Author: Curtiss Grymala

Curtiss Grymala, the University Webmaster, attended and presented at two conferences in the past week. He started by heading out to Detroit, MI for WordCamp Detroit on Saturday, Oct. 6, where he presented a 45-minute session explaining the WordPress Multi-Network concept used on the UMW website.

After that, he traveled to Milwaukee, WI, where he attended the national HighEdWeb conference. At HighEdWeb 2012, he presented the same WordPress Multi-Network talk on Monday, Oct. 8; he helped lead a 45-minute panel discussion on using WordPress as a Web content management system with colleagues from Maryville University and Allegheny University on Tuesday, Oct. 9; and he led a three-and-a-half hour workshop teaching attendees how to develop their own WordPress plugins on Wednesday, Oct. 10.

Over the past 12 months, Grymala has attended a total of 13 different conferences (two of which were online, or virtual, conferences). He presented at 11 of those events, and led a total of 15 separate presentations, workshops and organized discussions.

On Saturday, Sept. 8, University Webmaster Curtiss Grymala presented his WordPress Multi-Network session to a crowd of about 50 designers, developers and content managers at WordCamp Baltimore. The session was well-received, and a lot of interesting questions were posed throughout.

Grymala will also be presenting this session at WordCamp Detroit on Oct. 6 and at HighEdWeb 2012 on Oct. 8. The slides from Grymala’s presentation can be viewed online, and video of the presentation should be coming soon.

On Sept. 18, Karine Joly of HigherEdExperts and CollegeWebEditor, published a blog post outlining her ten most anticipated, or “must see”, presentations at HighEdWeb 2012. Among the ten sessions chosen by Joly is Curtiss Grymala’s presentation on WordPress Multi Network.

 

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.

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.

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.