Category: WordPress Stories

Michael Gillihan is the After Party and Print Wrangler for this year’s WordCamp DFW.

My WordPress story? I don’t have one, but I can tell you a bit of my story and how I came to work with WordPress.

After my first daughter was born, I joined the U.S. Army and spent several years in the service. It was during my second 15 month deployment that I decided it was time to hang up my spurs, so to speak. My daughters had given too much for as young as they were and deserved to have their father be a larger part of their life than a garbled video chat could provide.

I came home to Fort Worth in 2008 as the markets collapsed. I found my job prospects had quickly dried up. A strong will to stay in my home town and a fruitless job search found me looking for other means of making an income. Having built a few websites in 90’s, I began digging into the web and looking for opportunities.

My renewed interest in tech combined with a lifelong love for the outdoors led me to create an outdoor product ecommerce shop. I spent roughly a year working on it only to realize how much I dislike running ecommerce shops. However, while I quickly grew to dislike the actual business, I fell in love with development and found myself pouring through books and learning more and more about Yahoo’s weird RTML.

This was also the time when I found WordPress. I added a blog to my shop and it was so dang easy to customize compared to Yahoo. Eventually, I abandoned Yahoo, moving to PrestaShop and then to WooCommerce.

“And suddenly you know: It’s time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings.” ~ Meister Eckhart

Sometime in late 2009, I was asked to create a new website for a local church’s Child Development Center. This was the first site I completed that was 100% WordPress and it sure lit the fire. After that site, I got a referral for a paid gig and then another. It started becoming clear that I could make decent money doing something that I enjoyed.

I dug in and spent the next several years freelancing and learning CSS, HTML, PHP, JS, etc. I sat through about a billion courses on Treehouse and other sites, obsessed on all things CSS-Tricks and eventually ventured out to our local WP meetup where Carrie Dils was giving a talk and let us know her current rate. I was blown away. I went home that night and mentally doubled my rates.

October 2014 rolled around and with it came my first WordCamp. I was hooked. Compelled by Cory Miller to “Click Publish”, admonished by Paul Clark to yet again raise my rates, and inspired by my wife, Sheryle Gillihan, as folks got to share in a little bit of how awesome she is during her Project Scoping talk. My cup was full.

In the 3 years since, I’ve continued growing my business and pivoted to focus my work on doing some good in this world. I’ve developed platforms that serve continents while promoting civil society, launched national initiatives that help our youth become financially literate, and played a part, however small, in helping children who have lost loved ones cope with their grief. I have attended WordCamps all over the place and other WordPress related conferences like PressNomics and CaboPress. I’ve even crashed other meetups like the New Orleans WordPress Meetup where they gave me Wapuu pins, too cool. Almost every person I have met has made a positive impression upon me.

The WordPress community can be addicting. It fills you up and when you need more it’s there welcoming you back.

If someone were to ask me why they should attend WordCamp DFW, I wouldn’t tell them to come learn how to build a blog or that they can discuss REST API’s to their heart’s content. I wouldn’t say that they will leave rejuvenated and full of ideas about their next project. I would simply say “To fill your cup.”

This November, you should come visit and break bread with like-minded people in your community. You should share your own story and knowledge so that you might empower others and you should allow them to empower you!

I’ll be at WordCamp DFW this year. Come find me and let’s have a chat!

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event, speak at the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!

Stefanie A. Newton is the design and website wrangler for this year’s WordCamp DFW.

WordPress has enabled me to combine my technical and creative sides into a business that allows me to build comprehensive website solutions, due largely to the vast amount of available knowledge and assistance generously provided by others.

WordPress is open source software, you don’t have to pay anything to use it, and that fact helps drive the spirit of giving back that is so prevalent and why I’m glad to help organize this year’s WordCamp DFW. But how did I come to use WordPress?

My career with computers goes back a long way. Back to my senior year of high school working as a data entry clerk (at a time when you had to hire someone to “run the computer”). I worked my way up from there over the years to the level of software development, working with Pick BASIC, SQL, and VBA.

I started working on websites by creating my own, writing HTML in Notepad. Then I made a few for others the same way. Meanwhile, I had transitioned away from software development and was trying other types of work, but what I really wanted to do was work from home. I decided to start my own company, which at first focused on editing and proofreading, but quickly shifted to creating websites.

I needed a way for my clients to work with and maintain their own websites, so I tried one of the all-in-one hosted website builder options. While that was much better and allowed my clients to enter their own content and make some site changes, there were still drawbacks, such as frustrating interfaces and builder branding being inserted into the free versions of the user websites.

I started researching and comparing website frameworks and liked what I saw with WordPress. I was able to quickly learn from all of the tutorials, forums, blogs, and other resources available. After creating my own themes using the component libraries of Bootstrap and Foundation, I discovered the Genesis Framework by StudioPress. Now I create website solutions as nerdworker.com and work exclusively with WordPress and Genesis as my preferred tools.

