We have just activated the EventBrite event for WordCamp Montreal 2010. You can now sign up and buy your tickets for the event. They are $40 and include both days of the event, a tshirt and at least one catered meal. Also included are the dozens of interesting new friends and collaborators you’ll meet in the hall, all the skills and knowledge you’ll pick up in the lectures and maybe even a WordPress sticker or two.

Register now!

Early registrations will make our lives so much easier in so many ways, so if you can register today or ASAP, we’d really appreciate it.

The event will be at a downtown university campus (probably Concordia). You can learn more about the schedule on the Schedule page, which has full talk descriptions and bios of our expert speakers.

Once you are registered grab one of our badges and show off!

Micro-Sponsorships also available

Along with general registration the freelancer-friendly micro-sponsorship package is also available through EventBrite. Micro-sponsorships let small companies or individuals be sponsors of WCMTL without breaking the bank (details). A micro-sponsorship includes registration for the sponsor and the rest goes to making WordCamp as awesome as possible. There are a limited number of micro-sponsorships available so get yours now!

First 12 speakers announced!

We’re proud to say that we already have 12 excellent talks by WordPress experts from Montréal and across Canada lined up! You can read all the details on the Schedule page. We hope that there are already talks you’re dying to see, if you want to present something that you don’t see there please read about becomming a speaker, thanks!

L’inscription pour WCMTL est ouverte!

WordCamp Montreal 2010 est maintenant activé sur le site événementiel EventBrite. Dès maintenant, vous pouvez vous y enregistrer et  vous procurer votre billet. Pour la modique somme de 40$, vous aurez accès à deux jours de conférences, un t-shirt et au moins un repas fourni par un traiteur. Également inclus: de nouveaux amis et collaborateurs, de nouvelles compétences et informations glanées lors des présentations et même la chance d’obtenir un ou deux autocollants à l’effige de WordPress.

Inscrivez-vous maintenant!

Les pré-inscriptions simplifient nos vies de différentes manières. Ne tardez pas davantage. Enregistrez-vous dès maintenant ou dès que possible; nous apprécions énormément votre compréhension.

L’événement se déroulera au centre-ville de Montréal sur un campus universitaire (très probablement celui de Concordia). Pour de plus amples détails, veuillez consulter le programme où vous trouverez la description des présentations et les bios des conférenciers.

Une fois que vous vous êtes enregistrés, affichez fièrement votre affinité à l’événement en téléchargeant un des nombreux badges.

Micro-commandite également disponible

Sur EventBrite, il est également possible de s’inscrire au forfait de micro-commandite permettant aux pigistes, aux individus, et aux petites entreprises de commanditer WCMTL sans se ruiner (détails). Une micro-commandite inclut les frais d’inscription du commanditaire; le reste contribuera  à agrémenter davantage l’expérience WordCamp. Le nombre de micro-commandite est limité. Réservez votre place dès maintenant!

Les 12 premiers conférenciers sont annoncés!

Nous sommes fiers de vous annoncer que nous avons déjà douze experts de WordPress, de Montréal et de partout au Canada,  qui viendront faire une présentation. Consultez le programme pour de plus amples détails. Nous espérons que vous avez aussi hâte que nous d’échanger avec ces professionnels. Si vous désirez partager avec la communauté WCMTL un thème qui n’a pas encore été abordé, consultez notre section devenir un Conférencier. Merci!

Le français suit.

After some initial planning we have settled on the August 28-29 date for WordCamp 2010. It will be a two-day event at a downtown location (still not pinned down).

Wait, wtf is WordCamp?

WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you. Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.

Tickets will be 40$ and should be available for purchase sometime next week from EventBrite. We’ll post again when you can come to the site and register.

For now we hope you’ll reserve the date and consider being an active participant in WCMTL from the start. WordCamp is organized by the community in Montreal (i.e. a few passionate core volunteers) and we depend on the contributions and involvement of the wider community to make it the success we all know it can be.

