Category: Announcements

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What you can expect from your WordCamp.

fireworks

WordCamp has always been the highlight of my WordPress year. While its great to meet, greet and work with fellow WordPressers (that’s what I call ya’ll) WordCamp is always that little something special. This year was my first as both part of the organising team and lead organiser and it was fun to see how it all gets put together. I hope that you have as much fun attending it as I did at my first WordCamp in 2015. As such, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at what you can expect from your 2 day WordPress conference.

Still haven’t bought your ticket? What are you waiting for?!

1)  The simplest registration process

As soon as you enter the River Club, our registration team will be on hand to get you registered and give you your attendee card. Thanks to some updates to the process this will be as simple as giving our volunteers your name and them marking you as attended. If you booked your tickets after 3pm on Tuesday we may have to write your name on your attendee card, but once that’s done you are in and you can start enjoying the conference. Keep an eye out for the venue maps and schedules which will be up downstairs and upstairs, to indicate where everything is happening. Food is upstairs, so go and grab some coffee, a morning snack and chat with fellow attendees, or find the Swag room and stock up on your free stuff.

2)  Amazing workshops and talks

I looked at the full schedule earlier today and I have to say, we have some amazing talks this year. I wish I could split myself in three and attend all three tracks on Thursday. From automated marketing funnels all the way to WordPress APIs, I think you would find it hard to not find something to attend. Friday’s sessions are an exciting mix of stories from both new WordPress users to people who have built their livelihood on WordPress. We even have a great international mix from not only other continents but speakers vising from other African nations. I’m really looking forward to hearing how WordPress changes peoples lives across our world.

3) Great food

If you have attended the River Club for any conference before you know that their food is always amazing and plentiful. What I also like is that the food is served buffet style, so there is ample opportunity to grab a plate and have an awesome chat with a fellow conference attendee.

4) Awesome coffee

We know how much you like good coffee and this year we have a dedicated barista available for your coffee requirements. If you’ve never tasted a Truth cappuccino, you are in for a treat. I just hope our barista is up to the challenge of serving 200+ coffee connoisseurs.

5) Enjoy the relaxing and well equipped venue

The River Club is an awesome conference venue. If the weather is good you can enjoy a seat outside next to the pool, knock a few golf balls around and just generally relax in true Cape Town style. We even have a dedicated ‘chill’ area for those who need a little quite time to check up on their emails. The River Club has also upgraded it’s wifi network recently, so we should have no connectivity interruptions. (A reminder, torrents are still not allowed) and we’re making sure there should be ample plugs and extensions for those who need power.

6) Free stuff

Who doesn’t like free stuff. While our sponsor swag is slightly down from previous years, I am sure there will be something you can enjoy from the swag selection. The official WordCamp t-shirt returns this year and we’ve decided to try something different out design wise. We hope you like it.

7) Capture the moment

We’ve managed to secure a photographer for both days to capture the spirit of WordCamp as well as a videographer for the second day’s talks. On day 2 (Friday) we will also have a BrandRocket kiosk in the swag room, allowing you to use the #wcct2017 #hashtag to Instagram, Tweet or WhatsApp a photo from your mobile with the WordCamp branding. (Please, no photos of your cats or children!)

9) Mid conference meetup.

For those who don’t have to go straight home, or who want to wait out the traffic for a while, we’ll be having an informal meetup at the Slug n Lettuce after the workshops on day 1. Grab a coffee, drink or beer at the bar and join us for a nice post day 1 chat.

8) After Party

What would a conference be without a bit of an after party. If you can stay we’ll be having drinks and snacks (and some music) at the venue from about 5:15 on Friday. It’s a great way to unwind and relax after the conference.

See you all there!

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Meet the Sponsors

With only 16 days to go, anticipation and excitement are building for WordCamp Cape Town 2017. The buzz in the WordPress community is tangible!

