I'll be speaking about WordPress at CMA NYC in March

Following Lauren’s lead, I’ll be speaking at the Spring College Media Convention on Sunday morning, March 13th (the conference runs March 12th through 15th) at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. The organizers have asked me to lead two sessions:

• WordPress hack attack (Sunday, 9-9:50 a.m., New Media Central 1) - The basic WordPress website is pretty stripped down, but plug-ins and themes can perk up its appearance, simplify your workflow, and streamline your mobile delivery. The former director of CoPress will show you some of the best add-ons, teach you some nifty design tricks, and tell you how to keep your site running at peak efficiency.
• Making WordPress work for you (Sunday, 10-10:50 a.m., New Media Central 1) - Considered making the switch to WordPress? The former director of CoPress offers tips on how to make an open-source content management system work for your organization. Learn the pleasures and pitfalls of migrating from another CMS and why WordPress is a good solution for college newspapers.

My goal is to make each primers on core concepts, include usable takeaways, and offer lots of links for later digestion. In the first, I intend to cover topics like backups, version control, development sandboxes, and performance, a few different tools, and several of my favorite plugins. See my notes in progress on a Google Doc. In the second, I’d like to give a complete overview of migrating to WordPress, including how to migrate your archives, what to look for in a web host, and where you can train your staff, and then have a healthy Q&A session at the end. These notes are also in progress in a Google Doc.

If you have any concepts, tricks, or wisdom you think I need to cover, please let me know. I’d be happy to credit you in the presentation. I also intend to publish my full notes for reference prior to the sessions.