Thanks for sharing your knowledge with our diverse audience, Linda Gunn, Diana Thompson, Mike Demo, Anastassia Zukova, Evan Volgas, Roy Sivan, Justice Anderson, Chris Reynolds, Christina Hills, Joe. A. Simpson Jr., Ramuel Gall, and Sabrina Zeidan. You helped us broaden and deepen our knowledge base, weigh our options, and choose thoughtful paths forward. You knocked it out of the port.
They’re all up. Choose your favorite way to watch:
Thanks for helping us break new ground, Jonathan Wold, Andrea Middleton, Brett Dunst, Steve Zehngut, Natalie MacLees, and Gabriel Mays. We were deeply inspired and challenged by your talks. You knocked it out of the port.
They’re all up. Choose your favorite way to watch:
Here are some of our favorite photos from the first-ever WordCamp Long Beach. Thanks for exploring WordPress: the Port to the Wider Internet with us!
Photographers:
Thanks for being a part of the first-ever
WordCamp Long Beach.
Want to plug into a local WordPress community? Check your WordPress Dashboard for local events coming up, like these:
See you soon!
Tomorrow is the first day of WordCamp Long Beach and we can’t wait! Here is all of the important info you need to know for WordCamp Long Beach.
The Pointe Conference Center
Cal State Long Beach
1250 N Bellflower Blvd
Long Beach, CA 90840
Click here for a Google Map Link
Shannon’s At the Top
201 S Pine Ave.
(entrance off of Broadway)
Long Beach, CA 90802
Click here for a Google Map link.
Questions? Let us know on Twitter or on our Contact page.
We look forward to seeing you at WordCamp Long Beach!!!
On Saturday evening, WordCamp Long Beach will engage in the time-honored tradition of the WordCamp After Party!
We’re hosting our after party in Downtown Long Beach, at a beautiful loft above Pine Ave., a bustling street full of restaurants and nightclubs.
Come hang out, chat with fellow attendees, and relax with cupcakes, some light snacks, and drinks (one ticket per person). We’ve got an awesome photobooth from SnapYourself so you can take some seriously fun photos.
The WCLB After Party is from 7:00 to 9:30pm.
Sessions end at 5pm on Saturday, and you’re on your own for dinner. We’ll be serving light snacks only.
SUPER IMPORTANT: YOU MUST HAVE YOUR BADGE ON YOUR PERSON TO ATTEND. Only registered WCLB attendees are able to attend the after-party. Sorry, no plus-ones are allowed. There are no exceptions! (We still have some tickets left if you want to bring someone!)
Our After-Party is all-ages, though anyone under 18 must be accompanied by an adult at all times.
Our event ends promptly at 9:30pm! After that, the venue will turn into a nightclub. If you are over 21, you are welcome to stay at the venue, but please note, it will no longer be an official WordCamp event.
201 S Pine Ave. (entrance off of Broadway)
Long Beach, CA 90802
At the Top is upstairs from the Carvery restaurant. The entrance to the venue is around the corner from the restaurant, just a few feet down on Broadway. Look for the WordCamp Long Beach sign! At the Top is up a few flights of stairs (it’s at the top!), but there is an elevator for full accessibility.
The closest parking is one block away in the 24/7 parking structure located off of Pine Avenue between 3rd and 4th St. You can enter off of 3rd (one way) or 4th. The first two hours are free, for 5 hours it’s $8 (max of $12, get pricing details here)
City Place C
50 E. 3rd St.
(Google map link)
One block up is another structure:
City Place B
50 E. 5th St.
(Google map link)
Sponsorships are not a given. WordPress companies are deluged with requests for funds from WordCamps all over the world. Businesses have to be conscientious with their marketing budgets and limit what their spend is on special events like WordCamps.
So when an organization goes out of their way to help a local Camp out, when they don’t have to or plan to, it’s special.
I’d like to take a moment to thank our community sponsors who stepped up and helped make the inaugural WordCamp Long Beach become a reality.
These are sponsors who went above and beyond the standard sponsorship level to help our camp become a reality.
WP Engine – Not only are they already a Carrier Sponsor but they are also our After Party sponsor, too! WP Engine has given to so many camps so very generously. One thing that WPE has consistently done, from the very beginning was to provide a superior WordPress managed hosting product and then to invest heavily in the community. WP Engine has always been a champion of the WP community. THANK YOU!
GreenGeeks – Not only are they Global Community sponsor but they stepped in and helped us out with lunch for attendees. GreenGeeks is one of the few WordPress managed hosting platforms that are green and environmentally positive. Pretty darn awesome, if you ask me. In addition to being committed to the WordPress community, they are also committed to reducing carbon emissions and fighting for a “greener” climate. With the public discourse surrounding the environment and climate change, I think it’s pretty awesome that a business puts forth the effort to do good in the world. THANK YOU!