Consider getting involved:

• Become a speaker – WordCamp is about sharing knowledge and teaching each other how to use WordPress more effectively. That requires presenters to assign themselves a topic and come to the event prepared to share it with everyone else. We are looking for all kinds of talks, from web-writing tips to hardcore development, so almost anyone could be a speaker if they put some time into it, why not you?
• Volunteer for WordCamp – For the most part the core organizers will take care of things, but leading up to and during the event there is too much for the three of us to handle. Sign up as a volunteer and promise to do a few hours of work and we’ll love you (and give you a free ticket if you want ;)
• Sponsor WordCamp, or convince your boss to -  Those who have been to other tech conferences know that 40$ for a two-day even with catered lunch is nothing. This is possible because gracious companies and professionals sponsor WordCamp, supporting the local community and generating good-will and awareness about their brands at the same time. Please consider being a sponsor of WordCamp 2010 or promoting the idea to a company that you think would be a good fit.
• Also on the sponsorship page is information about our ‘micro-sponsor’ program, where freelancers can support WordCamp without breaking the bank with a $200 donation that includes their registration fee. A limited number of micro-sponsorships will be available during the ticket buying process, so start thinking now if you can afford it (of course you can, WordPress has provided, hasn’t it?)

Okay, that’s probably enough for now. If you want to learn more about WordCamp Montreal 2010 you can read the about page, which explains the history and goals of WordCamp, and the schedule page, which outlines what the content of WordCamp will be like.

__________________________________________

WordCamp aura lieu le 28 et 29 août 2010. Nous recherchons des conférenciers, commanditaires et bénévoles!

Après un peu de planification, on a finalement choisi les 28 et 29 août  pour WordCamp2010. Ce sera un événement de deux jours quelque part au centre-ville (endroit exact pas encore confirmé).

Attendez, c’est quoi WordCamp?

WordCamp c’est une conférence axée sur tout ce qui se rapporte à WordPress.  Les WordCamps sont des événements informels organisés par la communauté des utilisateurs de WordPress comme vous.  Tout  le monde, des utilisateurs occasionnels aux développeurs purs et durs, participe, échange des idées et socialise.

Les billets coûteront 40$ et devraient être disponibles au cours de la semaine prochaine sur EventBrite.  Nous vous informerons ici quand vous pourrez vous enregistrer sur le site.  

Pour l’instant, nous espérons que vous allez bloquer ces dates et envisager de devenir  un participant actif de WCMTL dès le départ. WordCamp est organisé par la communauté à Montréal (c’est-à-dire  un tout petit noyau dur de  bénévoles passionnés) et nous dépendons de la contribution et de l’implication de la communauté élargie pour que l’événement devienne le succès qu’il mérite.

Pourquoi ne pas vous impliquer:

• Devenez conférencier –  à WordCamp, on partage nos connaissances et on s’éduque les uns les autres sur les façons les plus efficaces d’utiliser WordPress.  Les présentateurs  devront se choisir un sujet et venir  à la conférence fins prêts à le partager avec tout le monde.  On recherche des conférences en tous genres, des trucs d’écriture web au développement pur et dur. Presque tout le monde peut  devenir conférencier, pourquoi pas vous?
• Devenez bénévoles pour WordCamp – Le comité organisateur va s’occuper de la majorité des tâches mais d’ici à la conférence et pendant son déroulement, il y a trop à faire pour nous trois.  Inscrivez-vous comme bénévole , engagez -vous à faire quelques heures de travail et nous vous adorerons (et vous aurez droit à un billet gratuit, si vous le désirez ;)
• Commanditez WordCamp ou convainquez votre patron de le faire – Ceux qui ont déjà participé à une conférence tech savent que deux jours de conférence avec lunch fourni pour 40$, c’est donné. C’est rendu possible grâce à la généreuse contribution d’entreprises et de professionnels qui, en commanditant WordCamp, s’impliquent dans leur communauté tout en contribuant à augmenter la notoriété positive de leur marque. S’il vous plaît, pensez à devenir commanditaire de WordCamp 2010 ou à en promouvoir l’idée  auprès d’une entreprise qui aurait des affinités avec l’événement.  
• En outre, sur la page des commandites vous pourrez lire au sujet de notre programme de micro-commandite qui permet aux travailleurs autonomes de soutenir WordCamp sans se ruiner, grâce à un don de 200$ qui inclut les frais d’inscription. Les  micro-commandites  seront disponibles pendant le processus d’achat de billets et leur nombre sera limité, alors commencez à compter vos sous (bien sûr que vous en avez les moyens, grâce à WordPress, n’est-ce pas?)

