Photo by Chelsie Goodwin, another awesome #wcn15 volunteer

Hello friends, attendees, sponsors and volunteers!

It is hard to believe WordCamp Nashville was a week ago. We wanted to let you know what to expect in coming weeks. WordPress learning and sharing doesn’t stop just because we picked up our trash and had some beer.

Stay tuned for the following:

• Sponsor Posts: In which you will learn more about our Gold and Silver sponsors
• Session Slides: In which we we assemble in a post for each “track” all links to available slide decks
• Podcast Interviews: In which you will be able to hear and/or read edited interviews with speakers and sponsors interviewed by Clark Buckner of Technology Advice.
• wordpress.tv videos: In which you be able to view full sessions recorded and edited by some of our many awesome volunteers.

We’d add a gentle reminder that WordCamp Nashville, as other WordCamps across the world, is powered entirely by volunteer organizers and staffed by an army of more volunteers on The Big Day. After WordCamp, volunteers edit videos, write posts, put together surveys and check in with speakers and sponsors.

Follow us on Twitter @wordcampnash for #wcn15 updates. Please be patient. And please keep in touch with the new friends you made.

It is going to be a great day.

WordCamp Nashville opens for registration at 8 a.m. today with the first sessions starting at 9 a.m.  WordCamp Maine and WordCamp Lisboa (Lisbon, Portugal) are this weekend, too.

But if you are in Music City – a few reminders:

We still have a few dozen tickets available; walk-ins are welcome and we’ll be delighted to take your $20.

Volunteers are in green WordCamp t-shirts. Attendees will receive blue t-shirts. If you need anything, grab a volunteer.

The painfully official hashtag is #wcn15.

Schedules are on your lanyards.. Three sessions are before lunch; three sessions are after lunch. We like the symmetry.

The nice folks at Lyft are offering one ride to attendees who are first-time Lyft users worth up to $20. The code is on your lanyard.

The after-party is at The Flying Saucer in downtown Nashville. You’ll get two drink tickets (maybe more if you know someone at the sessions who isn’t going) and light appetizers. Address is on your lanyard cards. We make excellent use of them and pack tons of print in a small space.

We have a separate room for sponsor swag, which is awesome because we have a record number of sponsors this year and a separate room means registration won’t back up.

And some random data just for fun:

San Francisco hosted the first WordCamp in 2006. Since then, there have been:

• 470 WordCamps in
• 197 cities in
• 48 countries on
• 6 continents

In taking part today – whether you are in Nashville, Maine or Portugal, you are part of something much, much bigger. The international WordPress community is generous, inclusive and growing.

With input from local organizers, WordCamp.org sets standards and guidelines to keep these grassroots events about WordPress, learning and sharing best practices and new tricks with the platform many of us know and love.

And please thank our awesome sponsors for making this all possible.

This year, look for volunteers in green t-shirts. Attendees will receive shirts of another color. Photo by Morgan Bortz.

The Big Day is almost here! We’ve compiled some information to help make your WordCamp experience as seamlessly awesome as possible.

REGISTRATION: We open the doors at 8:00 and sessions start at 9:00 a.m. Please don’t come too early. There is plenty of time to check-in, get your t-shirt, grab some coffee and meet some folks.

LOCATION: The Nashville School of Law is located at 4013 Armory Oaks Drive, Nashville, TN 37204. The facility and parking lot are Wheelchair Accessible. Parking is ample and free.

FOOD & BEVERAGE: Coffee and water will be available throughout the day. Lunch service is included.

INTERNET / WIFI / POWER: All session rooms have stadium-style seating with individual power outlets. WiFi is available to everyone, but with many people on phones, tablets and laptops logged in at the same time, you may want to bring a hotspot if you have one.

SCHEDULE: If you want a printed copy of the schedule get it here before leaving home. The schedule also will be printed on the lanyard cards.

SOCIAL MEDIA: Please share your experiences at WordCamp Nashville on Twitter using the official hashtag, #wcn15.

WE STAND READY: If you have general questions, a volunteer can help. They’ll be wearing the green t-shirts. Don’t forget one-on-one help with WordPress questions – be sure to bring your laptop to the Help Desk. We will have a team of rotating WordPress experts to help you throughout the day.

GET A LYFT: Lyft, the paid ride-sharing service, has agreed to a partnership that gives first-time Lyft users one ride worth up to $20. The code will be printed on the lanyard card.

AFTER PARTY: The WordCamp after-party will be in downtown Nashville from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m., at The Flying Saucer, a literal Beer Emporium. We will be offering two drinks per attendee as well as some light appetizers. Feel free to invite significant others. The address is 111 10th Ave. S, Nashville, TN, 37203. There is (paid) parking available behind the venue, which is down a ramp and near the train tracks.

GET TO KNOW YOUR COMMUNITY: We hope you love the sessions, yet much of what comes out of going to a WordCamp happens between sessions. Take the time to meet people and learn about what they do. You will not find a more open and available community – WordPressers are a friendly lot.

See you Saturday!

Join us again this year at The Flying Saucer for the WordCamp Nashville after-party. Photo by Visual Coma.

One week to go and a scant 35 tickets remain. Get yours while you can. Get Tickets

WordCamp conference targets all levels, plus site and business owners

About 300 people who use WordPress – ranging from true beginners to advanced developers – will gather May 16 for WordCamp Nashville 2015.

The daylong learning and networking event, the fourth annual conference here, celebrates WordPress itself and the large global support community around it. A team of volunteer community organizers curates sessions, and this year’s event has more local speakers and local sponsors than ever.

“The big increase in local WordPress presenters as well as business sponsors is great for the community,” says Randy Hicks, one of the conference organizers. “It’s more evidence of the growth and popularity of WordPress.”

WordPress is free and open-source publishing software admired by fans for its ease of use, flexibility and ability to customize. The platform drives websites of major companies such as Best Buy mobile, TechCrunch and BBC America; to celebrity sites, including Katie Perry and LL Cool J; to single-author blogs; and everything in between.

WordCamp Nashville 2014 Photo by Chelsie Goodwin

WordCamp Nashville is part of a much bigger picture. WordPress powers more than 1 of every 5 websites worldwide, including 100s of those for Nashville businesses. Each year, volunteers in cities across the globe organize WordCamps to share best practices and their expertise.

The Music City event, at Nashville School of Law, features 18 sessions in three tracks based on skill level, though attendees are not locked into any track. A daylong Help Desk includes other volunteers offering one-on-one assistance.

Get Tickets

Expect a crowd that loves tech, problem solving, entrepreneurship and business. The event is entirely volunteer-run and speakers are not paid. WordCamps are run under the auspices of the WordPress Foundation, a 501(c) 3 non-profit organization.

Tickets are $20 and include lunch, a t-shirt and admission to a party at the Flying Saucer in downtown Nashville following the event. Lyft, the ride-sharing service, has agreed to provide a ride worth up to $20 to WordCamp participants who are not already clients. Attendees, including speakers and sponsors, will get the ride code at the event.

We have secured two hotel options for all attendees who are coming in from out of town, and we are working on some others. We will announce them here and on the @WordCampNash twitter feed when we get more information.

We hope you find Nashville to be a comfortable stay and look forward to meeting you at WordCamp!

Courtyard Nashville Brentwood
103 East Park Drive, Brentwood, TN 37027

• Rate: $115.00
• Rate Reference: WordCamp Room Block
• Available dates: May 15th and/ or 16th
• Cutoff Date: Friday, April 24, 2015
• Call Marriott Reservations at 800-321-2211 or 615-371-9200

Extended Stay America – Brentwood South
9020 Church St. E. Brentwood, TN 37207

• Rate: Single: $66.49 + Tax, Double: $80.74 + Tax, King: $71.24 + Tax
• Rate Reference: WordCamp Room Block
• Available dates: May 15th and/ or 16th
• Cutoff Date: Friday, May 1, 2015
• Call Reservations at 615-377-7847

Join us Monday, April 20, at the WP Nashville Meetup, where we’ll have a “Help Desk” set up much like you will see at Nashville WordCamp.

