Tag: cgrymala

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.

 

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.

UMW was well represented at the Association of Collegiate Computing Services of Virginia Conference held in Charlottesville, March 14-16.

DTLT’s Lisa Ames, LMS Admin, gave a presentation on UMW’s adoption of a new learning management system titled “Designing from a Blank Canvas” while Tim Owens, ITS, partnered with Andy Rush, New Media Specialist, to lead a session called “Ad-free Streaming with the Change in Your Pocket.”

Webmasters Cathy Derecki and Curtiss Grymala led a birds-of-the-feather discussion on Web Redesign and Edward Gray, Systems Integration and Support Specialist, gave a presentation titled “Making a World of Difference: Inventory, Licensing and Software Management.”

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.