Curtiss Grymala “Melts Brains” at Syracuse

On Monday, June 25, Curtiss Grymala, University Webmaster at University of Mary Washington, presented at the regional HighEdWeb conference on the main campus of Syracuse University. Grymala presented a session called “The 10-Minute WordPress Shortcode,” in which he briefly explained how to create a new shortcode (a keyword entered into the WordPress editor that gets automatically replaced with content when the page is shown to visitors) and how to turn that shortcode into a widget.

Although the session was fairly technical and is usually presented to an audience that’s familiar with writing PHP code, the audience for this particular presentation consisted of social media managers, content managers, administrators, library employees, developers (coders), designers and more.

During the session, Grymala was accused of “melting a few brains,” but the overall feedback from the audience was very positive. The session was presented in a way that, although extremely technical, was basic enough to at least hold the attention of the majority of the audience.

After the presentation, members of the audience expressed an appreciation for the unintended lessons taught in the session, including a basic intro to some PHP coding standards and concepts, a basic introduction to the WordPress application programming interface (API), and even helping to demonstrate that, although WordPress is extremely simple for editors and content managers to use, harnessing the full flexibility and feature set of WordPress requires coders and developers that are familiar with the way the system works.

Grymala also presented the 10-Minute WordPress Shortcode session at the 2012 dotEduGuru Summit, and will be presenting it again at the regional HighEdWeb conference in Little Rock, AR in July. The slides from his presentation are available online.