As someone who considers themselves extremely introverted, I was slow to connect with the WordPress community, but eventually got up the nerve to attend our local Fort Worth Meetup. It was a great decision and I connected with welcoming and knowledgeable people there and also online through Twitter, Facebook, and Slack. While not without its share of drama at times, I can honestly say that you would be hard-pressed to find a group of people more welcoming and generous with their knowledge than the WordPress community. So, don’t be afraid to reach out and connect.

WordCamps allow you to take those connections to the next level. My first WordCamp was New York City 2014. It was exciting to be among so many others who also loved WordPress and spend two immersive days learning new things. It was also a chance to see so many people in person that I had only read about or corresponded with online.

Since then I have attended all of our rebooted local DFW WordCamps: 2014 through 2016. I have also participated as a volunteer and sponsor, as a way to give back to the community and help ensure that these events continue to be a helpful resource for everyone. In the future, I hope to attend WordCamps in many other regions as well.

This year, it’s exciting that we have expanded to a two-day event. I hope to see many familiar faces and new ones as well. Even if you’re new to attending, don’t miss this opportunity to learn from, and connect with, the larger WordPress community and say “Howdy!” to WordCamp DFW 2017.

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event, speak at the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!

Jacob Martella is the PR and Social Media Wrangler for this year’s WordCamp DFW.

I never thought I would be a WordPress developer.

For the vast majority of my life, I wanted to be a journalist. A sports journalist to be more specific. I grew up loving to play sports — especially baseball — and I developed a love of writing in the fourth grade.

So in high school, I joined the school newspaper covering the sports teams. At the University of Texas at Austin, I joined The Daily Texan. There I covered both golf teams, women’s soccer, softball, volleyball, baseball and basketball. Then in my final semester, I became the sports editor for the paper. And in August 2016, I got to go to Rio de Janeiro to cover the summer Olympics.

I ended up graduating with a journalism degree, but that’s not what I’ve been doing professionally. Instead, during that time there was another thing that kept trying to get my attention: web development.

My introduction to WordPress came at my high school newspaper. Fascinated by the software and wanting to learn more, I started my own WordPress site — a blog that covered arena football. As my time in high school went on, I became more interested in how WordPress worked.

Finally, in the summer after my high school graduation, I took the time to teach myself web development. I learned HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript and how WordPress worked. It definitely wasn’t the best learning, looking back at it now, but it was a start. And by the end of the summer, I had a custom theme for my arena football blog.

Eventually, my interest in arena football faded, but not my interest in web development. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I only became more intrigued by WordPress and web development. I took programming classes at UT and ended up with an Elements of Computing Certificate. And I created a theme for the WordPress theme directory.

But in the summer of 2014, web development went from a hobby to a job. Through an interesting set of circumstances, Christopher Harris hired me to be a development intern at his company, Faith Growth. It was the much-needed next step, and I learned a lot about how to properly do things in WordPress and web programming.

I now have a couple of more themes in the directory and a few plugins in the repository plus a premium sports plugin. I’ve also created numerous websites for churches and ministries at Faith Growth. But through all of that work, I hadn’t quite unlocked the true power of WordPress — the community.

In September 2016, I attended my first WordCamp DFW. Although I listened to a lot great talks, my biggest lesson came with how big and how awesome the WordPress community is. With WordPress and web development, it’s easy to feel like a lone wolf. I know that there are obviously online communities for WordPress, but it can be tough to feel that personal interaction online, especially for those of us who are just starting out.

But that WordCamp DFW got me excited about web development. Seeing so many people using the software and being excited about it gave me energy to keep going with WordPress and opened my eyes to what I could do with it.

After that experience, I became an active member of the Fort Worth WordPress Users MeetUp. There my experience with the WordPress community has only become more positive. I’ve met people who are wanting to learn more about WordPress and people who are willing to teach. It’s undoubtedly the best community I’ve ever been a part of.

This year I’ll be attending WordCamp DFW as the PR and Social Media Wrangler, but I would still be attending the camp even if I wasn’t one of the organizers. It’s a great opportunity to see the WordPress community in action. If you’ve just started with WordPress or have never gotten involved in the community before, this is the perfect opportunity to do that. And of course, if you’re wanting to learn more about how to developer with WordPress, blog with WordPress or use the platform as a business, there’s no better place to go than WordCamp DFW.

I’ll be at WordCamp DFW this year. I hope to see you too!

Tickets are now on sale for this year’s WordCamp DFW held on Nov. 11-12. There are also plenty of opportunities to sponsor the event, speak at the event or help run it. We hope to see you there!