Curtiss Grymala speaks to HighEdWeb about WordPress plugins
On Oct. 25, 2011, Curtiss Grymala, the University Webmaster at UMW, presented at the 2011 HighEdWeb conference in Austin, Texas. HighEdWeb is a national conference of nearly 500 Web developers, designers, content managers and marketing professionals in higher education. Grymala was invited to make a 45-minute formal presentation, in addition to a “poster session” at the conference.
In the first session, Grymala presented a low-level, technical overview of writing new plugins for WordPress. At the audience’s direction — it was actually put to a vote — he focused mainly on querying and manipulating the WordPress database. Grymala’s presentation slides (which, by the way, are not in PowerPoint; but in WordPress) are available online.
In the second session, Grymala presented a poster offering food-for-thought to anyone that’s working with WordPress. The session centered around the decision to add new features and functions, and where and how those features should be added. You can view the presentation materials from his poster session online, as well.
Both presentations were well-received, and prompted a lot of discussion and questions among attendees. Throughout the conference, Grymala spoke with nearly 100 different people that expressed serious interest in the direction that University of Mary Washington is taking WordPress through UMW Blogs and the University website. Some attendees even requested that Grymala come back next year and present a half-day workshop on the topic of writing WordPress plugins.
Earlier in October, Grymala also made two presentations at edUi 2011, where he was even referred to as “kind of a superhero.” One of those sessions was presented with Cathy Derecki and Jim Groom.