Alex is an SEO / SEM, Internet Marketer with a wide variety of work experience across industries and domains like Films, TV Production, Customer Service, Politics, Government Operations, Press Relations, Graphic & Web Design to finally Internet Marketing & SEO.
In the last few years he has been involved with the Indian WordPress Community which has helped him use WordPress for his clients at Ink my web better and also dabble with theme development (th3mes.com).
We have announced quite a lot of sessions till now. While we work on the exact schedule and confirm a few remaining sessions, here’s a summary/recap of all the sessions announced till date.
| Topic | Facilitator(s) | Language | Session Type | Useful for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Importing content from other systems into WordPress and WooCommerce | Akshaye Raje | Marathi and English | Lecture/Talk | Development, Administration |
| Unit Testing for WordPress | Sudar Muthu | English | Lecture/Talk | Development |
| An Introduction to the WordPress REST API | Gaurav Pareek | Hindi and English | Lecture/Talk | Development, Business |
| Local, Staging and Production Made Easy | Joe Guilmette | English | Lecture/Talk | Development |
| Let your site speak multilingual! | Bigul Malayi, Minesh Shah, Ankit Gade, Harshad Mane, Sumit Singh |
Marathi, Hindi and English | Workshop | Develpoment, Blogging, Administration |
| Growing from a Single Author Blog to a Multi-author Community | Arun Prabhudesai | English | Lecture/Talk | Blogging, Business |
| Automated Theme Development with Grunt | Sagar Jadhav | Marathi | Lecture/Talk | Development |
| Beyond the Blackboard: Building Education Products for South Asia | Mahangu Weerasinghe | English | Lecture/Talk | Business, Community |
| Theme Customisation | Puneet Sahalot | Hindi and English | Workshop | Development, Administration |
| HeroPress: Stories of Success | Topher DeRosia | English | Lecture/Talk | Community |
| WordPress JSON API | Priyanka Goyal | Hindi | Lecture/Talk | Development |
| Promote your WordPress Plugin or Theme | Shilpa Shah | English | Lecture/Talk | Business |
| How to Design Useful Websites | Jitesh Patil | Marathi and English | Lecture/Talk | Administration, Business |
| Podcasting with WordPress | Shrikant Joshi | English | Workshop | Blogging |
| Content Creation and Promotion in 2015 and beyond | Priya Florence Shah | English | Lecture/Talk | Blogging, Business |
| Careers in Development & Support with WordPress | Karthikraj Magapu, Jeremy Herve, Joshua Abenazer, Rahul Bansal, Gagan Deep Singh |
English | Panel Discussion | Business |
| User Experience best practices for a WordPress Blog | Siddharth Ashok | Hindi and English | QnA | Development, Administration, Business |
| Contributing to WordPress, the Project | Andy Christian | English | Lecture/Talk | Blogging, Business, Community |
| Contributing to WordPress, the Software | Sathish Nagarajan | English | Workshop | Development, Community |
| Building a Good Quality WordPress theme | Nisha Singh | Hindi | Workshop | Development |
Of the total 20 sessions as of now, there are 10 sessions related to development, 5 related to blogging, 5 related to administration, 8 related to business (including support) and 3 related to the community.
There are no more development related sessions to be announced. There’s more in store for blogging, business and the community. We have at least four very exciting speakers and sessions lined up that we will announce soon. In total, we still have to announce about 10 more sessions. Whether you are a blogger, developer or someone else, you’d find a lot of sessions in the list that’ll interest you!
There are 11 sessions in English, 2 in Marathi and English, 3 in Hindi and English, 2 exclusively in Hindi, 1 exclusively in Marathi and 1 in all the three languages. Like we had promised, you can go the whole day without attending a single session that’s exclusively in English!
There are 13 talks, 5 workshops, 1 QnA and 1 panel discussion. The discussions and workshops are longer in duration, so there’s more interaction time than plain listening!
So, how about making sure you don’t miss out on these and other awesome sessions by grabbing your tickets before we run out!
