Cole Geissinger

Senior Engineering Manager at 10up

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Professional WordPress Developer Course Announced!

Posted on by Cole Geissinger

Many of you have asked me when I’ll be teaching a WordPress theme development course again. Well, the time has come. This summer, I’ll be teaching an 8-week intensive theme development course. We won’t be learning how to use Genesis or any other theme framework, even though these are great, and powerful frameworks! We’ll be expanding your core development skills and learn how to transfer an HTML & CSS template into a functioning WordPress Theme.

On top of learning how to build a WordPress theme, we’ll learn the basic fundamentals of PHP, which is the underlying language that powers WordPress. With out PHP knowledge, writing or even editing a WordPress theme is tough and near impossible. We’ll spend the first day setting this foundation and will continue to apply and expand these new learnings as we go through the classes.

The course will run from June 13th - August 15th. During this class, July 4th and July 11th, we will not be meeting those weeks due to holiday and WIMPcamp 2015. We want this class to be affordable but also reflect on the quality of experience you will gain through this course by starting early sign ups at $399. This will only be available until May 23rd! After that, the cost will increase to a maximum of $499 the week the course begins. For more information on pricing, visit the Eventbrite page.

Very shortly here, our WIMP+ membership will become available where you can get a 10% discount on this course when you are a member. Look out for that announcement here very soon!

Of course, all the details and elevator pitch can be found on the Eventbrite page. Below is an outline of the course that we will be covering. I hope you can are eager to learn from my 8 years of a WordPress experience and push your knowledge and expertise to the next level!

Register For Class

Course Outline

Day 1 - June 13th, 9am-2pm
PHP Foundations

While this is only one day, we’ll be able to set the foundations and learn about what PHP is, what the syntax looks like (aka code), earn about variables, strings, integers and constants. We’ll also discuss conditional logic and operators, arrays/objects and for/while loops. If any of this seems scary to you, don’t worry, that’s why we have this in the course! Just be ready to learn and you’ll have this down in no time!

Day 2 - June 20th, 9am-2pm
Setting up our local environment

All professional developers have a local environment. A local environment is the perfect sandbox to write your code and have no fear of breaking anything that the public can see. This is an environment that lives within your computer that will load WordPress. There are a long list of software developers can use, but we’ll focus on two pieces of software, MAMP and WAMP.

Day 3 - June 27th, 9am-2pm
WordPress Theme Anatomy

We’ll spend the day deconstructing what a WordPress Theme is and how all the files make things work. We’ll write some code to get the basics going and learn about starter themes like underscores (aka _s)

Days 4-7 - July 18th, July 25th, August 1st and August 8th, 9am-2pm
Building A WordPress Theme

This section will cover the course of 4 days. In this time frame, we will deconstruct a basic HTML template and convert it into a working WordPress theme. We’ll use the HTML to break it into the different files we learned about in Day 3 to create header and footer templates, a homepage, a blog page, blog post page, and regular WordPress pages. We’ll also focus on what Custom Post Types are and how to use them within a theme, creating custom taxonomies, building a WordPress Menu and our own widgets.

Day 8 - August 15th, 9am-2pm
Writing Professional Code

In the finial day, we’ll go through our theme one more time and make sure we write secure and performant code. With how popular WordPress is, understanding these two pieces if very critical to the future and success of theme you create. Along the way, we’ll learn about the WordPress Coding Standards and why these are important processes to follow.

From The Wimptators: Volunteer for WIMP Contribute Day!

Posted on by Cole Geissinger

WIMP has been running for almost 4 years. That’s about 1,460 days or 35,000+ hours. Come April 2015, we will have achieved this with no sign of slowing down. In these near 4 years, the Wimptators (Melissa, Joshua, Randy and myself) have been hard at work pushing the community forward to its limits (hint: we have yet to find those limits!).

From the start, WIMP has been a community driven organization. We have many ideas and aspirations; however, there is only so much time and energy the Wimptators can put in.Even though WIMP is run by the four of us, it relies on the community’s efforts and contributions to make it what it is.

