This past Saturday, April 27th, WordCamp Ottawa was held at the University of Ottawa. The event was a great success, and involved everything WordPress. Both experts and newbies came together to speak, listen to speakers, volunteer, network, and have a great time talking about WordPress!
How was ITS involved?
Three members of the Web Services team, Mary Kathryn Roberts, Troy Chaplin, and Mike Corkum participated in WordCamp.
Build your Business, Cause or Brand Using WordPress
Our Communications Advisor, Mary Kathryn sat on the Build Your Business, Cause, or Brand using WordPress panel (pictured below).
The panel’s topics of discussion were:
- Why they chose WordPress as their content management system (open source, constant evolution, easy to use for clients)
- How they develop content that promotes their key messages (workshops, consistent navigation, calls to action, news posts)
- How they use WordPress to attract an audience (Google Analytics, awards received, moving towards responsiveness, meeting AODA requirements)
- What role social media plays and how they integrate it into their WordPress site (huge at Carleton, several Facebook and Twitter pages per department)
- What lessons they have learned (be careful with plugin interaction, have developers handle requests, give back to WordPress community)
Custom Post Types
One of our Web Developers, Troy Chaplin, served as one of the speakers at WordCamp, with An Introduction to Custom Post Types (right). These custom post types serve as additional sections to Pages, Posts, etc in the WordPress navigation that have different functions than the default sections.
His topics of discussion were:
- The functionality of custom post types (can mimic posts, reflect a page’s attributes, items your custom post type can support)
- Examples of custom post types (ie from the Sprott School of Business, the Carleton University Newsroom, Athletics)
- Ideas for custom post types (movies & television shows for entertainment sites, hockey & basketball for sports sites, etc)
- The basics of the function (WordPress code for custom post types)
- Theme files (archive pages vs single pages)
Happiness Bar
Finally, our Senior Web Developer Mike Corkum served as a volunteer for the Happiness Bar, where WordPress experts offer advice and answer questions about WordPress. Here he is with Troy and Web Services Manager Dan Brown below!
The Ottawa WordPress Community
The organizers of WordCamp did a fantastic job putting together Ottawa’s first WordCamp conference, and the members of our team had a great time being involved and helping out members of the WordPress community! If you’d like to find out more about the event, visit the WordCamp Ottawa website, and if you’d like to get involved in the community, join the Ottawa WordPress meetup group!