It’s a great chance for WordPress users of all levels – beginners to developers – to meet one-on-one, ask questions and get guidance from some folks with lots of experience. We won’t code for you but we will help get you and your site or blog how you want it to be. Depending on turnout, we also may have a general Q&A session running so more people can ask questions.

Whet your appetite for learning more about WordCamp Nashville, which takes place on Saturday, May 16, at Nashville School of Law.

Get a taste of WordCamp Nashville at WP Nashville Help Desk on Monday, April 20

At WordCamp at WordCamp Nashville 2015, we’ll have a room set aside for a day-long Help Desk in addition to three tracks packed with WordPress sharing and learning. The setting will be informal, and you’ll be able to come and go as you please throughout the entire day (except for a brief lunch break).

Like Monday’s event, the WordCamp Help Desk isn’t just for beginners, intermediates, or developers – it’s for everyone.

Go to http://www.meetup.com/NashvilleWordpress/ – and join WP Nashville if you aren’t already a member of the Meetup group. Register for Monday and get direct access to Nashville’s WordPress community.

THE DETAILS
7 p.m., Monday, April 20
AhSo Designs
440 E Iris Drive
Nashville TN 37204

We are located in Berry Hill above the t-shirt shop. The front door should be unlocked so just come upstairs! MAP

WordCamp Nashville 2015 is set for May 16 and tickets are available NOW.

A $20 ticket gets you a full day of WordPress awesomeness, a Nashville WordCamp t-shirt and a tasty lunch (with vegetarian and vegan options) PLUS admission to the after-party.

Get Tickets

Make new friends at WordCamp Nashville on May 16. Photo by Morgan Bortz.

Refund policy and ticket help
You may request a ticket refund until Wednesday May 13th. We understand that life changes so if you need to ask for a refund please contact wordcamp@wpnashville.com or contact us through our Contact Page. Use the WordCamp contact page, too, if you have trouble buying your ticket or have other questions.

Show your face
As we continue to build the Middle Tennessee WordPress community, we want to highlight more members in our popular “Faces of WordPress” feature on the WordCamp website.

These spotlight posts are not reserved for developers – our goal is to showcase users, business owners, designers as well as developers to put faces on the depth and diversity of local talent. And yes, you get a link to your site.

So take a minute and fill out this handy form.

The question isn’t why would you want to be a WordCamp Nashville sponsor. The question is why wouldn’t you?

Dozens of agencies in Middle Tennessee use WordPress to build websites for clients large and small. Such companies benefit greatly from a free and open source software like WordPress, plus the vast support ecosystem that surround it, and WordCamp sponsorships are a great way to give back to project that’s helped build their business.

Three sponsorship levels

Sponsorship comes with goodies, which grow with the size of the contribution. We created three levels of financial support ($500, $250, $100) to make sponsorship more widely available. Take a look:

Gold $500

• 4 comp tickets
• Sidebar Logo 300×300
• 2 Blog posts
• Swag table
• Newsletter thanks
• twitter list
• tweet thanks
• badge in all newsletters

Silver $250

• 2 comp tickets
• Sidebar Logo 200×200
• 1 Blog post
• twitter list
• tweet thanks
• badge in all newsletters

Community $100

• 1 comp ticket
• Sidebar Logo 75×75
• twitter list
• tweet thanks
• badge in all newsletters

Benefits beyond good karma

Digital marketing, design and development agencies that use WordPress support WordCamps as a way to help grow an even stronger local community. Companies that sponsor WordCamp also get their brand in front of hundreds of attendees, including a ton of awesome developers, and prime exposure on this very website.

Technology companies have used other community-organized camps in Nashville as a way to recruit talent. We’ve even heard a few reports of local WordCamp sponsors getting new gigs or clients because of the extra visibility.

