September WordPress Meetup: Child Themes and Vagrant

Amazing lightning talks last month. Thanks everyone for coming out and speaking. For this meetup we'll be doing a slightly different format from our usual "two speaker" meetup.

We recognize that there's a wide range of skill set among our meetup group. So from now on, any time we have a "two speaker" meetup, we'll try to have one talk geared more to a beginner audience, and one geared to a more advanced audience.

For our beginner talk, we'll have Courtney (one of the organizers of the WPDC group) discussing WordPress child themes.

For our advanced talk, we'll have Nicholas Cerminara who will be doing a longer version of his local WordPress development with Vagrant lightning talk.

Speaker bios and more detailed talk descriptions below.

WELCOME TO WORDPRESS! USE A CHILD THEME! by Courtney O'Callaghan

Ready to edit the theme you picked? Don't know what a child theme is? Want to know how to make one? Let's learn child themes.

Who I am ... professional listener, amateur teacher, vegetarian mom, animal caretaker, people watcher, culture enthusiast, off-hours feminist, book hoarder, designer/coder/other, Chief Digital Officer at Freer and Sackler Galleries, CA native, proud DC resident in search of an ocean.

Developing WordPress Locally with Vagrant

Nicholas Cerminara, creator of web blog Scotch.io (https://scotch.io/) and its creative agency arm Scotch Digital (https://digital.scotch.io), will demo how to setup a local LAMP environment with PHP 5.6 by using Vagrant and Scotch Box (https://box.scotch.io & https://github.com/scotch-io/scotch-box). This is a continuation of his lightning talk from our last Meetup and will cover the concepts from that talk in greater depth.

This talk is intended for all skill-levels and will be a great introduction for beginners to the command-line, Vagrant, and development best practices.

Nick's talk will cover common and older techniques for developing locally, and the many benefits Vagrant has over these. He'll also discuss best practices between developing locally while collaborating with others and touch base on what's ideal versus pragmatic for a business when moving WordPress code and databases to staging and production environments.

We'll wrap up with a live demo and walk-through of how to use Vagrant. Here you'll learn how to use Vagrant for the first time, manage multiple projects at once, access your databases locally, and much, much more.

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As always, venue and food/drink is sponsored by CHIEF (http://agencychief.com).