Talking WordPress at CMS Expo this week
Jake Goldman on
This coming week I’ll be participating in and speaking at the annual CMS Expo in Chicago. CMS Expo educates and informs business leaders, content marketers, website implementors, and other professionals looking for an in-depth review of the latest web-based publishing solutions. With three full days of content and more than 50 speakers, CMS Expo covers a cross-section of popular content management systems, including Drupal, Joomla, MODx, and of our favorite, WordPress. I’ll be one of four speakers offering insight and content focused on WordPress.
Assuming planes run on time, I’ll be there on Monday evening for the Welcome Kickoff Meetup at the Orrington Conference Center, where I’ll look forward to joining lead WordPress developer Andrew Nacin’s WordPress breakout meetup.
The conference fully kicks off on Tuesday, May 14, where I’ll be presenting Publishing Workflows for WordPress at 4:30 pm CST. On the heels of a session reviewing WordPress’s CMS chops, I’ll dive into scenarios where light weight, out-of-the-box WordPress just doesn’t cut it. Here’s my session description:
You get it. WordPress isn’t just a full featured Content Management System – it’s the industry leader. With a capable engineering team or the right theme, your site can look like just about anything. Shooting off a blog post or editing some basic page content is no problem… but what happens when your content or publishing workflow isn’t quite that simple? What does it mean for a team to actually, you know, manage content for your beautiful, but somewhat complex website?
This session combines captivating case studies that will broaden your sense of what’s possible with a look at off-the-shelf plug-ins and tools like Edit Flow that you can put to work immediately to improve your publishing workflows. From managing unique layouts like a grid or interactive map, to curating reader-submitted or ingested content, to staging big changes, we’ll wrap our heads around tools and methods that keep your site beautiful – without the headaches.
On Wednesday, I’ll be taking the mic again with representatives of other platforms to take part in the second of two Can Your CMS Do That? panels. Here’s the description:
The second in a 2-part panel series, “Can Your CMS Do That?” helps you get the lowdown on the front-end “customer-facing” capabilities of CMSs being used by our panel of experts at CMS Expo. This interactive panel discussion will bring together several panelists who are end users themselves, in “real-world” CMS Site implementations. Together, they’ll share their successes as well as limitations when using their CMS of choice.
This session will focus more specifically on creative, customer-facing and marketing-specific CMS capabilities. This includes design, social media integration, blogging, editing and responsive mobile capabilities. Panelists will both participate in guided discussion, and be available to answer questions from the audience.
Between my speaking obligations, I expect to spend some time volunteering at the WordPress booth with some Automatticians and fellow WordPress speakers.
If you’ve ever spoken to team 10up about CMS choices, you probably know that most 10uppers actually have experience with a variety of platforms. Speaking personally, I’ve built and managed website projects on Drupal, at least three commercial CMS solutions, and of course, completely custom builds. At 10up, we focus on WordPress because we think it offers the best outcomes and creates the happiest customers, 97% of the time (and we’re always happy to steer would-be customers to another platform when WordPress just doesn’t make sense). So I’m particularly eager to refresh myself with the latest offerings, thinking, and approaches that other platforms are bringing to the table.
You can follow me at @jakemgold on Twitter for updates from CMS Expo throughout the week – and if you’re heading there, be sure to let me know!