Bon, ça suffitpour l’instant. Si vous voulez en savoir plus au sujet de WordCamp Montréal 2010, vous pouvez consulter la page À propos qui explique l’histoire et les objectifs de WordCamp et l’horaire, qui décrit l’événement dans ses grandes lignes.

On Friday night there was a WCMTL planning meeting at the Vanilla offices. Brendan Sera-Sriar, Shannon Smith and I (Jeremy Clarke) attended. For now we will form the core team for this upcoming WordCamp, though we want to include everyone in the process.

This site (RSS feed), the planning Google Group, our Twitter account and the Facebook Group will all be updated with new information as it becomes official and things like tickets go on sale, so sign up to stay up to date! Below are summaries of the major points we discussed during the meeting.

Date

We talked about some of the different dates already proposed and decided that late/end of August would be best. The two potential weekends are Aug 21-22 or Aug 28-29. For now we are going to take advantage of the extra week of planning time and state the date as Aug 28-29, with the caveat that if a particularly awesome venue is available for the week before we may choose that instead.

Venue

We discussed our venue needs but didn’t come to any firm conclusions. Our ideal would be to find a university/cegep venue that already has all the AV and seating stuff that we’ll need, but we don’t know of any that are available at this point. The building Vanilla lives in has offered us several large rooms and we can use this as a fallback location but it would require renting chairs and organizing all the projectors/screens/audio equipment ourselves. The Vanilla building is also unlikely to offer a single room that could hold all participants for big meetings (i.e. seating 150 people). We could live without a giant room and big shared talks if necessary.

Any leads on educational or other venues that would be free or affordable are very welcome, if you know someone WordPress-friendly at a Montreal university or Cegep please get in touch.

Website

The website for this year will use the same domain and structure as last years, http://wordcampmontreal.org but with some aesthetic changes to make it feel like a different event (and obviously updates to all content).

Shannon has offered to be in charge of press releases and press relations and will work with me (Jeremy) on the website content.

Like last year tickets will be sold through EventBrite (they will probably have a similar price, 35$)

Volunteers

We are hoping to get people signed up as early as possible as volunteers. Volunteers will get free admission to the event but will be expected to put in several hours of incredibly fun work-time to compensate. You will also recieve bragging rights and free hugs from Brendan upon request. Once the site is relaunched for this year there will be a form where you can sign up.

Sponsors

Sponsorship will probably work mostly like last year. We discussed donation tiers and settled on a relatively obvious set of choices:

• Platinum $10,000
• Gold $5,000
• Silver $1,000
• Alluminum $500

We also plan to offer a low-price sponsorship package for freelancers, $100 or $200, which won’t get your logo on the poster or website but will buy you a position on a special page of freelancers who care deeply about WordPress Community. There will be a limited number of these sponsorships for sale, probably 20, to ensure that everyone who invests in this idea can be featured on the resulting page. We will sell these packages via EventBrite, so they will be purchased instead of a ticket to the event and will get you into all activities. Special investors will also have a special sticker on their badges so everyone knows how sexy they are.

Anyone have feedback about the price of this freelancer package? 200$ woiuld mean less dependence on other sponsors and we could feature the list even more, but would  obviously be less affordable for a lot of people.