As with most events, it’s difficult to measure ROI for a sponsorship and with WordCamps – it can be even more complicated. By sponsoring this community event, sponsors are investing into the success and forward momentum of the WordPress community. Indirectly sponsors are investing into the future of the WordPress platform which is currently powering 28.7% of all websites on the internet. Ultimately sponsors are not only pouring out finance for this event but primarily a heart for WordPress – which collectively makes the substance of our healthy, empowering and growing community.

The return on this type of investment is difficult to equate or predict but it is significant in every sense of the word. Without you, dear sponsor, we could never put together an event that boasts such a collaborative effort to see our community grown and propelled into the future of WordPress. Thank you! Thank you for believing in WordPress and for believing in the community.

If you are interested in investing in the WordPress community like our awesome sponsors have, please get in touch!

WooCommerce – Diamond Sponsor

Jetpack – Diamond Sponsor

GoDaddy Pro – Platinum Sponsor

Bluehost -Platinum Sponsor

WPML.org – Gold Sponsor

PayFast – Gold Sponsor

Code Cabin -Gold Sponsor

Hetzner – Bronze Sponsor & Coffee Sponsor

Yoast – Bronze Sponsor

Paid Memberships Pro – Bronze Sponsor

 

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Fresh Air, golf and kid-friendly facilities – welcome to the River Club!

RiverClub

While we’re sure you’re ready for this year’s WordCamp, we know there are always those niggly little questions about logistics. Aside from a smorgasbord of awesome presentations and workshop sessions, opportunities to learn, network and make new contacts, there are those awkward conference things to consider.

Like where to park – and how much will it cost? What to do with the kids for the day? And how about some fun and fresh air, too?

Relax – we’ve got you covered.

WordCamp 2017 returns to our favourite venue, the River Club. We love the relaxed-yet-luxurious feel of the conference facilities. Previous attendees agree: It’s like being in the country – although only minutes away from, well, everywhere in Cape Town!

Situated just outside the CBD traffic congestion zone, there’s plenty of free, secure parking for all.

Spacious, with lawns stretching towards Table Mountain, there’s a suite of fully stocked bars, restaurants and outdoor seating for private, small group discussions or one-on-ones with fellow WordPressers and speakers.

River Rascals Kids Club

Worried about the kids? Bring them along! They’ll have fun at the River Rascals Kids Club – a secure, supervised play area with jungle gyms, caregivers and indoor games. It’ll be a fabulous adventure for children aged one to 12 years (remember, kids under three should be accompanied by a caregiver).

Need to do something healthy and fun during breaks? Then the driving range is the place for you – no previous experience needed. There will be plenty of balls and clubs at hand for you to bring out your inner Tiger. Remember the hat and sunscreen, or play under the floodlights at night.

Rock on at the after party on Friday night – we’ll be bringing you news about this and much, much more, (if you haven’t already) so be sure to subscribe to our blog for updates.

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Introducing this year’s Session Speakers

You’ve already met our workshop instructors, so now we’d like to introduce you to the speakers from our Day 2 sessions. While the workshops are very practical and focussed on specific skill sets, the other sessions are designed to inspire you to do more and get more out of your WordPress experience. So, without further ado, here are the speakers who will be inspiring you on Day 2 of WordCamp Cape Town 2017!

You can find the full schedule for the event here.

 

Jason Coleman

Jason is co-author of Building Web Apps with WordPress and Lead Developer of Paid Memberships Pro, the 100% open source membership plugin for WordPress. He has been pushing WordPress to its limits for many years and is an advocate for using WordPress as an application framework to build web sites and apps that go above and beyond the typical blog of CMS site. Jason works out of his home in Reading, Pennsylvania where he lives with his business partner and wife Kimberly Coleman and their two small children.

Monehi Tuoane

I’m Monehi. I am a seventeen year old girl. I joined Code4ct in 2016, where I learned how to code basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I enjoy drawing with mixed Media and occasionally write poems. It has always amazed me how a person clicks on a button and the websites/app will automatically know what to do and what response to send back to the user, I think that’s one of the reasons why I love using Java. Let’s not forget the fun part – CSS – its one of my favorites, where I can be able to encorporate my art skills. I attend Groote Schuur High School.