LifterLMS – Not only is their WordPress LMS solution one of the best in the game, but their team is also big on community. One of the founders, Thomas Levvy, has been an organizer of the last two WordCamps in Los Angeles. If you saw him giving him his closing remarks you would know how much the guy cares about community—it’s present in all that he does. They are both a cargo sponsor and the volunteer/sponsor/speaker dinner sponsor. THANK YOU!
Gunn | Jerkens – They are one of the premier communications and marketing agencies in Long Beach (and beyond) and Linda Gunn, of Gunn | Jerkens, has been heavily involved with the local Long Beach WP community for a while now. Generously giving of space, people, and time and the community is blooming because of that generosity. It’s this sort of involvement that sparks community and keeps it growing. They are both a micro-sponsor and a Tugboat Sponsor. THANK YOU
Pantheon is a managed hosting platform for both WordPress and Drupal-powered sites. That’s not all, though! In addition to having a much-loved product, Pantheon’s commitment to their community is demonstrated in how they listen to their customers and how they support their superhero-fans. They’re always willing to help their community. This year they pitched-in in a big way for WordCamp Long Beach!
Pantheon and all of your Pantheors are straight-up awesome! We appreciate you! Thanks so much!
Our Tub Boat sponsors are awesome and the epitome of innovation and ingenuity!
First off we have SoundCheck. The Soundcheck plugin for WordPress is the easiest way to publish web content that is optimized for voice devices like Amazon Echo and Google Home. The plugin integrates directly with the new Gutenberg editor to make adding speakable content as easy as point, click, and type.
It’s awesome!
You may not have heard of Soflyy but you no doubt have encountered their products. Oxygen Builder is one of the cleanest and most innovative WordPress page builders in the game. You gotta check it out! Also, and most notably, they are known for WP All Import, the very best WordPress import plugin you can find.
In-kind sponsors are folks who provide a product or service for free or at a low cost.
Coldea Productions – They have offered to provide WCLB with top-notch video editing services for both days of camp! This is awesome because the talks will be up and online for all to view long after the camp is done and, for our speakers, it provides a great value as they continue to expand their brand and professional presence. We thank you so much!
Sticker Giant – These folks have been providing free and super creative stickers and sticker sheets for WordCamps since forever. Sticker Giant bleeds WP. Thank you!
Peter Rashkin – Where did all our adorable potted succulent swag at our Speaker/Sponsor/Volunteer Dinner come from? Peter‘s garden! He graciously planted and tended to over 80 little pots in his backyard for months, creating little plant tags from bamboo and handmade paper, and then donating them to our camp when he was done. Thanks, Peter!
David Nuon – “Buttons, buttons, who’s got the button.” You answered Willie Wonka’s call for buttons, David, and donated all the Shippu and Streamline Moderne carrier ship WCLB logo buttons you designed. Thank you!
Not only do many hands make light work but many small donations make a big impact. No one or no business has to donate anything to their local WordCamp and especially no one has to donate to a camp, not in their local community.
Our Micro Sponsors are from all over the place!! We have a sponsor all the way from the UK, Ann Arbor, Michigan, all the way over to Nevada. It’s a testament to the power of community when you have so many great businesses and individuals ready to donate and commit.
It’s a phrase you often hear in the WordCamp circuit: “These events would not be possible if not for the generous contributions of our sponsors.” It’s all very true!
We’d like to thank each of our WCLB global community sponsors for their commitment to the WordPress community. Their generous contributions support community events like WordCamps and WordPress user groups worldwide.
The Global Community Sponsorship program allows most WordCamps to spend substantially less time worrying about fundraising, freeing up our volunteer organizing teams to focus on putting great speakers and content in front of WordCamp attendees. If you’re hoping to contribute to improving and sustaining WordPress community events, this is a great way to do so.
We’d also like to give a heaping shoutout to Green Geeks for going above and beyond their Global Sponsorship commitment and offering to provide lunch for our Saturday attendees!
WordPress is a fundamental part of many of our lives, but there is so much happening with the project—and things move so quickly—that we don’t often have the opportunity to come together as a community and have big-picture conversations about WordPress.
WordCamp Long Beach’s Sunday track, The Future of WordPress, is an opportunity to have those big-picture conversations, and to explore the greater implications of where we think WordPress could, and should, be heading.
We’re delighted to feature some of the prevailing thought-leaders in the WordPress ecosystem, who will talk about the future of WordPress and what it means for the web, our businesses, and our community.
Jonathan Wold will start the day with an overview of WordPress, including where it has been and where it is heading, through the lens of WordPress as an operating system for the Open Web.
From there we will move deeper into the WordPress world with a talk from WordPress community organizer Andrea Middleton on the future of the WordPress community and how the community will (and must) evolve as WordPress continues to scale.
