Web Community Contributions

Communities come in all sizes, shapes and structures. Here are some of the ways in which I’ve tried to “pay it forward” to others by sharing experiences and my acquired expertise when building things with WordPress.

WordPress

July-2024: WP Campus: Showcasing student work: Forging ahead with WordPress. The Forge website is a “signature” project that I maintain here at ASU Engineering. I wanted to share its origin story and talk about some keeping up with such a large scale effort to maintain a collection of student-led research activities for ASU Engineering.

Feb- 2024: Back at WordCamp Phoenix, presenting on Advanced Custom Fields tips and tricks. Having made an entire block library leveraging the power of ACF to express the ASU brand standards, I learned some important tactics and had some code examples to share.

July-2023: WP Campus: WordPress User Roles Revisited. A presentation about one particular aspect of WordPress that hasn’t been touched in a number of years and could use some revision – user roles. Learn how to avoid the trap of “just make everyone an admin.”

Jan-2023: WordCamp Phoenix, Bringing an engineering spirit to everyday WordPress. A non-technical talk celebrating the values that underpin the WordPress project and learning about the power that comes when you are able to articulate those values to others.

Dec-2022: WP Engine Ignite for High Ed web presentation.

Dec-2022: Nominated as Pantheon Community Member of the Month.

Aug-2022: I provided a demo of the WordPress products (theme + plugins) that we are delivering for ASU Engineering in order to build “on brand” websites using an “officially unsupported” CMS. Pitchfork for the win!

July 2021: Inspired by a pretty deep discussion of the state of calendars within WordPress that happened with WP Campus Slack, I volunteered to formally continue the conversation during the 2021 online conference. Key takeaways: building a calendar integration that works with WordPress is HARD.

July-2020: I spoke at WP Campus about faculty websites and how they can actually be leveraged to provide value back to a university/college, if they are done correctly.

Feb-2019: I spoke at the 2019 WordCamp Phoenix event about the new (at the time) block editor for WordPress. Styles for native blocks weren’t really well known, so I wanted to take a really deep dive into what pitfalls and CSS tricks could be used to leverage the new editor.