Special WordPress Meetup - Thursday, February 19, 2015 7 PM

We are changing things up a bit this month. We will be meeting Thursday, Feb. 19th at 7PM instead of our usual last Monday of the month. This is because we have the opportunity to hear Juliette Reinders Folmer, from the Netherlands, (bio below), speak to us as she travels from Salt Lake to Miami for conferences.

Her topic is:

The story of WPSEO and me

Or how a virtually unknown developer in the WP community became a lead developer of one of the world's top 10 WordPress plugins.

How often do you find yourself frustrated by unanswered support requests about plugins or themes ? How often do you find yourself thinking "this plugin nearly does what I need, but not completely" ? And how often do you wonder why a bug which you fixed locally, still isn't fixed in the #th official update of a plugin ?

In this interactive talk I will take you on a journey through how I became involved with WordPress SEO by Yoast, what the effect has been on me personally and on my business, show you how git made it a lot easier to start contributing to (a lot of) plugins and themes, share some best practices, and tell you some anecdotes about the hurdles you might run into working in a virtual team and why white screens do happen.

BIO

Juliette Reinders Folmer is an all round consultant and web-developer who tries not be a geek.

http://photos3.meetupstatic.com/photos/event/6/0/d/b/600_434124795.jpeg

She is from the Netherlands and in the USA for the SunshinePHP Conference (Miami) and the PluralSight author summit (Salt Lake City).

She is also the top contributor to Yoast's SEO plugin and now works together with the Yoast company both on WPSEO as well as some of their other plugins.

With three weeks to spare between the conferences, she had the wild idea to do a road trip across the U.S. and will be making a pit-stop in Oklahoma City to visit our group.

Juliette is a long-standing member of [PHPWomen] http://phpwomen.org/ (http://phpwomen.org/)which helped her immensely to find her feet in the PHP world. She's an active contributor to github.com and a number of open source projects.

I think this will be a really special and informative time. I'm excited to have Juliette visit our group. I'll be extending this invitation to some other local tech groups. I know we'll have a great time together.

Here are some detailed driving directions:

Directions: Oklahoma Christian is on the north side of Memorial Road between Boulevard/Martin Luther King & Bryant. After turning into the entrance, proceed to the first stop sign, turn left (west). You'll be on the (only) road that circles the campus and you'll be going to the back of the campus. So when you get to the next stop sign, you'll be at the back of the campus and headed east. Go straight (about a block), after stopping and you'll see a 2-story building on the hill - the most northern building on campus. There are three buildings all connected. We are in the Noble Science Wing Room 204. This is the 3rd of the 3 buildings (the eastern-most building). Park in the back of the building and you'll see our WordPress sign on the glass door. The meeting room is upstairs - come on up, we have lots of signs posted.

If you'd rather come in the back way, you can take Boulevard/Martin L King to Smiling Hill Blvd (this is about 1/2 mi. north of Memorial Rd.

Turn east on Smiling Hill and go about 1/2 mile and you'll see the iron gate (always open), that leads into OC. Turn right (south) onto the campus. Go till you get to the first stop sign and turn left (east). Follow the rest of the instructions above.