Next, Brett Dunst will give us a look into the case study of Dreamhost and the controversial subpoena for user logs they received from the federal government, including the implications of that case for internet user privacy and the importance of WordPress’s open platform in preserving a free and open internet.
Steve Zenghut will kick us off after lunch by breaking us out of the WordPress “bubble” with a candid talk about the challenges and competition WordPress faces from other platforms, and what that means for businesses that work with WordPress.
Natalie MacLees will continue the conversation with a discussion on the ever-growing influence of WordPress on the greater web, especially in areas like inclusive design and accessibility, by asking the vital question … are we using our influence wisely?
We will close out the day with Gabriel Mays and a look at the complexity and fragmentation that could be holding WordPress back … and possible ways the WordPress community and the greater WordPress ecosystem could move beyond it to unlock WordPress’ full potential.
This is going to be a really exciting and interesting day that we hope will spark some really exciting and interesting conversations. Be a part of The Future of WordPress …get your ticket to WordCamp Long Beach now!
Saturday, October 5 is the first day of WordCamp Long Beach and the schedule and session descriptions are now LIVE!
On Saturday, we are featuring two tracks: one focused on Users, folks who use WordPress for their own websites, and the other geared toward Professionals, folks who build or manage WordPress websites for other people and businesses.
The Users Track starts with the basics in Justice Anderson‘s talk
“Zero to WordPress: Building Your First WordPress Site” and ends with Sabrina Zeidan‘s talk on one of the most often-asked questions about WordPress … how do I speed up my website?
In between, we feature a talk on must-have plugins from Christina Hills, a discussion about the block editor (aka Gutenberg!) from Chris Reynolds, and how to revive a “dead” site with Ramuel Gall.
We also feature an important talk on accessibility, which is a topic everyone needs to know more about, from Joe A. Simpson, Jr.
The Professionals track is a mix of discussion and how-tos for folks who use WordPress to create sites and content for other people and businesses.
We kick things off on a personal note with an inspirational (and aspirational) talk from Linda Gunn on her journey from soloprenuer to WP agency owner with more than 20 full-time employees.
On the how-to tip, we’re featuring a topical talk on data literacy from Evan Volgas and an overview of using WP-CLI to streamline development from Diana Thompson.
And on the discussion side of things, we’re featuring Mike Demo on how to sell the plugin you’ve built, Anastassia Zukova‘s take on builder themes and plugins, and closing out with Roy Sivan and his experiences with the trials and tribulations of WordPress at the enterprise levels.
Our goal was to provide a little bit of something (or a lot of bit of something!) for every level of WordPress user, from those just starting out to seasoned professionals. We’re excited about the breadth and depth of our Saturday talks, and we hope you are too!
And stay tuned, because the schedule and sessions descriptions for Sunday’s The Future of WordPress track are coming soon!
Don’t miss out on any of this WordPress goodness. Be sure to buy your ticket for WordCamp Long Beach today!
We are delighted to announce the speaker lineup for the inaugural WordCamp Long Beach!
As we get closer to Camp, we’ll be providing more details on each session our awesome speakers will be presenting as well as the final schedule, but here is your first look at the full lineup for both days! You can check out the bios for all of the speakers on our Speakers Page.
Can’t wait to hear what they have to say? Head on over to our Tickets page to get your ticket to WordCamp Long Beach. (Pro tip: Sign up before September 11 to get the official WCLB t-shirt!)
Joe A Simpson Jr. – Ouch! WordPress Accessibility that should not hurt
Chris Reynolds – How the Block Editor in WordPress Changes the Conversation for Content Editors and Developers
Justice Anderson – Zero to WordPress: Building Your First WordPress Site
Christina Hills – The Top 10 Plugins Every Website Needs and Why
Ramuel Gall – WordPress Necromancy: The Art (and Science) of Bringing a Site Back from the Dead
Sabrina Zeidan – 5 Steps to a Faster Website
Roy Sivan – WordPress in Enterprise: Is It Possible? Do You Want It To Be?
Diana Thompson – Take Command of WordPress with WP-CLI
Linda Gunn – How to Scale: My Journey to Brick-and-Mortar WP agency owner
Anastassia Zukova – What You See Is NOT What You Get
Evan Volgas – Data Literacy: What Everyone Needs to Know about Data, Physics, Memory, and Information (or, How I Learned to Quit Worrying and Focus My Attention)
Mike Demo – If You Build It, You Can Sell It
Gabriel Mays – The Future of WordPress: Reducing Fragmentation & Complexity
Steve Zehngut – Breaking Out of the WordCamp “Bubble”
Brett Dunst – Hand Over the Logs and No One Gets Hurt
Natalie MacLees – The Tangled Web We’re Weaving
Andrea Middleton – Will What Got Us Here, Get Us There? WordPress Community at Scale
Jonathan Wold – WordPress: An Operating System for the Open Web
Are you as excited as we are? We hope you will join us for this epic weekend of WordPress. Get your tickets now!