you can at least see if there are any red flags
  • Don’t just base a template on the homepage, look at the other template types and shortcodes that are available to you
  • Look over the comment & support history on theme forest, or on the developers private forum. See if there are any complaints or issues, also check the response time. An active developer shows that they care and take things seriously.</li

Answer 2: Tips for Deploying a WP site

I highly recommend making use of a local development environment. For tips on how to set this up ChikGeek puts on a great course called “Intro to WordPress development”, you can contact them here. Otherwise just google “local wordpress development environment setup” there will be quite a few results.

Having a local environment will allow you to do and test everything you want, after which you can just move things over to your live environment or where the site is hosted.

There are several plugins to do this as well. At Solid, we have tried several, but nothing was as reliable as we wanted and most require intermediate knowledge (incase something goes wrong). Try asking around at WordCamp too, or read reviews for various plugins online.

Also, if you are a web design company, don’t forget to set aside a few hours or more in your project budget. Hosting & servers can be complicated and sometimes be unpredictable.

The best method for moving a site is detailed on Smashing Magazine here:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2013/04/08/moving-wordpress-website/

Earlybird Question: Amazon Affiliate Links for Multiple Countries

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Question

My question is: How is the best way to set up an Amazon affiliate link on a WP website? We are Canadian, but most sales come from outside Canada. With all the eBooks and products on Amazon, how do we set up an International Amazon account and maintain it?

Answer

In short, there is no international amazon account. Unfortunately it does not exist. Amazon, while connected, runs compartmentalized on a per country basis. Because of this you have to have affiliate accounts in each country that you wish to have an account for.

In terms of a solution, after you have multiple affiliate accounts, the next step is to develop a plugin that detects the origin country of a user and swaps the correct affiliate ID. Imagine it like this:

  • If: a users country = Canada
  • Then: insert “Canada Affiliate Variable” into the code

The only way it won’t work if a visitor is blocking a browser from detecting that information, for example by using a proxy server.

There are a number of ways to program this, but we do recommend investing in a developer to create a custom plugin for you.

There are a few plugin services popping up that do this, but use caution. All it would take is some creative programming to hijack your affiliate ID, allowing a plugin developer to take your commissions. While not all plugins are bad, nor their developers – always use caution.

Finally, keep an eye on Amazon affiliate news – this could always change in the future.