And don’t forget – additional sponsorship opportunities exist for the WordCamp Speaker Dinner and the after-party on Saturday, May 16. Hashtag beer.

Become a sponsor!

Calling all WordPress fans – especially those from Tennessee (we count Southern Kentucky and Northern Alabama in that) – we want your session proposals.

If you’ve thought about presenting before but hesitated this is the year to try. WordCamp Nashville is soliciting proposals for three tracks – loosely defined below – and we need your help to make 2015 kick some butt.

Following WordCamp Central Guidelines, the Nashville organizing team aims to have 80 percent of presenters from this region. We’d love to see new topics and likely won’t select a speaker and session presented at another WordCamp in the last six months.

Ideas to get you thinking

WordCamp Nashville speakers have eager, friendly audiences wanting to learn.

At past Nashville WordCamps, some of the most popular sessions have been on using a specific tool (like Gravity Forms) with WordPress or scaling a product into a WordPress-focused business (Ninja Forms). Security concerns haven’t gone away. Our WP devs are all chatting about Jetty and the REST API. Subscription sites are a big deal these days, as is WordPress and marketing integration. And WP users who aren’t developers always want to know what plugins they should use and how to figure out what is going on when stuff stops working.

We know you have ideas – so do it! Feel free to submit more than one proposal. Submission deadline is Friday, April 3, because we want the schedule set well before we ring the bell to start WordCamp Nashville. Okay, we don’t really ring a bell, the WordCamp Nashville is May 16.

People as well as topics will fall along a spectrum so don’t worry too much about where your proposed track might fit. We help with that. To get some ideas, check out sessions from prior Nashville WordCamps:
WordCamp Nashville 2014
WordCamp  Nashville 2013

And here’s a look at upcoming sessions in St. Louis, which is this weekend, and Atlanta, which is later this month:

WordCamp St. Louis
WordCamp Atlanta

Submit already. You know you want to.

I’m ready. Let’s do this. 

How we loosely define user levels

Nashville School of Law is the WordCamp Nashville venue again this year.

Generally, we want users to define their own level of knowledge by reading into the text for themselves.The definitions for the terms User, Super User & Developer should imply an area of interest rather than a level of required knowledge. All WordCamp attendees are invited to attend any session, regardless of skill level, and can switch back and forth between tracks at any time. Still, we put together these guidelines to help both attendees and speakers pinpoint where they’ll get the most out of their WordCamp experience.

User (Beginner)
A user can input text and upload media to construct a post. The user probably does not yet feel comfortable modifying code (CSS, HTML, etc.) yet to customize the available settings of a theme or a plugin. Is comfortable or getting comfortable within the admin and publishing content. Interested in learning how to use WordPress on a functional level. Functional level is defined as the following:

• Publishing content: pages and posts
• Adding a widget, a theme, a plugin
• Uploading images
• Adding a user
• Other

Super User (Intermediate)
A super user is very comfortable with the wp-admin. They probably ‘knows just enough to be dangerous’ – that is they are comfortable enough with WordPress to make modifications to their project, but also to troubleshoot when things may go awry through experimenting. Has installed plugins and themes. Has an understanding of the pitfalls surrounding plugin and theme compatibility. Interested in learning complex uses of WordPress:

• Utilizing specific combinations of plugins and theme for a target use.
• In-depth understanding of large plugins: caching, ecommerce, galleries, SEO, forms, etc.
• WordPress as an application.
• Other

Developer (Advanced)
A developer is comfortable with all of the skills of a ‘super user’ and is interested in or currently is utilizing WordPress to build themes, plugins, and entire projects from scratch. Has an interest in learning about following, on any level, as they directly apply to WordPress:

• Scripting languages: HTML, CSS, PHP and/ or JavaScript
• Theme and/or plugin development
• Third party integrations
• WordPress as an application
• Other

WordPress users at all levels want to learn new skills. So step up!

Submit a session.