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.

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.

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: