Curtiss Grymala Rocks WordPress at Penn State

The 2012 Web Conference was held at Penn State University on Monday, June 11 and Tuesday, June 12, with presenters including digital product leader Luke Wroblewski, the author of “Mobile First,” and Ethan Marcotte, the designer who coined the term “Responsive Web Design” while he was helping to create the Boston Globe website.

On the second day of the conference, Curtiss Grymala, university webmaster at UMW, presented five hours of material in the “On the Edge Coding” track of the conference.

To start, Grymala led a workshop exploring the WordPress Coding Standards and answering questions from peers about how their code should be formatted and presented when developing for WordPress. After lunch, Grymala returned to lead another two-hour workshop explaining how to develop a WordPress plugin.

This workshop took attendees through the process of creating and implementing new features on a WordPress site using the tools available within the system.

Finally, Grymala presented a brief look at the unique WordPress implementation used at UMW. During this presentation, he explained how WordPress Multi-Network works, how it relates to a standard implementation of WordPress, how it can be implemented, the pros and cons of using a multi-network system and the lessons that have been learned while working on the system at the university. Late last month, Grymala gave the same presentation at the virtual (online) WPSummit conference. In both instances, the entire presentation garnered quite a bit of attention and interaction from the audience.

The slides from all three of Grymala’s presentations are available online.