AGENDA
6:00 - 6:30 PM - Food, Drinks & Networking
6:30 - 6:40 PM - Announcements
6:40 - 7:10 PM - Basic Concepts
7:10 - 7:20 PM - Break
7:20 - 8:40 PM - Main Speaker
8:40 - 8:55 PM - Door Prize Drawings

MAIN TOPIC ABSTRACT
Website Development with Wordpress
There are many content management systems designed for the web,
including fan favorites Drupal, XOOPS and Joomla. While feature rich,
these systems are typically too complex to setup and use for small
groups or companies that enter with limited web background. An
alternative for this class of user is to build the content management
system based on Wordpress, a simple to install and easy to extend system
originally designed for blogging that now boasts over 750,000 downloads
of its latest release since early December 2008. With hundreds of well
tested plugins, support for multiple types of media, a rich text editor
and multiuser support, Wordpress offers all the feature you need in a
CMS without all the complexity to manage it.

This talk will cover Wordpress installation, important plugins and
widgets for CMS users, and theme selection and editing. A static front
page layout will be created while moving the blog entries to a separate
page. We'll add simple navigation through theme edits and add a gallery.
Security will be provided through built in spam protection. On the
development side we'll look at basic template structures for pages and
posts, an overview of sidebar widgets and the Main Loop for plugin
development.

MAIN SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Michael Hammel

Michael J. Hammel is a Principal Software Engineer for Colorado
Engineering, Inc. (CEI) in Colorado Springs, CO, with over 20 years of
software development and management experience. He has written over 100
articles for numerous online and print magazines and is the author of
three books on the GIMP, the premier open source graphics editing
package.

BASIC CONCEPTS ABSTRACT
Open Source Development and the World Wide Web: A Certain Tension

The development of the World Wide Web over the course of the past ten years has run rampant. The course it has taken has been both swift and unpredictable. The largest distributed system in the world began as a utopian notion of an interconnected and open web of information, the dream of the academic and intellectual alike. Today it is indeed a massive interconnected web of communication and content, but the content, largely on the more popular, if not pornographic, end of the mass media spectrum, is not what the founders intended.

Coinciding with the rapid growth of the web has been the equally speedy rise of the open source development community, which can best be understood as a distributed system in its own right. Indeed, the development of the web has been, outside of the Linux project, the largest arena for open source development. And current trends, witnessed by such significant open source projects as Mozilla and Apache, seem to suggest that the open source way of doing things is quickly becoming the web way of doing things. However, there is a certain tension growing between those who would like to control, for economic profit or for the gratification of control itself, the direction of the web's development and those open source developers who are responsible for a large portion of that growth. This talk explores the natural relationship, as well as the growing tension within this relationship, between the open source development community and the World Wide Web.

BASIC CONCEPTS SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY
Chad Davis

Chad Davis is a J2EE developer, software consultant, and author of Struts 2 in Action. He has a wide background in writing that ranges from government research and public relations to academic writing in computer science. He, and his wife Mary, run Blackdog Software, Inc., a consulting firm that specializes in Java web applications.

OUR SPONSORS
Website Sponsor:
Homeland Security Careers
Food Sponsor:
Food provided by COMSYS
Door Prize Sponsors:
Jetbrains Software license (Several products to choose from)
SourceBeat Publishing PDF technical book
Atlassian Technical books or other Techno Prizes
OReilly Publishing technical book or two
COMSYS Additional door prizes