Category Archives: Sponsors

Interview with SiteGround

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

Why do you enjoy sponsoring/supporting WordCamps?

WordPress is extremely important for the web hosting industry as a whole. By sponsoring WordCamps we hope to humbly contribute to the growth of the community of the WordPress users. Of course, this also help us present our brand to many potential customer and partners.

Why do you like interacting with attendees/people at WordCamps?

WordCamps are a great opportunity to interact with many cool people that are open, easy-going and ready to share their experience with the other participants. We also meet many of our existing customers on these events. In a completely online business like ours, this is a great opportunity to talk to our users face-to-face and to even have a beer with them at the after party.

How your company is involved with WordPress (speaking, volunteering, core contributing, etc)?

For the last 3 years SiteGround has sponsored over 50  WordCamps, attended 30 of them and we had a speaker from our team on 15. People from our events team have also been involved on a volunteer base with the organization of the last two WordCamp Europe and several local events and meetups. We are also proud to have a very talented person, Ella Van Dorpe, whose work as a WordPress core committer is completely financed by SiteGround.

How has the WordPress community impacted your business?

As WordPress is the most popular application among our customers, the needs of the WordPress users shape to a great extent the characteristics of our service.

Do you have something cool you want our attendees to know/learn?

We will have some really cool stuff for all Minneapolis WordCampers on our both, so stop by and have a chat with Dimitar & Miroslav from our team!

WordCamp Minneapolis Blogpost

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

WordPress is one of the cornerstones of our agency. It’s not just the CMS we choose to build on; it’s our chosen community.

The people we meet at WordCamps are some of the best humans in the world. They’re nerds like us that like to geek out over APIs and page builders. They’re puzzle masters that pull up a laptop across from ours to review code. And they’re friends we want to kick back with at the end of the day, playing foosball or grabbing a beer.

When we built our business, we set out to create and maintain a culture shaped by intentionality. That culture has always included giving back to the open-source community. Collectively, our team members have given over 80 WordCamp talks, helped organize 14 WordCamps, and made countless contributions to Core Code, Core Team, .org Code, .org Support, and more.

Sponsoring this WordCamp isn’t just to get our logo on the signs around the conference. We’re sponsoring because we believe in the WordPress project, and more importantly, we believe in supporting the community behind it.

Plus we have to admit we have a soft spot for Minneapolis. Several of our team members live in the area and are heavily involved in the local WordPress community. WordCamp Minneapolis is a great opportunity for us to support our team and show how much we care and are invested in the community at the same time.

This upcoming weekend, you’ll spot Triberians throughout the conference who have helped plan and run the event (Michelle, Travis, & Nick), and our team members who are contributing as speakers (Reid, Travis, Michelle, & Jen). Swing by our table to say hi or catch one of us between sessions.

We’re ready to reconnect with old friends, make some new friends, and learn a thing or twentyninehundred from the sessions.

Team-picAbout Modern Tribe

Over the past decade, Modern Tribe has established itself as the agency of choice for Fortune 500 companies, educational institutions, government entities, and well-funded start-ups.

In addition to specializing in large-scale WordPress deployments, we’re also committed to open source and excellent product design. We’re the team behind plugins like The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, The Image Widget, and GigPress.

Our plugins have been downloaded and loved by millions, including many folks here at WordCamp Minneapolis. Sponsoring this WordCamp is just one small way we like to give back to the community.

Learn more about our plugin projects at TheEventsCalendar.com or get in touch at tri.be.

Building WordPress is About Building Community

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support! This post was written by Mendel Kurland, a speaker at our event and Community Evangelist at GoDaddy.

I’m an analytical sort of fellow. I like research. Give me stacks of data from various sources and I’ll connect the dots. I’ll sit in a downtown coffee shop somewhere and create a formula that explains where the most influential small-business communities are in America. Or where you can find the best artisan coffee in Louisiana. 

And I’ll back it up with data.

So a couple of years ago, when I was thinking of where I wanted to live next, I did the same thing. I poured over data to try to find the best community to live in. Where can I find an awesome community? Where can I find a real community?

That’s a loaded term, isn’t it? Community? Real community is even more heavy. What is that? A pretty downtown with big oak trees and a busy diner and an Elk’s lodge? A group of collective street artists taking over abandoned buildings and making them beautiful? A bunch of families getting together on a Sunday afternoon to build a local playground for their kids? 

It’s more than just hanging out. It’s more than having something in common. It’s more than defining yourself by what you’re not.

What makes WordPress a community?

