Winnipeg WordPress Meetup a Huge Hit

Winnipeg's 2nd WordPress Meetup came and went and by all accounts it was a resounding success. I was pleasantly surprised by what I thought to be a large turnout. I had planned to arrive early but as fate would have it I drove around for nearly 20 minutes searching for a parking spot - the only blemish on an otherwise perfect evening.

Attendees mingled with one another for a bit prior to the start of the meetup. Most knew each other, or of each other, while a few such as myself knew no one. At least not on a personal level.

The night featured 2 separate presentations, the first by Matt Wiebe and the second by Ian Stewart.

Doing Things the WordPress Way

Kicking things off was WordPress developer Matt Wiebe of Soma Design who gave an informative and thoughtful talk on doing things the right way when working with WordPress. Matt touched on a number of topics but what caught my eye was when he discussed the proper way to include not only any one of the javascript libraries bundled with WordPress but the correct method for loading jQuery from the Google library.

Bad:
Using a script tag

Good:
wp_enqueue_script

To this day I still plenty of ...

<script type="text/javascript" src="<?php bloginfo blah blah blah

HTML5 and Toolbox

Up next was the owner of ThemeShaper, creator of the Thematic Theme Framework, author of the WordPress default theme Twenty Ten and official Theme Wrangler for Automattic Ian Stewart. Yes he wears many hats.

Ian started by discussing some of the new markup elements of HTML5, like article, footer, header and nav. Now to be honest, much of this went over my head as I know very little about HTML5. Yes I know, the future is now.

Things got interesting when he moved on to talking about his latest creation, Toolbox. I say interesting because Toolbox is built on HTML5. Basically Toolbox is a stripped down, blank HTML5-ready theme that sports a minimal set of clean templates. You can reference it while building your own theme or drastically change Toolbox itself with the power of CSS. Think of it as the modern day Sandbox, only more powerful and versatile.

The evening ended with plenty of mingling and chatting amongst the guests. I brought a camera along with me but unfortunately didn't make any use of it.

Did I hear someone mention swag? Yup, there was plenty of official WordPress swag on hand. I managed to procure a few items for myself. (click image to enlarge)

I think the most enjoyable part of the evening, for me at least, was meeting fellow WordPress fans. It goes without saying it was a thrill to finally meet Ian. Heck, we live in the same city and have never even bumped in to each other prior to the meetup.

I'd like to thank the attendees I met namely, Dan Bernardic, Doug Lampi, Jill Lampi, David Pensato and Matt Wiebe. A big thanks and congrats have to go out to both Ian Stewart for putting this on and the gang at Digihedron for hosting us. Apologies if I left anyone out.

Judging by the success of this presentation I see only great things in store for future meetups and can't wait for the next one. Have we planted the seeds for a future WordCamp? One never knows.