OCWP RoundUp – June 27

A great evening here in Orange County to geek out on WordPress for a few hours! As always, special thanks to the Zeek boys for hosting this awesome event.

Jason Tucker – @jasontucker
We’re streaming now at Orange County WordPress meeting officially starts at 7pm http://bit.ly/lQs0XR #ocwp

Jason came through with a complete streaming setup for the event. Could this help put Orange County on the WordPress map for good? Does anyone even watch live streaming?

Jon Brown – @jb510
Am I the only one hearing cello in the background? #ocwp

Jeff Tuner decided to kick us off with some YoYo Ma… Apparently needed some music to soothe the crowd.

Jeff started off the evening demoing a pretty cool plugin called Front-end Editor. The editor allows you to make some modest changes to the posts, sidebars, and some other elements in real time, directly from the front end. Very cool if you get frustrated with individual posts after you’ve published them, and want a quick & easy way to make modifications.

Laura Monroe – @CreativeAgentVA
@zengy discusses Disqus comment system #WordPress #ocwp

The next topic on the agenda has a lot of appeal, since many of the WP folks are concerned about scalability for comments. A couple notes he’s mentioning: Your comments are available to you – you own them! So if you are concerned about the long-term viability of the Disqus business – don’t worry! You can get ‘em back.

Laura Monroe – @CreativeAgentVA
@ResPres “are you looking for SEO or engagement in your comment system?” (he says engagement) #ocwp

Good spark of a debate – and the response, in my mind, should scare the s**t out of Google. SEO is a dying concern – the impact of near-term social sharing and dialog is far more valuable than the long-term prospective implications of the search benefits (especially around comments).

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Now we’re moving on to some new topics: The Genesis framework by Studio Press. Why pick Genesis? SEO gains, stability, dynamic page layouts, and several other gizmos. Seems like a good reason for adoption is the desire to reduce the count of plugins that a site is running – less maintenance on the plugin side, and “great support” for developers.

As with a lot of the heavy-duty professional theme frameworks, there are tons of nice enhancements found in the Genesis theme. You can easily add secondary navigation, customize the archives pages (add images, change the amount of content on those pages), setup a blog page (and let the rest of the site be driven by custom post types and “static” pages).

Dave Cole – @HeyDaveCole
Oooh, another shiny plugin rec’d by @chadajohnson SEO Data Transporter http://bit.ly/mBoMYy #ocwp #plugin

This plugin lets you convert SEO plugin packages from one to another. Though this was demoed during the Genesis theme demo, I really like the simple transportability of SEO. It’s nice to see helpful little utilities like that.

The view from the front (image brazenly ripped off from Jeff Turner)

So much stuff to cover on Genesis… There’s a ton of nooks & crannies in the framework. There’s also a slough of additional child themes, in case you just want a fancy new look.

Linda Sherman Gordon – @LindaSherman
Yes! RT @jb510: Very well done #GenesisWP demo @chadajohnson thank you! #ocwp

Kudos Chad! Really appreciate the demo & discussion.

Brandon Dove and Loren Nason have some good thoughts on Genesis vs. Thesis. Sounds like Genesis is the winner just by ease of use for coder / developers, and by the volume of updates that Genesis is receiving versus Thesis. And Jeff Turner is also teasing at the future of Headway (he sounds amped…) A lot of growth in the framework / theme universe.

Some good tips on the forthcoming WP 3.2 release (look out for those database updates!).

And that’s a wrap folks! Thanks again Jeff + Steve of Zeek!

Tags: GenesisWP, OCWP, plugin, WordPress

Mentioned in this Post: @jasontucker, @jb510, @CreativeAgentVA, @Zengy, @respres, @chadajohnson, @LindaSherman, @BrandonDove