A Time To Give Back

Now is your chance to get more involved. WIMP is represented by the LLC, but it is by all accounts an open source community that thrives off of volunteerism and contribution. Last November we ran the first Contribute Day, we opened the WIMPspace doors for the community to gather and help improve and push forward our infrastructure. At first it was focused on our new website redesign, but we quickly realized there are many other ways one can contribute to the organization.

What’s great is that you aren’t required to be there all day – although I know you can’t stand the thought of being separated from your WIMP family. We had a few Wimps join us throughout the day, with some sticking it out for the whole day. Remember that you are always welcome to drop by at any time in the day, whatever works best for your schedule.

We had Wimps working on press releases, marketing materials, and getting our new website redesign a step closer to completion (note: still a work in progress!). Melissa had already worked on a mockup earlier in the year and we had volunteers slicing the mockup and building the HTML and CSS. We then converted the HTML/CSS into a WordPress theme. Meanwhile, others were working on refining the information architecture and sitemap of the new site.

And there are even more ways you can contribute, besides what we accomplished on the first Contribute Day. There’s always room for help with SEO, editorial work, outlining future events/meetups, design and any other skills you possess. What we’re saying is: this is the time to give back! It can also be a great time to learn something new too! At the same time, it’s not a time to learn something completely new from scratch, but a great opportunity to further your skills and learn.

How Can I Volunteer?

Okay, so you’re pumped and now you want to know how you can join us on this magical journey? You’re in luck, because we plan to host a Contribute Day once every quarter, our next one will be January 17! All you have to do is RSVP to the meetup event and show up!

The only requirement is that you bring a laptop (or some type of mobile computer) and your boundless energy to contribute! If you plan to contribute with development, a GitHub account is required and basic knowledge of Git. If Git is still new to you, don’t sweat! I’ll be more than happy to teach you some basics to get you off the ground, or you might check out this awesome blog post (h/t Quinn Supplee). With all that said, you are also welcome to contribute to our GitHub repos by submitting pull requests! WAT.

I hope to see you at our upcoming Contribute Day! It’s a great time to give back to the community and help us push it to the limit!

Beyond Photoshop: Designing for the Modern Web

Posted on by Cole Geissinger

Our first successful recording of a meetup is now available on YouTube! Open the champagne!

This month, Ben Grace talks about designing for the modern web, including the tools and workflows we use today and where we think it’s going. This was one of our larger meetups with 44 attendees! If you didn’t make it, check out the video from the meetup and enjoy the resources and Ben’s slides.
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Welcome to the new Wimp Website!

Posted on by Cole Geissinger

Randy “The Man” Hall

As you may have noticed, we have made considerable changes to our website!

We’ve spent some time getting things working and to a point that we feel comfortable to launch an early version. As you traverse the website you’ll notice several pages pretty bare. This is intentional as we couldn’t wait any longer to push this up! Yes, maybe it’s a little premature, but we guarantee, there’s many things you can do

If you visit the Members area, we have improved the user profile system. You can now post status updates, friend other Wimps, private message, join or create groups… and this is just the start.

While we used to have a working Job Board, this new site, does not contain one at the moment. We will be greatly improved this area to tie in with our new user accounts system and some other great tricks we got going on.

If you were familiar with the original website, you’ll see a few new areas. Awards, Resources and Community Wall. While these areas are nothing more than pages with little blurbs, these are some things we have scoped out the future of Wimp. Let’s take just a quick, high level look at these.

Awards - That’s right. We want to celebrate and award the Wimp community. The plan here is to have an “awards ceremony” at the end of every year and award those chosen by our community. This would be a user submitted system covering several categories and voted by our community.

Resources - The WIMP Facebook Group shares a lot. We want to centralize this into a wiki system for our members to easily contribute and share this data at any time. This can be anything from best software for web design, tools for hardcore developers, marketing tips, recommended business advisors, best hosting websites for your CMS, and the list goes on.

Community Wall - We love our Facebook group, but we want to centralize things. The community wall would be a real time chat interface that in time will merge with our Facebook group with cross posting (opt-in/opt-out of course). Now this doesn’t mean we are going to abandon the Facebook group, we are still going to keep that thriving! We have many members that come to the Meetups that don’t have a Facebook account. This is our answer to opening our group up to a wider audience

Now go start using the site!! Woot!