Petya Raykovska

Petya is a Senior Project Manager at Human Made where she helps large projects across big publishers and enterprise succeed. She is a huge WordPress enthusiast, active member of the WordPress community and is one of the WordPress Polyglots team leads supporting the people who translate WordPress to more than 160 languages. Petya helped organise WordCamp Europe 2014 and WordCamp Europe 2015 and lead the team that organised WordCamp Europe 2016 in Vienna.

Noel Tock

I’m a Swiss Digital Nomad that enjoys building solutions online. I’m also a partner at Human Made, a top tier WordPress agency (and VIP Partner). There I oversee the growing product portfolio (Nomadbase, Happytables, WP Remote, etc.). If you need enterprise solutions built on WordPress, talk to us.

I’m a jack of all trades, master of none, usually bouncing between product management, UI design and front-end development. The projects I enjoy working on most, target small businesses and the long tail, democratizing opportunity so that smaller players have a shot at being successful online.

Dwain Maralack

Developer living in Ceres, WC. I enjoy spending time with family and learning more about Software Engineering.

Naledi Sinandile

I am Naledi, I am a seventeen year old girl and I joined Code4CT in 2016. I am a young poet and I enjoy CSS the most because I enjoy adding colour and character to a website. I attend Springfield Convent High school for Girls.

Code4CT

Code for Cape Town (Code4CT) exposes high school girls to opportunities within STEM careers and the local tech industry. We teach coding, professional development and design thinking. The three speakers representing Code4CT in this talk are high school girls from Khayelitsha who have been learning to code and build websites with WordPress.

Nonopha Mamba

My name is Nonopha Mamba a grade eleven, 17 years of age attending school at COSAT (Center Of Science And Technology). It is a school based in Khayelitsha. I am currently a Code4CT student, RCL secretary and  the Head Girl of COSAT. I am the type of person who enjoys public speaking and I aim to be a motivational speaker that Is known all over the country. I pose a feminist that is standing up for the rights of the females in my community and everywhere else I find females rights being abused. I was motivated by a feminist known as Farai who started the Africa matters organization.

Chris Muller

Chris Muller is a self-starter who is passionate about tech, travel, learning and going off the beaten track. Co-founding Pango (an e-Learning focused tech-accelerator) and his role as CTO for AdvantageLearn.com (an online education company) fuel these passions. Otherwise, you’ll find him running in the mountains, practicing yoga or sharing a beer with friends.

Mary Job

I’m a tech consultant and I specialize in teaching newbies about using ICT as a tool for self empowerment. I’m a WordPress designer by day and blogger at night.
I founded a non profit bloggingnigeria.org which is targeted at capacity building for new bloggers and motivating old bloggers to take part in corporate social responsibilities with the goal of making Nigeria great again by blogging our stories, the Naija way.

Shannon McLaughlin

Shannon is an entrepreneur and mama to her busy little toddler Leo, who is the inspiration behind her business, Ubuntu Baba. She strives to create the simplest and comfiest baby carrier on the market, helping new moms to step out into the world again with confidence, freedom and style.

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Introducing this year’s Workshop Instructors

We’re very excited to announce that we have confirmed all of our speakers for WordCamp Cape Town 2017! Here you can find out more about the workshop instructors and who they are – just like last year, workshops will taking place on day 1 of the event.

You can find the full schedule for the event here.

 

Thierry Muller

I am a Swiss Digital Wrangler writing code and architecting softwares for close to a decade. I am truly passionate about code quality, open source, community driven projects and building enterprise solutions. I spent a great part of my career building products and web solutions for WordPress as well as driving open source projects.

I am fortunate to serve XWP as a WordPress Architect and Senior Engineer, working alongside some of the brightest WordPress experts in the world.

Seagyn Davis

Seagyn is the Head Maker of Things at Flicker Leap, a digital solutions agency. He has been working with WordPress since 1.5 and has never looked back. He loves stretching the limitations of what has been done with WordPress. He’s currently exploring the uses of the WordPress API. In his spare time, Seagyn playing online games and spends time with his beautiful wife.

