Sponsor Spotlight: Trew Knowledge

Sponsor Spotlight

Trew Knowledge“Trew Knowledge is a Toronto based branding, marketing, design and development agency striving to create great marketing communications for the world around us.

We specialize in creating responsive WordPress themes for small and medium-sized businesses all the way up to large enterprises. As vetted WordPress VIP developers, we understand the importance of speed, stability and security for all projects we deliver.”

Why WordPress?

“While it is hard to pinpoint one thing in particular we would call our favourite thing about WordPress, “community” seems to jump out. Without the WordPress community it would be hard to imagine what the platform would look like today and how far it has come. Everything about WordPress is directly related to the contributors who make it all happen.”

How has WordPress affected you?

“We use and build with WordPress everyday. It has become critical to our daily operations and the services we deliver. A lot of business want to take control of their website and WordPress makes it very easy to do so.”

What’s your advice for attendees?

“Get involved – attend WordCamps, Meetups, or any other gatherings related to the development community. Sharing insights and experiences with others is a great way to learn and build a network of reliable resources.”

What question do you have for attendees?

“If there was anything about WordPress you could change, what would it be?”

Thanks to Trew Knowledge for sponsoring WordCamp Toronto 2014!

Sponsor Spotlight: Muut

Sponsor Spotlight

Muut Logo

Muut is a modern, beautiful, and responsive commenting and forum system that you can embed on your own site and style to your liking. The Muut guys set out to bring commenting and forums out of the UX stone age and make them cool again. Any site will benefit from an active community, and starting one with Muut takes just seconds.

Why WordPress?

“Muut is actually a commenting and forum system that is not limited to WordPress websites, but with our plugin it is definitely perfect for the job.

While WordPress ships with a commenting system and there are many other forum plugins available, Muut unifies the two with one fast, clean, and usable system that can be integrated seamlessly with the website’s user base, and styled directly by the theme. It’s almost as if Muut were designed with WordPress in mind.”

What’s your advice for WordCamp Toronto attendees?

“Give Muut a try; it’s totally free, and totally unlimited.”

What’s your one question for WordCamp Toronto attendees?

“What do you find most bothersome about forum systems available for WordPress?”

***

A big thanks to the team at Muut for sponsoring WordCamp Toronto 2014!

Planning Updates: New Organizers, Logo, Site Tweaks & Sponsors

Planning

Hi everyone!

We’ve made quite a bit of progress since our last update.

New Organizers

Jordan Quintal has joined us to spearhead the accessibility initiative for WordCamp Toronto 2014. Jordan is a longtime member of the Toronto WordPress Group, a WordCamp Toronto presenter, and returning sponsor.

Dejan Markovic will be handling volunteer coordination this year. Dejan is an experienced WordPress developer and event organizer with the Toronto WordPress Group. (If you’re interested in volunteering, please sign up!)

WordCamp Toronto 2014 Logo

We’re excited to unveil the official logo for WordCamp Toronto 2014:

WordCamp Toronto 2014 Logo - Black

This was a joint effort between Kobayashi Online and Zeitguys Inc.

Site Tweaks

We’ve made some adjustments to the site over the last few days. Namely:

  • Switched from WordCamp Base theme to Twenty Thirteen.
  • Changed font for greater readability (hopefully!)
  • Added genericons to links that open new tabs or windows.
  • Replaced the header photo with the beautiful shot by Anton Bielousov. We’re also using it on Facebook and Twitter.

We made these changes in hopes that it would improve our site accessibility and usability. If you run into anything that’s causing a problem, please drop a comment below. 🙂

More Sponsors!

We’ve added a bunch of new sponsors – just take a look at the sidebar! We’ll be rolling out the spotlight posts and formal announcements over the next 8+ weeks in the leadup to WordCamp Toronto.

Interested in sponsoring? We’re still accepting applications.

Planning Updates: Speakers, Sponsors, and Schedules (Oh Boy!)

Planning

Hey everyone! We’ve just wrapped up our latest WCTO organizer meeting.

Here’s what we tackled:

WCTO Speaker Reviews
Reviewing WordCamp Toronto speaker submissions.

Speakers

  • Reviewed submissions to decide on topics, and determine how different presentations fit together into a track that flows.
  • Following up with individual applicants.

Sponsors

  • Invoices went out to our first wave of sponsors. Thanks to everyone that jumped on board with us so early! We’re really excited to make the official sponsorship announcements soon. 🙂

Schedules

  • Deciding on our start & end times, tracks, and overall structure (great conversation). More details TBA!

Calling All Sponsors: Let’s Make WCTO 2014 Awesome!

Announcements

WordCamp Toronto 2014’s Call for Sponsors is open! This is your chance to give back to the WordPress community by supporting WordCamp Toronto 2014.

You can read all the details on our Sponsor page.

WordCamp Toronto (#WCTO) is an annual, not-for-profit, volunteer-run event dedicated to all things WordPress. Each year we bring together over 400 WordPress enthusiasts for a weekend of learning, sharing, socializing, and – of course – contributing to the development of WordPress.

What are the sponsorship levels for 2014?

