WordCamp Savannah 2010

WordCamp Savannah is almost here, and you’d be surprised how many little details there are to take care of just before everything happens. To that end, we’re looking for some volunteers to help make this WordCamp super crazy awesome. An hour or two, a whole day, the whole weekend… how much time you want to volunteer is up to you. It’s a great way to get more involved and meet some of the organizers and speakers. Check out the volunteers page for more information and let us know if you’re interested. Thanks!

People have been asking if we can make some of those “I’m attending” badges to put in their site sidebars. Your wish is our command! We’ve made a set of badges for attendees, speakers, and sponsors, available on the Badges page.

If you bought a ticket early, the schedule might have said we weren’t sure if we would be able to provide lunch on Saturday, since we didn’t know how much money we would raise. I’m glad to say we have raised enough money to feed everyone, and a BBQ lunch from Angel’s will be provided on Saturday by Gold level sponsor Automattic.

Lunch on Sunday is going to be potluck; we’ll talk about it on Saturday at the event.

The commemorative t-shirts have been ordered. We ordered a handful of extra ones in the most popular sizes to try and account for late registrations, but anyone registering from this point forward will not be guaranteed their preferred size if there’s a last minute run on tickets. Anyone who registered before this announcement will be guaranteed to receive the size they chose when they signed up.

The shirts are green in more ways than one. They’re green in color, like the trees of Savannah with their hanging moss. They’re also green in intent: we chose an eco-friendly blend fabric that can stand up to the humidity without getting soaked, and combines organic cotton with recycled polyester and a little bit of rayon. They’re cut loosely, like comfy old P.E. shirts, and are nice and light. We hope you like them!

It’s a good problem to have, right? 50+ people registered for the full-day newbie workshop on Friday, so we are now sold out of those tickets. You can still register for the regular Saturday/Sunday WordCamp tickets, but if you wanted to attend the separate Friday workshop, you’ll need to hop onto the waitlist. We’re close to selling out for Saturday and Sunday also, so if you were planning to come but haven’t bought your ticket yet, now is the time. You can buy Sat/Sun tickets and get on the Friday waitlist at the Tickets page.

Right now we have 113 people signed up for the inaugural WordCamp Savannah, yay! We’re going to be ordering our commemmorative t-shirts in a couple of days in order to get them in time for the event, so if you or anyone you know is planning to come but hasn’t registered yet, now’s the time! While we will be taking registrations right up until the event and will even do walk-ins (albeit at $5 more per ticket), to play it safe with our lovely sponsor money, we’ll only order as many shirts as we need. That means everyone should register by the end of the week if possible to guarantee getting a t-shirt at the event. Spread the word. Thanks!

When we first started putting together the program and the speaker list, Andrea Rennick (known as @andrea_r in the forums and everywhere else online) was the first person I asked about doing something around the multisite feature in WordPress 3.0, previously a separate application called WordPress MU. Sadly, her schedule would not allow her to travel from the wilds of northeastern Canada to the sultry Savannah coast. But! As fate would have it, Andrea is doing a free webinar on Thursday, August 19 on using the multisite functionality. Since we can’t have her at WordCamp Savannah and we haven’t found anyone to match her expertise level (well, not anyone willing to get on stage, anyway), we strongly recommend reserving a space for this webinar if you’re interested in learning more about multisite. Save your space now.

Mark Jaquith

Have you been thinking about making the jump to doing some of your own WordPress development, but aren’t sure where to start? Or maybe you already took that leap, but wonder if you’ve missed anything in teaching yourself. Whatever your current status, this session by Mark Jaquith on building your first plugin will give you a solid foundation of understanding the coding standards used in WordPress, how to make use of hooks, basic security measures to ensure your plugins don’t introduce vulnerabilities, and requirements for getting your plugin included in the WordPress.org plugin directory. If you have any interest in WordPress development, you should attend this session.

Mark Jaquith is a successful WordPress consultant and is one of the lead developers of WordPress core. He has 16 plugins in the WordPress.org directory (including the ever-popular Subscribe to Comments, with over 200k downloads) and hundreds of patches that have been committed to the core WordPress application. He’s an acknowledged expert on WordPress security, and was responsible for one of the first commercial BuddyPress implementations at GigaOm Pro. Mark will be driving up from his home in Brandon, FL and looks forward to exploring Savannah and Tybee Island.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

As we’ve mentioned, we’ll have a full-day workshop on Friday, August 20 for people who need help setting up their first site using WordPress. But what about newish WordPress users who already have a site and a grasp of the basics (so they don’t need the full-day workshop) but still have newbie questions? We’re very excited to announce that one of our sessions will be a Q&A with Lisa Sabin-Wilson, author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies, two of the best starter guides around. And for people who do attend the Friday newbie workshop, Lisa’s session later in the weekend will be a chance to ask any questions that occur to you after you’ve had a chance to play with your first WordPress site. Yay for Lisa!

We’ll have a full track on Saturday just for WordPress users (non-developers) filled with how-to demos and practical presentations, not to mention an open Genius Bar on Sunday for people who need one-on-one help.

Tickets are now on sale for WordCamp Savannah. Please sign up sooner rather than later, since the questions in the checkout form will help us plan the best event possible. Go get your ticket now!

And don’t forget to tell your friends, your co-workers, your local social groups, any and all local publications about WordCamp Savannah.