TIME FORGOTTEN
So I don’t remember when the last time I attended a Boston WordPress Meetup was, but it was definitely a time before COVID hit and when Microsoft kept their large amphitheater seating open. We all sat in bleacher-style wood seats while watching the presenters give their talks.
The last time I extensively used WordPress at a design firm was back in 2018. Just right when Gutenberg emerged as the new player in town. A new experience of building the web. Course, this was also a time when I worked for a company that switched from WordPress to Drupal, and well, that’s a different story.
FAST FORWARD WITH EXCITEMENT
Regardless of the wet rainy evening in Boston, I hopped on the train and headed into the city. Excited about meeting people in the WordPress community again. I wrote about my experience at WordCamp Rochester and how that sparked the thirst for more connections.
During the Boston WordPress Meetup, I met up with some familiar faces. Folks like Jonathan Desrosiers whom I met in person once in the past physically and J.J. Toothman only through video chats. I also connected with a few new faces such as John Echman from 10up and Sam Singer from Hubspot who had some very interesting stories to tell about their experience working with WordPress or working with agencies who provided WordPress as a platform for their former company’s needs.
The meetup brought in about 18-20 people, which according to Jonathan and John, was a good turnout. It definitely is hard to bounce back from post-COVID. I can recall the last one I attended, it drew in 40+ people. It was a packed house basically, and they had 2-3 speakers every time.
Let’s hope we can bring the crowd back again. If not in 2023, hopefully in 2024.
SPEAKERS
J.J. Toothman was up first with his talk about the recent NASA project. He explained in detail the efforts it took in order to pull off a federal government site. The team members he picked to spearhead the project and the challenges he and his team faced when dealing with extensive data from a large government organization.
Next, he dove into the next project phase with NASA, their challenge to provide educational video entertainment content for the public. Instead of embedding themselves into another subscription-based provider, NASA wanted to start their own offering. What better way than to use WordPress as the primary platform? J.J. Toothman reminded us that WordPress should be seen as more than just a blogging tool, a website-building platform, but also a “web application framework.” Tapping into the existing WordPress REST API and connecting with external data points to bring to life a wealth of streamable data under one roof.
Ken Gagne was up next as the second speaker. The basic breakdown was about spreading the capabilities of journalism to the masses. Traditional newspapers have been on the decline for the past decade or so. How can we spread the wealth of knowledge in a muddled social media-addicted society? In what ways can we spread news, track news, protect news, and value news?
Ken covered in detail first about the advent of newsletters. How to utilize the various tools out there to help engage your audience. Next, he discusses the ways to find imagery that matches the content you’re writing about. There are a plethora of royalty-free services out there that yield beautiful images for your article needs. Last he talked about infrastructure and plugins. The backbone that makes newsworthy content accessible and sharable. How to manage your news with event planners for automation and enhancement tools for SEO purposes.
If you want to know more about what Ken spoke about, you can click through his speaker notes, WordPress Tools for Journalists.
CONCLUSION
Both J.J. Toothman and Ken Gagne brought some very inspiring projects and ideas to the table. Further cementing WordPress’s worth as a web publishing platform for all levels of business. As the WordPress open-source community continues to grow and expand, so does the platform’s capabilities to serve for future years to come.
I also want to plug in a little saying from Matt Mullenwig from a recent article about meeting up physically at events,
face-to-face time is crucial for building relationships, understanding the nuances of how we communicate, and facilitating a different kind of creative collaboration
Matt Mullenwig
This resonated with me a whole lot as you can tell from my experience with the the second half of this year. I have been actively engaging in various virtual meetups, attending my first WordCamp, and revisiting an old meetup group.
I asked Jonathan if there was anything I could do to help bring in more people for the Boston WordPress Meetup, and perhaps revive WordCamp Boston for the future.
Only time will tell!