Nisha Singh is a Quality Analyst at WPoets Technology LLP. She is also a member of WordPress theme review team since 2010 and has reviewed more then 1300 tickets on WordPress theme trac.
If there’s someone who knows what makes a theme good or bad, it’s Nisha. She is also the best person to know if your theme would make it to the WordPress repository!
WordPress is an entrepreneur’s dream, both when they use it for their business and when they use it as their business. WordPress offers both a lucrative and an ethical business environment that new India needs desperately. That’s why we caught hold of six CEOs who use WordPress as or for their business and asked them three questions!
Arun We are a media network company that operates five different portals; all of them run on WordPress. So needless to say, it plays a pivotal role in our organisation. WordPress is the foundation on which we build our castles on!
Amit Since 2010, WPoets has been providing services and solutions exclusively around WordPress.
Premanshu We design and develop websites using WordPress as a CMS. As most of our clients are SMEs and MSMEs, using WordPress allows us to provide them with many features and be cost effective at the same time.
Preetinder WordPress is an important part of our service offerings in Design & Development of websites and applications to clients across the world. We have been using WordPress for about 7 years and have built several web applications, business directory solutions, college / university websites and personal blogs.
Rahul In a way the inception of rtCamp started thanks to WordPress. I started blogging on WordPress in 2007, developed first plugin in 2008, started one of the first WordPress-only consultancy company in 2009.
Year after year, WordPress has made it bigger and better for us. 🙂
Karthik A major part of our revenue comes from selling WP related products (themes, plugins) and services (support, hosting). We use WP based websites for almost everything in our company. Also, all of our inbound marketing leads are generated from blogs that are run on WP
Arun It is the extensibility of WordPress that appeals to us most. WordPress started as a blog platform, but today WordPress can be anything you want to it to be. It can be a community portal, a forum, an ecommerce site, a video site, a document management system or anything for that matter. When you couple this with a large passionate community, WordPress becomes a unbeatable proposition. That’s what we love about WordPress
Amit One of the primary reason is that it is the easiest CMS to work with, both for a user as well as a developer. Community support around the project is also very good compared to many other similar open source CMSes.
Premanshu One. You are kidding, Right ! The constant innovation, vast, helping community, huge number of contributors, the freedom to use/modify those contributions, ease of use, low learning curve for new users, built-in functionality to mange content… I can actually go on and on talking about why WordPress plays the central role in making our average business, a great business.
Preetinder The most important quality is its ease of use and its wide spread use among technical and non-technical users. This allows us to cut down our training time considerably, which otherwise we would have to spend on creating documentation and presentations on using any custom built system.
Other important factors are its vast and supportive user community and plugin ecosystem which easily allows you to find a plugin or theme for almost every use case / situation.
Rahul We never thought about it when we started with WordPress. I was a student in 2007 and started blogging with WordPress first. I loved the platform and just went on exploring it further. In fact I learned PHP and proper web development only after I started using WordPress.
But when I look back, I think I enjoyed being part of WordPress community. You never felt alone when working on WordPress.
So single most important quality of WordPress is the large and active community WordPress s!
Karthik Plugins and themes are available from thousands of premium providers. This brings down the cost of deploying solutions based on WP. Also, the large following and adoption by the developer, blogger and business communities creates a strong demand for WP based services and products!
Arun Yes, WordPress is growing and it will keep growing. The potential is immense!
Amit Absolutely! Popularity of WordPress is increasing day by day and WordPress already powers 23.3% of the top 10 million websites. WordPress is now being used more like a PHP framework, and that has opened the room for many more useful solutions.
Premanshu If I were doing business on any other platform, I would have said NO, because we don’t want competition 🙂 But that’s the beauty of WordPress! The more businesses start revolving around WordPress, the better it gets for us all. From profitability point of view, working with WordPress is highly recommended since there are a lot of resources already available and the ROI is great. So yes it is absolutely a good idea to start a new business with WordPress at its core.