Schedule

We discussed several elements of the schedule for this WordCamp but agreed that the practical considerations listed above are more urgent and immediately in need of solving.

We didn’t come to a firm conclusion about whether this should be a one or two day event. Both have their benefits and it may depend on our venue.

We agreed that the schedule should feature as much balance between development and content-production as possible, and that we hope to have balanced speakers like last year or even better if possible.

Speakers

Once the website is relaunched to reflect this new WordCamp there will be a form for speakers to enter their personal information and propose topics. We hope you will start thinking now about topics you would like to present and start working on your info about them. If you can, prepare the following information about your topic:

your name,
your bio,
talk name,
talk description.

For examples and information please go look at last year’s schedule which is up on the site now: http://wordcampmontreal.org/schedule/

Meetups in the meantime

Ma.tt is going to be in town for much of July and he wants to hang out with us! http://ma.tt/2010/06/to-montreal/

Moving WordCamp itself up a month isn’t really feasible but we can certainly have some warmup get-togethers in the meantime. We will be in touch with matt and with this group and the facebook one to announce some social get-togethers (at a bar) and hopefully at least one informational meetup next month.

Lots to do, lets get started!

Thanks for your interest in WordCamp and we hope you can all be involved as Sponsors, Speakers and Volunteers! Keep in touch.

• Location: Station C :: 5369 Boulevard St-Laurent #430 (mile end) http://is.gd/3silg
• Time: 7:30pm – 10:00pm
• 2 presentations, contact jer if you want to present
• Presentation: NetBeans IDE and other tools for faster programming.
• Discussion: GPL and WP, paid themes/plugins, legality, sharing.
• Food and drinks: Please bring some snacks and drinks (alcohol welcome) to share with everyone.

More details and full information available on the Facebook event listing.

If you’d like to be notified of future WordPress events in Montréal please join the Montreal WordPress Community Facebook group.

Hope to see you there :)

My roomate Arthur (who does amazing work for the under-appreciated TV McGill) is going through the process of digitizing and uploading all of the video he shot at WordCamp. Eventually everything from Room 1 should be available (if you filmed room2 please get in touch with me, I’ll give you the login for the blip.tv account so you can upload the video!)

You can see all our videos on the Blip.tv Archive page. You can also find the player below in our video page, which is in the top navigation

Videos we’ve uploaded so far (jul29-09): Q&A with ma.tt, Future of WP with Jane Wells, Theming for Noobs with Jeremy Clarke, WP Security with Brad Williams, Flashpress by Brendan Sera-Sriar.

This player should have all the videos so far. There will be more soon so subscribe to rss updates if you’re interested.

I wanted to share that opportunity with everybody, if you are available these days (let’s say for some work in august or september), post your availability here and I will put you in touch with the people that sent me requests (and will redirect others here too).

I tried to corral all the speakers and get them to upload their slides to Slideshare so that people could easily look through them. Most of the speakers put them up or sent them to me. Here’s the list:

• Jane Wells – The Future of WordPress
• Jeremy Clarke – Caching and Optimization for WordPress: Keeping your site fast and stable.
• Jeremy Clarke – WordPress Theming for Epic n00bs: Intro to Template Tags, Themes and PHP
• Sarven Capadisli – Making Laconica and WordPress work together
• CT Moore – WP-MU 101: How to Install and Avoid Common Mistakes
• Brad Williams – WordPress Security
• Stephane Jolicoeur & Audrey-Rose Savard – An Easier Way to Embed Video in Your Blog
• George ONeill – Using WordPress As An Integral Part Of A Social Media Marketing Strategy
• Alexandre Simard – Ecommerce on the cheap with WordPress
• Erin Blaskie – Lifestreaming: The New
  Future of Blogging?