We have five sponsorship levels this year. Four are geared towards organizations, while the fifth — a new addition for 2014 — is geared towards individuals and freelancers.

They are:

  • King Street ($2000): Sponsors contributing at the King Street level get the most recognition online and offline. Contribute a blog post, get first dibs on sponsor table placement, and drop some goodies in the swag bag.
  • Queen Street ($1000): This is a great opportunity to give back to the WordPress community, chat with attendees at your own sponsor table, and get recognized for your support.
  • Yonge Street ($500): Ideal for any organization that would like to contribute to the WordPress community and support WordCamp Toronto.
  • Annex ($200): Good for small businesses, startups, or organizations that would like to make a small contribution to WordCamp Toronto and the broader WordPress community.
  • Kensington ($75): An opportunity for individuals and freelancers to contribute and be recognized for their support of WordCamp Toronto.

You can find more details on our Sponsor page.

If you have any questions or comments about sponsorships, just give us a shout.

Calling all Speakers for WordCamp Toronto 2014

Announcements, Planning, Speakers

An energetic speaker points to a projection on a large screenWordCamp Toronto 2014’s call for speakers is now open! #WCTO is November 15-16, but we intend to lock our speaker schedule in early!

Do you have something to share about WordPress that will benefit the community? Are you a dynamic and organized speaker who can engage an audience and deliver great value? We’d like to hear your idea for a 50 minute talk to be delivered as part of this two-day event.

Submit a Speaker Application

This Year’s Focus

While we will be offering the usual diverse range of topics for a wide range of audiences, this year we are hoping the community will rally around accessibility to help raise awareness, compliance and the level of accessibility across all WordPress related projects. If you have expertise around web accessibility, AODA and WCAG compliance, assistive technologies or accessible WordPress projects, and are willing to share, we would definitely like to hear from you!

But if you don’t have an a11y related topic that’s OK! We’re looking for a wide range of interesting and informative content for diverse audience with a lot of converging WordPress related interests. So fill out a speaker application!

Topic suggestions

The topics, tracks and schedule this year will be entirely dictated by you, the Speakers, based on what you are offering to present. That being said, if you are eager to present, but are looking for inspiration, here are some ideas to get you started:

A11y

  • AODA Accessibility compliance
  • Building accessible WordPress themes
  • How to perform an accessibility audit
  • Finding an accessible WordPress theme
  • Accessible web forms
  • WAI-ARIA and JavaScript best practices
  • A11y issues from the disabled perspective

Coding

  • Theme development best practices
  • Leveraging the WordPress plugin architecture
  • WordPress Multisite best practices
  • Leveraging the Transients API
  • Development environment set-up and best practices
  • How to code with unit testing
  • Introduction to Backbone.js and WordPress

Content

  • Blog writing 101
  • Using the new Media Galleries introduced in 3.8
  • Working with video
  • Creating and maintaining a bilingual website with WordPress
  • Enhanced comments with third party services
  • SEO best practices and plugins
  • WordPress basics

Community

  • Women in WordPress / Girl Geeks
  • WordPress-related Open Source projects looking for contributors
  • Getting involved and contributing to WordPress
  • Toronto WordPress resources

Business

  • Pricing WordPress-based projects
  • WordPress project lifecycle
  • The business of WordPress plugin/theme development

See something you’d like to talk about? AWESOME!

Don’t see your topic on this list? AWESOME!

Either way, if you’ve got an idea, please fill in the Speaker Submission Form, and we’ll be reviewing them on a FIFO (first-in first-out) basis.

Submit a Speaker Application

** We’ll be accepting submissions until late August. Get yours in soon! **

Back On Track: Planning Resumes for #WCTO

Planning
Your WCTO organizing team: Brent Kobayashi, Sharlene Hopwood, Tom Auger & Andy McIlwain
Your WCTO organizing team: Brent Kobayashi, Sharlene Hopwood, Tom Auger & Andy McIlwain

It’s been quiet on the WordCamp Toronto front for the last couple of months. We haven’t said much since the site went live in mid-February.

That’s about to change. Starting today our organizing team will be holding bi-weekly meetings to work through tasks and get things done.

(A big thanks to our co-organizer Tom Auger and his team at Zeitguys for hosting these meetings!)

Our major takeaways will be documented on this site. You can keep tabs on the updates by subscribing via email — use the form in the sidebar — or via RSS.

Here’s what we talked about during today’s meeting:

Continue reading Back On Track: Planning Resumes for #WCTO →

Welcome to WordCamp Toronto 2014!

Announcements

We’re excited to announce that WordCamp Toronto 2014 is officially a GO!

WordCamp Toronto 2014 (#WCTO) will take place on November 15-16 at Humber College’s Lakeshore Campus, the same beautiful west-end venue that hosted us last fall.

You’ll find all the details on our Welcome page.

Our call for volunteers is going out early this year, so if you’re interested in helping out at WCTO 2014, hit up our Get Involved page and fill out the form.

In addition to our usual speaker and sponsor announcements, we’ll also be updating this site throughout the year with notes from our planning meetings.

To stay in the loop, you can:

Here’s to another great weekend of WordPress in Toronto!