Real communities are diverse and inclusive. Real communities grow because they welcome newcomers and support the regulars. Real communities have a vision that’s beyond the day to day. It’s bigger than a location or a playground or a product.

Building a community? That’s not an easy thing.

But it’s exactly what we’ve seen with WordPress and the open-source community surrounding it. These are collaborative and welcoming cultures that have built something bigger than themselves — something that contributes to the common good of the Internet and the world. 

The software? That’s only of a piece of it. The real power is in the community.

When Matt and Mike first created WordPress, I’m guessing they didn’t imagine it would power the Internet, apps and enterprise sites. I’m not sure they could have seen that it would unify designers, developers and artists toward a common cause. WordPress has become another shining example of a real community. Every single contributor (big and small) is an agent of that success.

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At GoDaddy, we’re committed to building the WordPress community.

With this in mind, GoDaddy’s been a part of the WordPress community since inception — at least from a consumer and website-builder perspective. We’re nerds. We love to make websites and share them with friends. It’s digital validation that we know what we’re doing. 

But it hasn’t been until recently that we doubled-down and became an active member of the community and a WordPress champion. Our goal shifted from using and loving WordPress to building and nurturing the broader community. 

We wanted to spread the love, so to speak.

So at the beginning of 2016, GoDaddy made a financial commitment to the WordPress community in the amount of $130,000. Money that the WordPress Foundation used to launch smaller WordPress communities around the world. And money to make meetups and WordCamps a reality for existing communities. Communities like the one coming together during WordCamp Minneapolis. Where WordPress t-shirt-wearing folks of all ages and backgrounds will join together over client war stories. Where web creators will take a moment out of their hustle to learn as much as possible vacuuming every ounce of coffee from the carafes. 

Beyond money, we’re listening closely to the WordPress community and building a WordPress platform based on their feedback and their needs. The GoDaddy WordPress team continues to focus on creating an elegant and powerful platform for developers, web designers (GoDaddy Pro), and the 14 million small and micro-businesses that we serve.

And we’ve met a lot of amazing and thoughtful people along the way. People who are teaching others how to start and run their own freelance businesses. People who are showing WordPress beginners how to get started. They’re teaching them everything from themes and plugins to JavaScript. We love what they’re doing so much, we’ve hired them. Many of them have contributed to our online blog, the GoDaddy Garage. And we’ve funded local workshops for others (BobWP and the DoTheWoo podcast). Even more recently, we’ve seeded Zac Gordon’s efforts to build comprehensive training for WordPress-related JavaScript, JavaScript for WP.

And we’re not slowing down. You’ll see us at WordCamp Minneapolis in a big way. GoDaddy-ers and friends of ours are attending, covering, and contributing. We’re participating in WordCamps and contribution days in Minneapolis and around the world.

Yep, we love this community. We’re stoked to be a part of it. And like any real community, we’re excited to continue to participate, grow, and contribute to a vision that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

Let’s connect.

Give me a shout on Twitter or Facebook (or GoDaddy), and keep up-to-date with what we’re up to next! What should we be working on? How can we help?

Oh, and if you haven’t tried our new Managed WordPress hosting, hit me up at WordCamp Minneapolis. I have something for you. 😉

Countdown To WordCamp With Rocket55

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

We’ve seen a lot of things change within the industry since Rocket55 began in 2007. Mobile responsiveness, interactive content, HTML5, and even completely wireless functionality were just ways to complete “Wouldn’t it be amazing if…” statements. Now, as we grow and advance, we are able to do some really cool things.

Rocket55 is quickly expanding, and as the departments within the agency grow, so do the areas and levels of expertise. Our team is collaborative, passionate, dedicated, and always looking for the next best way to improve online experiences – and WordPress enables us to do that.

At Rocket55 we love talking about all things digital – especially when we can talk about it with people who are as excited about it as we are. On Foundation Friday, our Development Manager Rich will be presenting during the Intro to Development. On Saturday and Sunday, feel free to stop by our booth! We will be providing website and service consultations, and we’ll have specialists from every department available to answer any questions you might have. You can also pick up some R55 swag, learn more about what we do, chat about the latest in web design and development, or talk about anything, really (SEO… cats… beer… Star Wars…) Hope to see you there!

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How to RockIT at WordCamp

  • Don’t be afraid to talk to the speakers and ask questions. They are people just like you!
  • Don’t limit yourself to just one type of session. Sitting in on a session you don’t know much about can be fun!
  • Talk to people. Then talk to more people. And then find more people and talk to them.
  • Make sure to attend Saturday’s after-party – even if you’re flying solo. It’s a good time, and you’ll be welcomed whether you’re with a big group or not.
  • Don’t miss Sunday’s lectures! They’re often some of the best. Grab an XL coffee and get your butt there on Sunday.
  • To get your hands on the best swag of the weekend, make sure to check out the booths before lunch on Saturday. Or, stay for the last session and clean house at the end of the weekend.
  • Take a cue from some of the seasoned WordCampers and put all those sweet stickers on your laptop. But be sure to leave some space for next years!

