LightSpeed are proud to announce that we’re in partnership with WordCamp Cape Town 2016. We can’t wait to get involved with and learn from the rest of the city’s community, as well as visitors and speakers from abroad!

LightSpeed was founded in 2003 by Ashley Shaw, an entrepreneur and passionate believer in open source. Ashley and the LightSpeed team work on providing specialist solutions to a variety of clients with a focus on serving the Southern African tourism industry.

The websites we build provide our clients with tools to get their message across on the Internet in a simple and effective manner.

We’re proud to have launched our online store this year, with an initial release of a free premium theme, LSX, as well as 6 paid plugins. We’re excited to speak with fellow developers at WordCamp about the project and learn from other Wordies’ eCommerce experiences.

As a WordPress development team serving largely the Southern African tourism industry, the plugin we’ve poured the most work into is the LSX Tour Operators plugin, (you can take a look at a demo site here) the result of hundreds of hours of experience in building websites for tour operators. In essence it’s a content management plugin for Tour Operators, with inter-connected post types that cater to the essential needs of every tour operator: accommodations, destinations, tours, activities, reviews, specials, team members and more are some of the content types that LSX Tour Operators helps to piece together to quickly and easily create dynamic Tour Operator websites.

The LSX Tour Operator plugin works hand-in-hand with the Wetu Importer plugin. It allows existing Wetu customers to import their accommodation and tour content from Wetu.com. Imported content can then be easily fine tuned and adjusted to ensure that the site is perfectly suited to your needs and design specifications.

Other products we’ve launched this year that we’re incredibly proud of are the CourierIT shipping extension for WooCommerce (providing dynamic shipping rates for South Africa based on sender and customer locations using the CourierIT API) and the GiveWP PayFast integration, allowing South African websites to accept donations.

This year, we want to make sure we don’t lose time with installing software or sorting out finding a pen, so we’ve prepared a list per workshop track of things to do/bring in preparation. If it looks a bit daunting, don’t forget that each track has 4 workshops; you won’t need all of these things for every workshop.

User

Needed for most workshops:

• Pen and paper
• Laptop
• Local installation of WordPress (can easily be done with DesktopServer for both Mac and Windows, tutorial here) with default theme (TwentySixteen) installed

Needed for specific workshops:

• Selling anything online, with WooCommerce
  • Idea of what you want to sell online
  • Install WooCommerce locally, but do not activate
• WordPress Customisation for Dummies (Like Me)
  • Install Simple Custom CSS locally
  • Install Child Theme Configurator locally
• Integrating OroCRM into WooCommerce
  • Twitter account

Intermediate developer

Needed for most workshops:

• Pen and paper
• Laptop
• Local installation of WordPress (WAMP, MAMP, Vagrant or DesktopServer)
• Default WordPress with TwentySixteen theme and Hello Dolly plugin active
• Any valid code editor (Notepadd++, SublimeText, PHPStorm, Atom)
• GitHub account

Needed for specific workshops:

• Building blocks of development: The process of identifying, reporting and fixing bugs
  • On the test site, install this plugin
• Development for Designers
  • Designing software (Photoshop, Sketch, Node, or free software: Gimp)
• The benefits of using a WordPress Framework like Genesis
  • Access to #wcct-genesis on WP South Africa Slack (sign up here)
  • Download the files from the channel

Advanced developer

Needed for most workshops:

• Laptop
• Local installation of WordPress (WAMP, MAMP, Vagrant or DesktopServer)
• Default WordPress with TwentySixteen theme and Hello Dolly plugin active
• Any valid code editor (Notepadd++, SublimeText, PHPStorm, Atom)
• GitHub account

Needed for specific workshops:

• Taking WordPress to the App Store
  • Add 3 dummy posts with title, content, excerpt and featured image to the test site
  • Install AppPresser plugin
  • Create free Adobe Phone Gap Account
  • Fork and clone this repo
• A Basic Introduction to Continuous Integration with WordPress
  • Fork and clone this repo
• Leveraging the Settings API
  • Way to build and test plugin

The team at CODECABIN_ is thrilled to be in partnership with WordCamp Cape Town 2016! With sneakers laced and starry-eyed smiles, we are counting down the days to the big event. What could WordPress be without its community? What would WordCamp be without it’s Wordies 😉

This year, we proudly introducing one of our prodigy plugins to our fellow WordPeople WP Live Chat Support!  WP Live Chat Support is the most popular self-hosted live chat solution on WordPress and our users rate our plugin 4.5/5.0. Our team is excited to meet up at WordPress Cape Town 2016, to share top tips in future-focussed software development.

