Author Archives: Naweed Chougle

Ship your idea, with WooCommerce!

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If you know WordPress at all, there’s a good chance you’ve heard of WooCommerce, its most popular eCommerce plugin. Whether you’re selling physical goods or digital merchandise, WooCommerce handles it all, from start to finish.

With thousands of free and paid extensions to choose from, WooCommerce can help you sell, process and ship just about anything. It also supports dozens of payment gateways, so you can sell your products pretty much anywhere in the world.

Also, WooCommerce is designed to ensure your store and products look as good on a desktop computer as they do on your customers mobile phones. You can even turn your existing WooCommerce store into a mobile app with no custom coding, just by using a few third party tools/services.

The best part? The core WooCommerce plugin is completely free, so you don’t need to break the bank to setup a beautiful online store. In fact, you can start selling today!

Our Confirmed Speakers from the First Round

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Our first round for speaker selection concluded recently, with a blind vote carried out by organizers to choose the speakers. This meant only the title, topic description and intended audience were listed on a form and points awarded by each organizer based on the content of the speaker’s pitch.

These were the criteria for the first round of speaker selection, listed in order of priority:

  1. Is the subject relevant to WordPress, and the categories of its adoption: developer, user, business and community?
  2. Is the speaker’s pitch refreshingly new, and not ruined by a publicity attempt?
  3. Does the speaker’s pitch display enough knowledge of the subject?
  4. Has the speaker delivered good talks in the past?

At the end of the blind vote, the points by all organizers were added up for the final speaker list of the first round.  As organizers, we have always encouraged speakers from Sri Lanka to take the initiative for this event. Hence, local speakers were granted a few extra points at the end of the vote.

So, these are the five speakers shortlisted and confirmed, along with the titles of their talks:

  1. Takayuki Miyoshi — Lessons Learned from Ten Years of Plugin Development
  2. Rahul Bansal — Selling WordPress to Enterprises
  3. Karen Arnold — Great Support Matters: Bridging the Gap between Developers and Customers
  4. Himash Tehan — Using WordPress as a Mobile Backend
  5. Harshadewa Ariyasinghe — How Design Thinking can Change everything
  6. Dwain Maralack — How WordPress Taught me to be an Engineer

We still have a few slots remaining, and hence are carrying out a second round for speaker selections. The deadline is midnight UTC, 9th August, 2017.

 

 

 

 

Our Call for Speakers – Second Round!

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We are pretty amazed by the response to our first round of speakers.

Six speakers have been shortlisted so far, and we will be announcing their names soon.

Now, we have a few more slots remaining, and that warrants a second round of speaker applications. If you haven’t applied yet, now is a great chance — the deadline is midnight UTC, 9th August, 2017.

Click here to Apply

You will rub shoulders with our brilliant array of confirmed speakers who are joining us not just from Sri Lanka, but around the globe — from the United States, to South Africa and Japan!

The Topics

You could choose to talk on the following areas of WordPress – but you are welcome to suggest your own:

  • WordPress for Beginners
  • Design Thinking
  • Freelancing
  • Business growth
  • Community
  • Accessibility challenges
  • Content
  • Back-end development
  • JavaScript-driven Applications
  • Hosting
  • SaaS (software as a service)
  • UX (user experience)

The bottom line is, we want to hear your unique life experiences with WordPress!

Note: Our Call for Speakers (first round) has closed at midnight UTC, 9th August, 2017.

Grab a Jetpack at WordCamp Colombo 2017!

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We’re proud to announce Jetpack as our first Global Gold (Mahaweli) Sponsor!

One of the most popular WordPress plugins out there, Jetpack connects your site to the global services, community, and support provided by WordPress.com, so you can focus on the stuff that matters. It also automatically shields your site from the unwanted attention of spammers, hackers, and malware, while real-time sync and backup means you don’t have to worry about data loss.

Its straightforward traffic-building tools help you attract the attention of readers and search engines, and it allows your site’s pages and videos to be delivered at high speed from a global, ad-free content delivery network. Finally, Jetpack sends new content directly to your subscribers’ inboxes and shows readers related content, helping you increase page views per visitor and boost ad revenue.

Of course, there are tons of other features that you can take advantage of, when you install Jetpack for free, or purchase its advanced features.

If you haven’t tried Jetpack, the fact that it’s making WordCamp Colombo possible is a great reason to give it a go!

A Conversation with Takayuki Miyoshi

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Contact Form 7 has been installed more than 3 million times and has an average rating of 4.6 out of 5 stars, making it one of the most sought after plugins in the WordPress ecosystem. It comes ready with REST API custom endpoints in its latest version.

Still, the author Takayuki Miyoshi is humble enough to call it “Just another contact form plugin. Simple but flexible.”

Contact Form 7

We were fortunate to have had an opportunity for a short, heart-to-heart conversation with Takayuki about his work, life and WordPress. Let us draw some inspiration from him:

First of all, could you tell us how your WordPress journey began?

Thirteen years ago, I was preparing to start a business. I needed to develop a web service, but I didn’t have enough skill to do it from scratch. I searched something I could use as a development base and found WordPress. Few people in Japan knew WordPress at the time.

Even now I discover new aspects of WordPress, and they always inspire me.

Takayuki Miyoshi

Takayuki Miyoshi, author of Contact Form 7

With 3 million plus active installs of Contact Form 7, WordPress would never have been the same without your contribution. What is your advice to WordPress lovers trying to draw inspiration from you, and make a similar dent in the WordPress universe?

You can learn a lot of great things from WordPress core design. Even now I discover new aspects of WordPress, and they always inspire me.

Could you share a few tips on being productive and efficient as a programmer?

I myself am not a productive or efficient programmer so I have no tip to share. I rather want to be a patient and deep thinking programmer who can make a difference in a large sense.

When you are not working with WordPress, how would you love spending your time?

Difficult question since I have no particular hobbies. Sid Meier’s Civilization often thieves my time.

We have seen a lot of local WordPress communities rising in various cities across the world. What advice would you give to these nascent communities, to help them keep rising and contributing to the global WordPress family?

I know maintaining a local community is really difficult. I’m not good at it. My advice is like this: Never mind if a meet-up doesn’t go well.

Finally, could we have a few words of guidance for young professionals thinking of building a career with WordPress?

  1. Keep the quality of your products high.
  2. Learn from quality feedback from users and other developers. That is essential.
  3. Keep your products open and free, both as in speech and as in beer!