Preetinder Yes, absolutely. Apart from the lucrative services business of creating and maintaining WordPress websites for clients, WordPress serves a good example of a great ecosystem for creating a product to support a niche or generic requirements. We have already seen several success stories of plugins, themes and complete businesses built around WordPress. WooCommerce, ElegantThemes, Appthemes, WPCurve are good case studies.
We, ourselves, are working on a new business idea around WordPress which is currently in beta/invite-only mode.
Rahul Of course, yes! WordPress powers every 4th site in the world. If you consider only the CMS market share, it’s every 2nd website.
This is a very large market to target, for both a product company or a consultancy!
Apart from typical product and consultancy companies, WordPress has specialised hosting, security and all kind of other focused businesses.
Karthik Yes, as with any business, it is good to start in a space where there is a strong demand. Right now there is very strong demand for WP products and services. For a small business, WP is a great place to start.
Though there is high demand, the barrier to entry is very low, so you have to quickly differentiate, else growth will be difficult. Once you find a niche to build presence in, there is a lot of potential to grow.
It’s unanimous then; it’s a great idea to start and run a business revolving around WordPress or at least a business that starts with WordPress. The demand is huge and the opportunity plenty. Also, the chief reason WordPress is so great for business is because it is backed by a great community (that is YOU, my friend).
So, if you have such plans you know who to say Hi to at WordCamp Pune (there are way more of them than the six here) for some business advice! You can also see this vibrant community in action and know what makes WordPress so special.
Arun and Karthik are speakers at WordCamp Pune, Premanshu is the most energetic organiser, and Amit and Rahul are both speakers and organisers and Preetinder is someone whose organisation has sent us great volunteers in great numbers. See the list of speakers and of organisers for a more detailed introduction.
Since Preetinder isn’t featured there. Here’s a brief introduction:
He has built his team and company around two popular open source systems WordPress & Drupal and is using & following WordPress / Drupal from about 9 years and can help you build almost anything using Open source software.
He believes passion and persistence are keys to success and everyone should follow their passion. When not working on new ideas / opportunities, he loves to spend time with his family and exploring new places.
Every Friday till August the 28th, we’ll carry a similar post featuring short interviews with six people working with WordPress with a common role, context or situation. 6 posts about 6 groups of 6 people each that you can meet on 6th Spetember at WordCamp Pune 2015!
In a series of posts, we lay bare our processes and list the tools that we use. For the sake of absolute transparency and so that other events may pick up a few, since we’ve already tried and tested them. We’ll be revealing the organiser selection, speaker selection and volunteer selection criteria and processes.
If you’ve read the previous transparency reports, some of this would be very obvious. Still, there were only two factors that we considered when we decided upon a speaker:
It is easier to speak on a stage to an audience than interact with the audience and facilitate the transfer of knowledge from you (or someone else) to the audience and use the feedback and cues to mould your session to what works and not a pre-decided and rehearsed speech.
We did not select a lot of great speakers because we found the interaction lacking. We selected some whose language or presentation skills or even speech delivery wasn’t that great but they were very interactive and hence were way more interesting!
There are two choices that we faced sometimes when selecting a speaker. Should we select an expert who’s not a good speaker or should we select a good speaker who’s probably not an expert but has decent enough knowledge.
WordCamp after WordCamp we’ve learnt that there are enough experts in the audience who are more than ready to participate and help both the speaker and the rest of the audience with their knowledge.
So, we decided to have great speakers on stage instead of experts. Luckily, almost all of our speakers are also experts on the topics they are dealing with. So it worked out automatically most of the times.
There were other secondary factors that were also considered but the first two took absolute precedence.
Some topics can only be dealt with in a lecture or talk while others can be taken in a workshop, QnA or any such interactive format. Speakers who were excited about such changes were given priority over speakers who would rather give a speech!
We didn’t approve a single speaker who we haven’t seen or heard speaking before. We asked for previous videos from those who we hadn’t heard in a previous conference.
We asked those who didn’t have such videos to record videos for us to consider. Some of them even held demo sessions in their workplace that they recorded and sent across. Some others came down in person in our meetups to deliver their sessions.
In the end, we based our decisions on our own experience and the audience’s reaction.