Steve Barnett

 

Steve Barnett works as Front-end developer and User Experience consultant. He loves the One Web and applying User-Centered Design principles to Front-end Development. He’s a bit addicted to meetups and community things: you can find him helping out with RailsBridge Cape Town), Cape Town Front-End Developers, running a Device Lab session, or at conference giving a (strongly opinionated) talk or facilitating a workshop. If he’s not there, he’s probably crouched in an awkward position in front of something funny-looking, taking pictures of it.

You can find him on Twitter as @maxbarners, on GitHub as SteveBarnett, and on his own site Naga (which really, really, needs a redesign) as, erm, himself.

Anchen le Roux

Anchen le Roux is the CEO and lead developer of Simply Digital Design.

She has a passion for everything WordPress and loves being part and contributing to the WP community.

Anchen is the author of The Content Creation Strategy Guide, advocate for green, simple and nomad living and occasionally find time to play the bass guitar.

Daine Mawer

A designer, dynamic trainer and developer, Daine is a mover and shaker in the world of Education and Web Development. Having achieved his B.A at Vega: School of Brand Leadership in 2009, Daine went on to take the web development industry by storm having worked for a number of Cape Towns most prized media and advertising agencies and companies. Daine is passionate and dedicated to the world of web development, having already made a considerable contribution in South Africa.

Janet Hancock

I have been in the design industry since 2005 and I love what I do because it allows me to mix my love for art with my career. I started as a graphic designer with a very successful small firm and worked my way up to Studio Head before starting Rubio Communications and then Brand Candy. I now manage the digital marketing side of our business – looking after our clients’ marketing from strategy through to implementation and measurement. I also run two courses: a “Social Media Marketing for Business” course and “Content Marketing for Irresistible Communication” advanced course.

As a business woman, time, freedom and financial security have always been as critical as success, and although ambition works its way into every decision, I know that a well rounded person is more fun to be around than an über-successful one!

Gareth Allison

Gareth Alison is a designer at Automattic. He still has no idea what he’s doing with his life. In his spare time, he eats.

Jarryd Long

Im a developer at CODECABIN_ with almost 4 years of experience. I also lead our USA timezone’s support team.

I’ve developed parts of WP Google Maps and WP Live Chat. Along with other team members, I also support these plugins on a daily basis.

Roy Scheeren

Roy is a developer from The Netherlands where he worked as a freelancer building websites mostly powered by WordPress. Holding on to a long lasting dream to move down to South Africa it was WordPress that brought him there. Nona Creative needed some extra WordPress power and decided they could work with a Dutch import. Closing in on 2 years in the the Cape Roy has branched out from the WordPress environment to a more full stack environment using technologies like Vue, Node and experimenting with the JAMStack using Hugo.

Ed O’Reilly

Developer and Founder at Nona Creative.

 

Job Thomas

Job is the only Belgian in the WooCommerce team at Automattic. He leads one of the WooCommerce support teams. He’s been working with WordPress for about 10 years, and mostly enjoys just breaking things in order to learn. Since 2013, he’s been living in Cape Town, but misses Westvleteren 12 and Belgian mayo a lot.

Nicola du Toit

Nicola du Toit is UX designer by day and a musician by night. She has a Masters degree in IT (specialising in Human-Computer Interaction) but is also left-handed, which means that usability (or a lack thereof) has always been a significant part of her life. She firmly believes that user-centred design can make the world a better place.

Stephen Tredrea

Stephen is an octopus with WordPress coloured ink and tentacles across the full stack. As a enthusiastic and slightly opinionated rule breaker, his current mission is to make WordPress easy again. In between building websites for clients he can be found compulsively obsessing over his pet project, amibe.net, or posing as a coffee hipster.

Trust Nhokovedzo

Trust Nhokovedzo is a digital marketing consultant and trainer. He is a senior consultant at Calmlock Web Design. Trust has been active in the digital space for nine years in different roles including web designing, web development, being a WordPress, online marketing, SEO and AdWords Consultant.

