Category Archives: Blog

Sponsor Spotlight: Metacake

Sponsoring WordCamp Nashville 2013 at the Diamond level was an easy call for Metacake.

“We are passionate about WordPress and WordCamp gives us an opportunity to sow back into the community.” says co-owner Bob Strachan. “A platform like WordPress that can help businesses do more with less money is good for business and good for Nashville.”Metacake cake

Metacake is a Franklin-based ”digital bakery” that offers digital strategy, user experience and visual design, development, and marketing services, among others. When lead developer Randy Hicks, one of WordCamp Nashville’s main organizers, joined the Metacake team four years ago he brought WordPress expertise with him.

“When Randy joined our team in 2009, we quickly became big advocates of WordPress,” Bob says. “Those were the early days of WordPress, but even then its potential was clear. Over time WordPress has proven to be a robust and flexible framework to build any kind of site on. We’ve built large and small sites, everything ranging from complex e-commerce to video platforms on WordPress.”

Maintaining other frameworks was time-consuming, for Metacake and their clients. As an agency head, Bob could see that it would frustrate clients when small site updates required developer intervention. With WordPress, clients could easily make their own minor changes and manage their own content in an environment that was familiar to them.

Check out a few recent Metacake WordPress sites:

    Daniel Island, a real estate development in Charleston, SC
    Thoughtronix, a Nashville-based research firm that organizes and engages big data to unlock its potential
    The People’s Church, a Christian church with campuses in Franklin and Spring Hill

As WordPress has matured from a blogging platform to a full-fledged Content Management System (CMS) used by more and more businesses, Metacake wants to help spread the word.

“I am not a developer. My role at Metacake is to be the bridge between the business and the technology ” Bob says. “WordPress to me is an awesome platform that allows us to design and build web infrastructure that meets the business needs of our clients.”

Contact Metacake:
Bob Strachan
metacake.com
o: 615-852-6166

WordCamp Nashville 2013 Photos

WordCamp Nashville was a pretty big hit, and we are thankful to our volunteer photographers for documenting the day! We hope you will take some time and check out the pics, please use them as you like. We do ask that you give the photographers their credits if you use a photo, and feel free to thank them in the comments.

James Brummett and Chris Wilcoxson, the Nashville WordCamp team thanks you!!! You did a great job!

WordCamp Nashville Available Presentations

Thanks to all who spoke at WordCamp Nashville on April 20th, 2013. We had a lot of fun. Below you will find all the available presentations from the speakers.

In the near future, the videos from the conference will be available on WordCamp.tv. We will be sure to let you know when they are available.

Track 1:
TRACK 2:
TRACK 3: Developers

Thanks to Awesome Volunteers for making WordCamp Nashville 2013 possible

WordCamp Nashville is a labor of love, or at least extreme fondness. Without a few dozen of volunteers, we could not have pulled it off.

Volunteers staffed the registration desk, handed out swag, videotaped presentations, designed the website, t-shirts and other cool stuff, answered questions, solicited sponsors, wrote blog posts, moderated rooms, answered questions, organized food, cleaned up, and generally took care of what needed to happen so the day would run smoothly.

The organizing team, like the presenters, are volunteers, too. Each year WordCamp Nashville gets bigger and better because volunteers donate their time, energy and creativity.

Without the help all the volunteers, WordCamp would not have been what it was so please take few minutes to check out their sites and find them on social media.

THANK YOU sponsors, volunteers, presenters and attendees

Wow.

WordPress is alive, well and thriving in Nashville and Middle Tennessee. WordCamp Nashville 2013 sold out, with 260 attendees and three tracks.

WordCamp Nashville

It takes a village, and Nashville showed up!

Businesses are using WordPress and talking about it. Local participation in related LinkedIn groups has tripled in a year. More businesses are moving to WordPress as their Content Management System (CMS), showing what many of us already knew – that WordPress is no longer a simple blogging platform.

WordCamp Nashville 2013 showcased local talent, enthusiasm and hunger for more. Nashville is on track to become a major collaboration center for WordPress in the South. Consider:

*WPNashville, our monthly meetup, has grown 66 percent.
*11 User MeetUps covered everything from plugins to socials, SEO, categories and tags, the new WordPress media manager and Nashville-based plugin development.
*5 developer MeetUps drew an average of 25 people for breakfast and coder talk.
*4 local developers answered questions and offered advice on a panel at BarCamp Panel in late 2012.
*WordCamp itself moved to a larger venue, added more presentations and lunch while keeping the ticket price the same.

From developers to businesses and users, folks across Middle Tennessee are using WordPress and collaborating more and more. Each year the community grows, and Saturday at WordCamp we even started an unplanned mini-track halfway through the morning to accommodate new users.

THANK YOU sponsors, volunteers, presenters and attendees for an AWESOME WordCamp Nashville 2013.

We had a blast and hope you did, too. Stay tuned for information on how to keep the momentum going.

Stuff you should know as the hour approaches….

It’s almost here!

Nashville WordCamp 2013 is hours away and we wanted to check in with some final details to make your experience even more awesome.

But why wait until Saturday? Join us tonight for the pre-party.

Pre-party: 7 p.m. Friday night 4/19
Patrick’s Bistreaux
2821 Bransford Avenue, Nashville TN
MAP of LOCATION

one more day

Yes, thank you. WORDCAMP NASHVILLE 2013 is hours away.

WordCamp Nashville 2013 4/20
8 a.m. Registration opens
9 a.m. First session starts
Nashville School of Law
4013 Armory Oaks Drive, Nashville TN 37204
MAP of LOCATION

After Party 4 p.m. and on, Saturday evening 4/20
M L Rose Craft Beer, Burgers & More
2535 Franklin Pike Nashville, TN 37204
(Franklin Pike is the same as 8th Avenue South in this part of Nashville)
MAP of LOCATION

Make sure you head to the M L Rose on 8th/Franklin Pike and NOT the M L Rose on Charlotte Avenue. The 8th Avenue South location is a short drive from the WordCamp venue. The Charlotte Avenue location is on the other side of town.

REMEMBER: Attendees are not locked into any one track. Float from room to room. Mingle. Create the WordCamp that works for you.

Tickets are still available, and we do expect to have some at the door should your friends and associates decide to join us, so it is not too late to spread the word. Cash will make such transactions easier but we want to accommodate as many WordPressers as we can.

See you soon.

WordCamp Nashville After-Party Confirmed

A WordCamp without an after-party is sad. Because our goal is to make you happy, we’ve picked a spot not far from Nashville School of Law, where WordCamp Nashville 2013 will unfold.

By not far we mean it is a short drive but not a walkable route.

WordCamp Nashville party

Did someone say beer?

Campers, speakers, organizers and volunteers can head for M.L. Rose after the last session. M.L. Rose is a craft beer and burger joint on Franklin Pike. The pub has two locations in Nashville. If you head to the spot on Charlotte Pike, you have picked the wrong one.

The specs:
WordCamp Nashville 2013 After Party
Start Time: 5 p.m.
Ends: Whenever
Location: M.L. Rose Craft Beer and Burgers
2535 Franklin Pike
Nashville, TN 37204
Info: Immediately following the last session attendees can make their way to the after party.
Site: M.L. Rose

Sponsor Spotlight: Alley Interactive

Alley Interactive is on a mission to prove no website is too big or too complicated to be built on WordPress.

As developers, the folks at Alley Interactive go big. The agency’s experience with WordPress began in early 2011 with the migration of The New York Observer’s flagship site from Drupal to WordPress. Now, Alley Interactive, based in New York City’s Flatiron District, is working with design shop Hard Candy Shell to overhaul the New York’s Post’s site, a project that involves migrating hundreds of thousands of articles and images to WordPress.wordcamp nashville alley interactive

It is one of nine WordPress.com VIP service partners. And at WordCamp Nashville Alley will showcase a new, sophisticated “field manager” it built to manage metadata for posts.

A site overhaul for the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation led Alley to write a custom plugin with a field type that allows users to manage data like an Excel spreadsheet on the front end without creating a custom database table on the back end, says Austin Smith, a managing partner and co-founder of Alley Interactive.

“We have had to do some brand new stuff with WordPress,” he says.

Alley will make much of Field Manager as an open-source plugin, and WordCamp Nashville will be its public rollout. Austin is a presenter in the developer track on April 20, the first of what he hopes will be a “long string of appearances” at other WordCamps on the road to making Field Manager part of the WordPress ecosystem.

Most of Alley’s clients are media companies or content producers that want help building and maintaining Drupal, WordPress, and Django sites. Again with Hard Candy Shell, it launched a new site and full rebranding for The New Republic magazine earlier this year. That site is on Drupal 7.

Yet for many projects WordPress is a compelling platform because new versions don’t require expensive upgrades to custom work, Austin says. The new Field Manager, which required hundreds of developer hours, embraces the same philosophy.

“It makes adding custom fields to WordPress posts incredibly easy,” he says.

Alley Interactive Website
Check out Alley’s WordPress projects.
Twitter @alleydev