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
Drupal is a powerful open-source Content Management System. In the May 21 session, I provided an overview of this software, and we looked at a simple site that shows product reviews. Here are some resources for you to get you started:
Download Drupal and find documentation, a forum, and vast resources at the main Drupal site: drupal.org
Find a huge array of Drupal sites from all over the world at: drupalsites.net
You can see many Drupal case studies and success stories here: drupal.org/cases
At least I hope it was fixed. Prez Don Arrowsmith let me know that in trying to read my posts via RSS, he saw an error message. I found and installed a plugin that fixes it – called, appropriately enough, Fix RSS Feeds. It worked, so I was willing to fork over $4.99 as a contribution.
Six Revisions is an online magazine that we talked about a few months ago. It’s a great resource for web design techniques, especially for the artistic side of things.
In our April meeting, I’m going to review some articles that cover a range of techniques that you can use to improve the design of your websites:
Progressive Disclosure in User Interfaces/
How to Design a Clean Business Website with Photoshop
How to Use CSS3 Media Queries to Make a Mobile Version of Your Website
Smashing Magazine is a terrific resource for a huge variety of topics: Coding, CSS, JavaScript, HTML5, Photoshop, Design, and others. It also includes articles of a more philosophical bent that discuss concepts and raise questions about web coding or design practices. In the March 19, 2011 session, I reviewed a number of articles covering several areas – here are the links:
WordPress is flexible, powerful web-building software with a reasonable learning curve. One of its best features is the ability to add plugins, which are bits of code that can add features, functions, and security to a basic website. There are thousands of plugins available at www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins.
I’ve selected 6 plugins to demonstrate for our February 19 session, using the Web Design website as a platform. Here is the list:
At the PACS Web Design group next Saturday, I’ll be showing some WordPress plugins. Plugins really extend the power of WordPress by adding functionality to the basic installation.
Installing plugins is easy, and takes no coding knowledge. There are thousands of free plugins available, and I’ll review a bunch of good ones to help you spend less time searching and more time building your WordPress website.
See you next week!
The huge amount of information on the internet can be as overwhelming as it is helpful. Here are some websites that provide excellent information to help you do what you want to do.