CODECABIN_ is especially looking forward to the workshops & talks this year to  in turn learn from experienced Wordies. You’ll spot us easily, interacting with brilliant minds, as we dive into WordCamp. Set against the beautiful Cape skies, we believe WordCamp 2016 is going to be one for the stars. With an exciting itinerary lined up, us Wordies are spoilt for choice. To the organisers, volunteers and sponsors, your community spirit is inspiring. At the end of the day, that’s WordPress isn’t it?

WordPress is more than a development hub, more than an enterprise, it’s collaborating a blueprint for a brighter WordPress platform across continents. It’s an international family CODECABIN_ is glad to be collaborating with.
See you Wordies there!
CODECABIN_ & WP Live Chat Support

Remember showing off your golfing prowess at WordCamp last year? Well that’s back again this year!

If you’ve never played golf before, or if you have, but you know you don’t have the skills, then don’t worry – actual talent doesn’t really matter in this case (as I can personally attest to from last year).

Right next to the conference venue is the River Club driving range, which is not only beautiful to look at, but fun to take advantage of too – and at WordCamp you’ll be able to do just that once again. We will provide you with a healthy amount of golf balls and the River Club will have a few golf clubs on hand (but you can always bring your own if you like), so during the breaks you can go wild and hit as many balls you like. Use it as a chance to hang out with some new people while taking part in an activity that you may or may not have some skill in.

If you’re anything like me and you know that your golf skills are severely lacking, then it’s a great opportunity to meet others while having fun finding out who can miss the ball most often!

If you are actually somewhat skilled in the golfing arts then you can use this as an opportunity to see how well you stack up against the rest of the community – either way, it’s sure to be a blast.

At this year’s WordCamp, we’ve got Nathaniel Wagner speaking for the first time. He’ll be sharing his story. Several people of the WordPress community in Cape Town gave time and energy to help out at GROW Leadership Academy. One of the attendees there was Nathaniel.

He was introduced to the free WordPress ecosystem that gave him accessible tools to voice his thoughts, and in the long run even start his own design business, Design Lunatics.

You can also get involved by mentoring, educating, introducing people in the Cape Town region to WordPress. By giving them the tools to flourish, they are given purpose in life.

So how can you get involved?

• Assist Code4CT. They want to see young women empowered to leverage technology for social innovation, so that there is greater diversity in the African tech industry, and high school girls to have an enabling environment to imagine and create new technology that is relevant to a South African context.
• Be a mentor at GROW. GROW’s objective is to equip young people in the Cape Flats with the necessary skills that will aid them into stepping into their career path.
• Join do_action(). do_action is a charity hackathon to help local communities and charities to build their online presence. NGOs can already sign up for next year’s one.

How will you get involved? Do you know other organisations that could use our help?

WordPress theme frameworks have gained increasing popularity over the last few years, and for good reason too. They provide you with a significant kick start to your theme development and drastically cut down the time it takes to create a new theme. This is true whether you’re building a custom theme for a client, or a theme that you intend to distribute.

Once of the leading theme frameworks is the Genesis theme framework by StudioPress and at WordCamp Cape Town this year, Bradley Baumann will be giving a workshop on how to use it and what the massive benefits of such a framework really are.

So why are we telling you about this in advance? Well, if you attend the workshop then you will be given a free copy of the Genesis framework as well as the Sample child theme that you can use while you’re learning all about it from Bradley. On top of that, at the end of the workshop you will also receive a unique link to purchase any Genesis products at a whopping 75% discount. That’s definitely something worth getting hold of!

A huge thanks to StudioPress for this generous offer.

WordPress is great (obviously) and mobile apps are great too, and this year we have Chris Muller presenting a workshop on how to turn your WordPress site into a mobile app. It’s going to be an interesting one for sure and one that I’m particularly excited about.

To get you ready for it, Chris created a proof of concept app for his workshop using data that is relevant to all of us – the schedule for this year’s WordCamp Cape Town! In the workshop he will be showing you how to turn your WordPress site content into a mobile app and this app is the basis for the workshop. It’s a simple app (by design), and it allows you to see the WordCamp schedule along with a handy countdown to the start of the event. Chris will be adding more features to the app over the course of the next week too!

You can get the app for iOS as well as Android by using those links or simply searching for ‘WordCamp CT 2016’ on either platform. Here are a couple screenshots from the app to whet your appetite:

WordCamp volunteers assist with anything from setting up, to handling registrations, to helping out with any general tasks throughout the day. All volunteers receive a free ticket to WordCamp.

Join our awesome sponsors and help to make WordPress Cape Town 2016 a reality!

Read through our sponsorship packages here.