How WooThemes Gives Back to the WordPress Community (and How You Can, Too)

This is a blog post from one of our sponsors. Be sure to visit all of our sponsors at the event and thank them for their support!

At WooThemes, we are perhaps most well known for WooCommerce, the leading eCommerce platform for WordPress. I’m sure that as an attendee of WordCamp Minneapolis, you probably already know at least a little about WooCommerce (but you can always learn more right here).

What you may not be aware of is that WooThemes is not only passionate about eCommerce, but also the WordPress community itself. Without the community, we wouldn’t be the company that we are today, not by a long shot. We owe so much of who we are to the influence and support of this great WordPress community of which we are a part.

In that light, we make it a point to give back to the community as much as we can. We also encourage others to get equally involved in building the WordPress ecosystem. Here are a few of the ways that we like to give back to WordPress, and how you can get involved too.

Translating WordPress

If you’ve never done it before, you’d be surprised at how easy it is to translate WordPress into practically any language. With a team spread all over the world, we have a huge opportunity to assist with this task, and we do: a significant number of our ninjas regularly contribute to the various languages in which WordPress is available.

On top of that, a few of our team members are editors for our respective locales, which gives us the ability to confirm and merge all the community submitted translations into WordPress core.

If translating WordPress sounds like something you would like to do, then have a look at this handy post that outlines the process in detail.

Documenting WordPress

“If code is poetry, then documentation is prose.”

WordPress is a great platform for building almost anything, but any software platform is only as strong as its documentation – and WordPress is no different. A large part of contributing to WordPress involves writing documentation, both for the code itself as well as for how to use it.

This is something that we at WooThemes contribute to with great frequency. Whether it’s improving the inline code documentation (which is automatically pulled through to the new Code Reference), or assisting with writing user-facing guides on how to use WordPress, this is something that we love to do.

We are so involved in this, in fact, that one of our team members is leading the HelpHub project. This is an endeavour that is set to move all of the user-focused documentation from the WordPress Code, to a new and far more flexible WordPress platform. We also have a few more ninjas who are working on the HelpHub team to make sure it is all built and migrated correctly.

If you would like to get involved in the HelpHub project, have a look at the HelpHub page in the Docs handbook and jump in to lend a hand.

Engaging with the WordPress Community

While WordPress is great as a powerful piece of software, it is so much more than that. The community that surrounds WordPress is hugely influential, entertaining and helpful.

The easiest way to get involved in this community is to attend events like this WordCamp, but there are always additional opportunities available to get involved – for example, by organizing events for your local community. You can find out more about those on the Community blog.

At Woo, we value these community events so much that we make a point of sponsoring as many as possible. A large number of our team members are involved in organizing WordPress meetups and WordCamps in their cities. On top of that, a few of our ninjas are available as Community Deputies, which mean they are on hand to assist other community organizers around the world in a number of tangible and practical ways.

Making WordPress Accessible

It’s crucial that WordPress is as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, no matter what their situation in life is. To that end, the WordPress Accessibility team work hard to make sure that everyone has an equal chance of using and building with WordPress in whatever way they like.

One of our team members is a dedicated member of this relatively new team, and works alongside a number of other talented volunteers to ensure global accessibility for all WordPress users.

Building WordPress

Of course, with WordPress being primarily a software project, the core code itself is of utmost importance. With that in mind, we make a strong showing of contributing code to WordPress core as often as we can. In fact, the last 10 major releases of WordPress (and many more before that) all include at least one member of the Woo team in the list of contributors.

One element of WordPress core that we are particularly proud of is the menu management system. It has evolved quite a bit over the years, but the menu management page that was first included in WordPress 3.0 was taken from our very own WooNav module, which we previously included in all of our themes.

If you would like to get involved in contributing to WordPress core, have a look at the WordPress Core blog to prepare yourself for the world of WordPress core development.

We Take Pride in Giving Back

As you can see, WordPress is a broad and varied world of opportunities with many skill sets being required to make sure that the project grows at a steady pace.

At WooThemes, we take great pride in our commitment to furthering this growth, and we encourage you to do so as well. Giving back to WordPress is one of the most rewarding things you may ever do – get involved today, you won’t regret it.