Community Day- Happiness Bar

We just want to let you know that on March 15th,2015, is Community Day, and aside from our Kid’s Camp, Give Back to Core Kid’s Camp, we will have the Happiness Bar in Room 300, which is the auditorium.

This is YOUR opportunity to get those WordPress questions troubleshooted. We even answer SEO, Social Media, and Blogging questions that can tie into WordPress. We will have some of the speakers in and out of the Happiness Bar eager to help.

Examples of some help that we can provide:

  • Troubleshooting the white screen of death where you can access your website… it’s just a blank screen
  • Having trouble figuring out how to change a color or image?
  • Your site is showing some fatal error or some kind of error.
  • You can’t get your Social card or Twitter card or Open Graph to pick up your image for your blog so your social posts look nice.
  • If you need some ideas for a WordPress related project, but not sure what direction to take.
  • If you need a little SEO advice.
  • If you’re still really new to WordPress and can’t seem to understand what you could do with your website. Sometimes a brief brainstorm can clear up the confusion and get you fired up.

We’ve got enough knowledge of WordPress under one room that an answer can be done.

It would really suck if you went home early and have tons of answers still left. It was a lot of information to take in and process. While Happiness Bar won’t build your website for you or fix a theme or plugin if it’s broken, we’re here to help you help yourself by learning how to use WordPress better.

Partnering with Hands Up United for Community Day

We’re excited to announce that we are partnering with the Roy Clay Sr. Web Development and Entrepreneurship Workshop, a Hands Up United initiative, for our Hackathon during WordCamp St. Louis’ Community Day on March 15th.

IMG_5242

Students learning HTML, CSS, and WordPress at T-REX

The 6-week workshop (named for North St. Louis County native and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Roy Clay) consists of teaching Ferguson/St. Louis youth HTML, CSS, JavaScript, UX, entrepreneurship, and small business management with the goal of participants learning the complete set of web development skills needed to help build sites for others in their community. Funds raised using the group’s GoFundMe campaign provide participants that complete the program with a $500 stipend and a personal laptop to continue using the skills they learned.

To develop these skills, participants have been meeting for 12 hours per week since early February doing everything from creating static HTML pages to creating wireframes using client requirements to customizing WordPress themes.

All of their hard work will culminate on March 15th when we have a full day scheduled for working with the participants, local small businesses, and community organizations they’ve been working with to finish and launch their WordPress sites. We’re hoping you’ll join us to help put some of the finishing touches on their sites as well as showing these young, new WordPressers that they are part of a huge community of volunteers worldwide.

Get Excited for Kids Camp

Photo by Gary Robertson - Licensed under Creative Commons

Photo by Gary Robertson – Licensed under Creative Commons

This year the second day of WordCamp is our community day. One of the sessions we’re proud to bring is our Kids Camp. WordCamp attendees are encouraged to bring the young people in their lives to learn about WordPress and publishing on the web. We’ll spend the morning covering the basics of WordPress, free and open source software, copyright, and what it means to be public on the web.

We’ll end the morning with lunch from Pi Pizza and our keynote with Mika Epstein!

It will be a relaxed affair. Come as you are, but be sure to bring a laptop! For more information check out the Kids Camp session on the schedule and get your tickets today! (Note, only one adult ticket is needed if you’re bringing multiple kids. Sweet!)

Community Day Keynote by Mika Epstein (aka Ipstenu, aka Half-Elf Support Rogue)

We’re super-excited to let you know that everyone’s favorite Half-Elf Support Rogue will be joining us to talk about how you can fit into the WordPress community by being true to yourself. Mika will not only be joining us for the Sunday keynote, but she’ll also be helping out during the Community Day “Give Back to Core” session. This session is where you can learn how to submit plugins or themes to the repository or submit patches to WordPress Core.

For those of you who might not know Mika, we could list her achievements and interests but it would take me the better part of the day. It would probably just be easier if you checked out her website.Org profile, or Twitter. We promise that you will be awed, inspired, and entertained.

If this sounds like a fun way to spend your Sunday, grab your ticket and be sure to follow us on Twitter or Facebook to stay up-to-date with all of our latest announcements.

Tickets are now Available for WordCamp St. Louis 2015

Tickets are now available for WordCamp St. Louis 2015.

WordCamp St. Louis 2015 will be held March 14-15 at Washington University. Tickets are $25 and cover both days. The first day will be filled with two tracks (Developer/User). The second day is our Community Day where we’ll give folks an opportunity to learn about how they can give back to the St. Louis and WordPress community. Tickets include a spiffy t-shirt, lunch, and attendance to the after party.

We have some great speakers lined up this year. Attractive, eloquent, funny, knowledgeable, and smart folks from across the St. Louis community will be joined by WordPressers from various corners of the globe to bring you the best WordCamp in St. Louis.

The goals of any WordCamp – but you know, ours especially – is to bring together great people and foster a community where everyone is free to learn and share. Any WordPresser – blogger, designer, developer, small business owner, writer – is welcome. We know you’ll have a great time.

Get your tickets while they last. We had over 250 attendees last year and sold out a week in advance. This year we anticipate the same!

If you can’t make it, but still want to support WordCamp in St. Louis, there are still sponsorship opportunities available!

Community Day

WordCamp St. Louis is a community event, therefore the 2nd day of the event (March 15th) will bring together designers, bloggers, developers, entrepreneurs, educators, kids and other WordPressers for a collaboration that aims to create an open and educational environment of learning, sharing, and giving back.

We want this to be awesome, so here is a preview of a few of the things we’re planning:

  • Keynote by Mika Epstein
  • Kids Camp a class geared towards 8-13 year olds, however, any age is welcome to attend (space permitting). Parents must be present for children under 13 and all attendees must bring a laptop. Up to 3 children under the age of 18 can attend without charge for each paid adult (parent) ticket.
  • Hackathon help developers, designers, and other attendees on creating or improving local organization’s presence on the web (the list of specific organizations will be announced later, if you know of someone who might benefit drop us a line)
  • All-day happiness bar: come and learn with the best!
  • Give back to Core: members of the plugin and theme review team as well as core contributors will be on hand to help you give back to the global WordPress community.
Everything will be prepared by the community for the community, so feel free to volunteer! In addition to all of this, to celebrate the “Pi day“, we are gonna have Pi Pizza for lunch!!!…

WordCamp St. Louis represents the passion, talent, and diversity of our community, and we want you to be a part of it!