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WordCamp Miami, The Great CMS Debate

I will be talking WordPress at two upcoming events, on opposite ends of the U.S. east coast this month.

WordCamp Miami. Never a big fan of winter, I’m definitely looking forward to a breather in sunny Miami, Florida. I’m flying down the evening before (this Friday, the 19th) and returning the following Tuesday. It’s actually more economic to stay a couple of extra days at the hotel as compared with taking a Sunday flight back. In any case, I’ll be speaking at Miami’s WordCamp, which takes place on Saturday the 20th at the University of Miami. I’ll be presenting a revised version of Themes 101, which “premiered” at WordCamp Boston. It will incorporate new information on the upcoming “default” theme, along with some feedback from Boston. If you’re in the area and interested in meeting up on Sunday or Monday, send me a note.

Boston North Shore Web Geeks’ “Great CMS Debate”. I’ll be representing WordPress on a panel debating the merits of a few popular web content management systems (CMS). Other panelists include Boston Web Studio’s Marc Amos (Expression Engine), Jay Batson (co-founder of Acquia, a widely known Drupal consultancy), and Fidelity’s Tom Herer (representing Kentico). My friend, founder of WordCamp Boston, and strategy guru at Optaros, John Eckman, moderates. It takes place on February 25th, at 7 ,pm in Newburyport, Massachusetts.

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WordPress.tv Cameo: Intranets

Back in November, I had the pleasure of attending WordCamp New York City. I spent about 10 minutes presenting my Google Reader plug-in, had a kick off WordCamp Boston planning meeting, had the pleasure of meeting inspiring folks like Raffi Mudge, and even had a great conversation in the hallway with Matt Mullenweg and Jeff Chandler (me in the  middle with the shoulder  bag, Matt sitting to my left, Jeff to my right – photo courtesy John Eckman) for about 40 minutes.

One of the sessions I attended was Ramil Teodosio’s WordPress Powered-Intranets. I’ve done a few Intranet implementations of my own and Ramil’s seminar was a bit more focused on SharePoint-like substitution than I expected. My own experience gave me an opportunity to pipe up a couple of times to offer suggestions and, among other things, plug my free Restricted Site Access plug-in, which was born out of an Intranet project, and I thought might be of interest to the audience. Judging by the post-presentation follow-up with a handful of attendees, at least a few found my comments useful.

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Interviewed on Episode 81 of WordPress Weekly

Last night I recorded the WordPress Weekly podcast with Jeff Chandler of WordPress Tavern. We chatted for about 90 minutes, and then want on to chat more during an after show chat that continued for over an hour. The podcast was published today, you can listen to it or get instructions for downloading it here. Here’s the iTunes link.

Topics included:

  • General WordPress consulting services
  • WordPress value perception as compared to other major CMS platforms
  • Exciting developer features coming in WordPress 2.9 (RC1 out today!)
  • What the near future holds for WordPress, with the MU merge and growth of BuddyPress, bbPress, et al
  • My latest Smashing Magazine article
  • WordCamp Boston (which I’m helping organize)

I really enjoyed participating in the podcast, and hope to participate again in the near future.

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My latest Power Tips article was published last Wednesday on Smashing Magazine. Part 1 covers techniques for adding sidebar content elements and associating post categories with pages. Part 2 will be published in about 2 weeks, and focuses on administrative customization.