[Extras added after this post was published]

• Mario Asselin – WordCamp sans la ligne de vie
• Brendan Sera-Sriar – FlashPress – Bridging Two Worlds
• Jerome Paradis and Kim Vallee – The Perfect Migration to WordPress: Why and How

You can also find their slides on the schedule page by clicking the ‘view presentation slides’ link below the talk name.

Hopefully the other speakers will send their slides soon. We should have videos of most of the talks up on WordPress.tv soon, but it might take a while as its a slow process to prepare them.

Photo of CT giving his talk by eva blue

My presentation at this past weekend’s Wordcamp was called WP-MU 101: How to Install & Avoid Common Mistakes. One of the things I made clear at the outset was that I am NOT a developer or web designer, so the session was going to be very much of a beginner’s level one.

Being a very beginner’s level affair, the Q&A part brought up some some questions that I just wasn’t equipped to answer. After all, I’m a newbie to WP-MU, and was really just intending to share my experience with other newbies so that they don’t make the same silly mistakes that I did.

So what I started doing was crowd-sourcing the Q&A session. The crowd seemed pretty receptive; quite a few attendees stepped in to answer questions, and even I learned quite a few things.

Insofar as WP-MU is ideal for running multiple blogs through one platform, some of the things that more advanced WP-MU users in the audience shared with everyone were:

1. WP-MU will support blogs in different languages; all you need to do is install the qTranslate plugin.
2. Multiple domains can be managed through a single installation of WP-MU: first, you create a new blog through WP-MU (such as blog.domain.com); second, your point your new domain (example.com) at the same server root where WP-MU is installed; then, you go to the general blog setting for the blog you created (blog.domain.com) and change the URL in the general settings to the additional domain (example.com) you want to manage through WP-MU.
3. Admin users can force plugins on blogs.

And some of the features of WP-MU that I was already aware of, but are worth recapping for anyone trying to determine whether the platform is right for them:

1. WP-MU can support blogs in either sub-domains (blog.example.com) or sub-directories (example.com/blog), but not both; and you make the choice during installation.
2. if you choose to have blogs in a sub-domain, you will need a Wildcard DNS Entry.
3. your database must be MySQL 5.0.
4. a single database is used for all the blogs under WP-MU.
5. single users can contribute to several blogs.
6. single users can be assigned different permissions on different blogs.
7. each blog can have its own theme / blogs can share themes.
8. there is no WYSIWYG for editing the home.php file (which is responsible for the content of the index page for the domain WP-MU is installed on); if you want to edit this file, you will need some coding skills and FTP access to the file itself.

In a nutshell, my presentation was intended to help others learn from my mistakes (i.e. not reading the installation instruction) and give the audience an understanding of (1) when to use WPMU, (2) common installation mistakes, (3) choosing between a directory vs subdomain, and (4) basic WP-MU configuration after you install it.

In any case, here’s the PowerPoint from my session. It’s not nearly as rich as the discussion that ensued (the audience was so awesome), so if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll try to help you out as best I can.

Nous avons pour vous 2 serveurs dédiés gratuits pendant 12 mois (valeur de 1629$US chacun), des jeux de Xbox 360, des t-shirts geek et plusieurs autres prix très intéressants!

Veuillez simplement répondre à ce billet avec votre nom et courriel et peut-être aurez-vous la chance de gagner un des merveilleux prix (ouvert seulement aux participants de WordCamp Montréal 2009, nous allons vérifier avec la liste des inscriptions lors du tirage au sort).

Bonne chance à tous et à l’année prochaine!

Instead of a giant pad I thought it would be cool to just use the comments on this post to list job offers. So if you’re looking to hire a WP developer, designer, writer or anything else please leave a comment here so those looking for work can get back to you.

Please leave your name, website and if possible a photo of you so people can recognize you at the event. The attendee list has photos of a lot of people based on their Gravatars, and those will also show up next to your comments, so if you don’t have a link to a photo of you make sure you have signed up for a Gravatar so people can find you to talk about the project.

Good luck!