Plan to attend Philly Tech Week, April 22-28. There will be a great variety of tech related events taking place at various venues and times. For more information and the complete schedule (updated as events are scheduled), visit http://phillytechweek.com
Drupal is a powerful Content Management System, with a large and growing community of developers and users. Many well known sites use Drupal, including whitehouse.gov! On September 17, I presented an introduction to this CMS, using the “rough cuts” edition (pre-publication) of O’Reilly’s book, Using Drupal, 2nd edition, by Heather Berry and Angela Byron. The full version should be out on December 15th, 2011. The notes attached are nearly all excerpted from the book, and I suggest that you buy the book if you have an interest in learning about Drupal.
When you’re building your WordPress site, you often want some dummy content. While you could simply take notes at the Web Design group and copy the material into your site, that’s a lot of work. Fortunately, there’s a plugin called WP Dummy Text, which will automatically add as many pages and posts to your site as you like in just a few seconds. It uses actual text from such works as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, so it’s not unreadable as Lorem Ipsum is. That can be good or bad; you may find yourself reading the posts instead of working on your site. Give it a try!
In just two months, PACS meets again. I hope that you are all making good progress on your summer reading lists, and that you remember to bring in your book reports. You’ll want to start the 2011-12 season off right!
WordPress 3.2 was released early in July, and version 3.2.1 is out now. If your hosting service will support it, you should upgrade now.
I say “if” because I was surprised (and dismayed) to learn that my current host is running PHP version 5.1.6 on the server where my site resides. WordPress has been saying for many months now that version 3.2 required PHP version 5.2.4, at least. My host would be willing to move my site to a server running the latest version of PHP, but this would require a change in plans, and more money. I will be changing hosting services. The change should be transparent to viewers, but if it is not, I will send an email to members on the Web Design mailing list.
On July 4, 2011, the latest version of WordPress, 3.2 was released.
Users should upgrade as soon as possible to take advantage of new
features and enhanced security. Among other things, a cool new theme,
Twenty Eleven, is included as the default.
Check out this video! It’s really impressive.
http://wordpress.org/news/2011/07/gershwin/
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Reed Gustow
Philadelphia Area New Media Association
panma.org
Saul Rosenbaum, one of our most popular guest speakers, presented a terrific talk with the provocative title, “How to Tart Up a Website,” teaching us how to make our sites more attractive and compelling. As usual, he delivered an informative, amusing session, packed with useful tips and great web references. Here are the notes from his talk:
how-to-tart-up-a-website
About 25 people came out to the Philly WordPress Meetup on June 29th. Thanks to the generosity of Jennifer Herman and Future Media Concepts (325 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia) we had a great place to dig into WordPress, discuss issues and answer questions. Thanks also to the amazing WP Meetup leaders, Brad Williams and Doug Stewart, who organized the meetup and make it all happen every month!
The notes from the meetup are attached. wordpress_beginner_session