He founded AfroDigital Skills Training (http://afrodigital.org) where he became the Lead Trainer for the Google Digital Skills Training Program in Zimbabwe. He has done presentations at various tech conferences including WordCamp Harare, Digital Future and Women in Tech.

Trust holds a degree in computer science and various certifications from Google, Hubspot and Marketing Motive. His passion is to see businesses and people in Africa embracing digital technologies, especially SEO.

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Not just for developers: Why businesses owners and employees should attend WordCamp

It seems like most people who’ve heard of WordCamp automatically assume that it’s a conference only for WordPress developers. In reality, it’s a conference that focuses on EVERYTHING WordPress. It appeals to a wide audience from casual users to freelancers, project managers to designers, and even business owners. It’s a great environment to learn, share ideas, network, and get to know the movers and shakers in our amazing WordPress community.

As a business owner I am constantly looking at new ways to produce the best possible product or deliver the best possible service, for the least amount of effort, and the most amount of profit. That’s why we started experimenting with WordPress back in 2014 – from a business perspective, it just made sense.

However, we had a problem. We didn’t know all that much about WordPress, or how we could use it to grow our business. It’s for these exact reasons I attended my first WordCamp in Cape Town back in 2014, and I’ve attended, spoken at, volunteered or co-organized every WordCamp since.

What kept me coming back? The benefits to me, my business, and my staff are endless.

It covers so many diverse topics.

Yes, there are developer-focused Workshops and Talks, but there are also amazing Workshops and Talks about Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Social Media, Design, Remote Working, Managing Clients and Projects, and so much more. Whether you’re a freelancer, an employee or the boss, I can almost guarantee that there will be a topic from which you can learn from and/or discuss with other likeminded people dealing with the same issues you are.

It’s the best event to networking with likeminded people and grow your business.

Whether you’re looking to have a product developed, for new developers to hire, for partners to outsource to, or if you’re just looking to meet some of the most influential people and companies in the WordPress community – both locally and abroad – then WordCamp is the conference for you!

It’s cheap! The rewards far outweigh the costs.

At only R500 per ticket, WordCamp is by far one of the least expensive conferences out there. Nowhere else will you find so many amazing Workshops, Talks, Individuals and Companies coming together for two full days for such a low price. Not only is the conference inexpensive, there’s a driving range and food and drinks are included.

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WordCamp Sessions

Speaker selection

Every year WordCamp Cape Town hosts some of the most interesting and informative workshops and talks from WordPress users both locally and internationally. We do this by inviting speakers from around the world to join us in celebrating WordPress.

The process of taking all the session submissions and filtering them into the final list for the event has always been handled purely by the organising team. However this is quite a subjective process and so this year, in the overall spirit of open sourcing WordCamp, we want to put more power into the hands of our users, those of you who will be attending WordCamp.

So, if you follow the link to the list of proposed sessions, you will see a list of all session submissions as well as a poll to vote for your favourites.  We would love to get your feedback in choosing the sessions you want featured at WordCamp.

While we will do everything in our power to include the sessions you have voted for, please be aware that the final selection is the responsibility of the WordCamp Organising Team.

So head on over to the proposed session list and make your choices.

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WordPress Women: let’s hear your voices at #wcct2017

Jenny Wong speaking at WordCamp Cape Town 2015

WordCamp Cape Town loves women! And we want your voices heard at our #wcct2017 event.

We’re inviting engaging, innovative and tech-savvy WordPress women to join our impressive list of speakers. Share your innovations, insights and challenges with your WordPress community.

Help us build a show-stopping, gender-balanced line-up for our two days of workshops and talks, set to take place on 26 and 27 October 2017 at the River Club.

We invite you to submit your Speaker application today – entries close on 20 August 2017. To apply as a speaker simply follow this link to the submission form. We’re open to any topic that you have expertise in and are looking for workshops as well as regular 35-minute talks.

WordCamp Cape Town is over. Check out the next edition!