Photo-A-Day #2062

Tonight was the Holiday Party for WordPress Providence. We had Lightning Talks done by the four men pictured above. They are Jonathan Derosiers, Bill Dennen, J. Hogue and John James Jacoby. These guys did some amazing talks about how they are using WordPress in fun and interesting ways. I didn’t record the talks this time. Just wasn’t on my game. You can learn more about the session and WordPress Providence at the WordPress Providence Site.I did post more photos from the session. They can be found on my WordPess Providence Flickr set.

Here is some detail on each of the speakers. This is from the WordPress Providence site.

Lightning talk #4 is by regular meet up participant Jonathan Derosiers. Jonathan is the in house web developer for Slocum Design Studio in his home town of Dartmouth, MA. He enjoys taking on new challenges, and has developed everything from WordPress plugins to Twitter Applications. Jonathan will be presenting More is better….. Right? As a society this is drilled into our minds. And generally yes, more content is better. However in a time of infinite information, it is important not to overwhelm your users. Organization is key to a good user experience. Jonathan will go over the progression of new and old ways to do this, and how WordPress has made this much easier to do over the last few versions with new features such as custom post types.

Coming in at the #2 slot is Bill Dennen, who has been a participant in our community since the first meet up. Bill is a Web Technologist and Sysadmin at Wheaton College. He has worked with web technologies since the days of NCSA Mosaic. Bill will be presenting Under the Hood: How Wheaton uses WordPress. Wheaton College, in nearby Norton, Massachusetts, has been migrating from a home-grown CMS to WordPress with Multisite. Even with thousands of pages spread across dozens of sub-sites, they have found that WordPress can handle just about anything. Bill will provide an overview of the project and talk about what is running behind the scenes, including a mix of off-the-shelf plugins and custom code.

Rounding out our holiday talks at slot #5 is J. Hogue, Creative Director for C. Murray Consulting and former owner of Highchair Designhaus. J. will present Innovative WordPress: Behind ThinkingArizona. J was the creative lead and project manager for ThinkingArizona.com, an innovative, WordPress-powered website edited and produced by the former editor of the Boston Globe. J. will give a quick tour of the website, and demonstrate how ThinkingArizona takes advantage of custom post types and custom taxonomies on the back end to create a well organized, easy to manage online magazine.

Headlining the lightning talks is new Providence resident John James Jacoby – one of the core developers of BuddyPress, the official social networking add-on for WordPress. John has spoken at WordCamps around the country and helped organize a WordCamp in his previous home town of Miami. He just moved to Providence at the beginning of November, and we’re thrilled to have him in our community and participating in our meet up. John will be presenting BuddyPress in 5 Minutes, a great introduction for those of you who have not yet checked out BuddyPress!