In our communication with speakers, sooner or later it became very clear that some speakers wanted special VIP treatment or wanted to speak to become famous.
A special quality of such applicants is extensive name dropping and excessive communication about who they are and where have they spoken rather than what they are going to speak about. As soon as we realised this, we put them on the dicey list. They were also interested in discussing the publicity options more than the actual content of their talks.
Which is why probably, none of them actually had any well thought of and interesting topics or well structured, well planned content of good quality. It doesn’t mean that you will not find an exception of someone with great content but lousy intentions. If we had met such an applicant, we might have accepted them due to our first criteria. You can make your own choice.
We included two questions in our application form. One was about the Magic Number 7 and other was about Chunking. Both the concepts deal with our working memories where information is stored in the run time before turning it over to short term or long term memory for storage.
The theory of magic number seven says that our working memories can only hold seven instances or chunks of information at a time. It varies by +/- 2 in individuals. So the maximum information everyone can gather in their working memory is about five chunks! Anything more than that would be useless as it will overflow and be lost.
So, if you provide 9 pieces of information, 2 will be lost for some and 4 for some more. That’s why, a 10 digit phone number can’t be remembered together: 9224198765.
However, by bundling multiple pieces of information into chunks, one could place more things in the working memory. For eg, the number above can be presented as 922 419 8765. Now there are just 3 chunks instead of 10 and it is easier to process! That’s why numbers are written in chunks.
We were looking for speakers who understood this, so as to structure their presentations into 3-5 chunks/ points and at the most 3-5 sub-points. The topic’s introduction and conclusion themselves form 2 chunks!
Almost everyone is aware of the pride associated with contributing to the WordPress project. Those who do contribute will also tell you how amazing it feels to be able to give back, even if a little, to the community that is the scaffold for our careers and businesses.
If you were wondering how you could be one of those contributors, you need not be a developer or programmer and you need not just contribute to the code. There are many ways of contributing and each of them is recognised with a nice little badge on your WordPress.org profile. For eg, see Samuel Wood (Otto)‘s profile:
Or even our own Gagan Deep Singh‘s profile. Aren’t we proud of these two!
The weekend after the WordCamp (12th September), we’re hosting a Contributor’s Day. You can join us in an attempt to put the knowledge we gain from Andy and Sathish to good use, by contributing as much as we can to the project in one whole day!
To make our lives easier, Siddharth Ashok is going to answer all your questions in a QnA session on User Experience best practices for WordPress Blog. You can ask your questions beforehand as well using #WCPuneUX on Facebook and Twitter.
He is a Front-End and WordPress developer working with the Swedish web agency Next Big Thing and lives in Panaji, Goa.
He’s been using WordPress for almost a decade and has followed its journey from being just a blogging platform to CMS. Along with WordPress, he’s deeply interested in questions like ‘What makes good User Experience?’ and ‘What constitutes good design?’, and likes to play around with User Interaction components and the interaction itself.
He loves Open Source and tries as much as he can to contribute to the community. Find him on twitter @siddharthashok
Remote working looks like an exciting life in pyjamas! Since WordCamp Pune has a lot of remote workers involved with it in various roles, we got six of them to give us some insight into the whole work-from-home scenario. We asked all six the same questions:
Joe Working remotely is one of my highest priorities when considering work.
First, the freedom is incredible. With remote work I can travel and see the world and my family and friends while continuing to work. It helps me clock quite a few hours a week and still feel like I’m always on vacation.
Second, this allows me to take advantage of exchange rates and differences in cost of living to get more out of my paycheck. This is a free earnings multiplier that affords me a lifestyle out of reach if I were to be living in the places where my employers are based.
Finally, you’re no longer limited to your local job market. You can apply for and seek jobs in countries all over the world, even piecing together part time work from different continents.
Sudar Remote working has become an integral part of my life and is very important for me. Remote working gives me the freedom to choose where, when and how I work.
Akshay Personally, remote working provides all the necessary flexibility to organize work based on your priorities. Other benefit of a remote organization as compared to traditional brick and mortar offices is cross timezone availability. We are a global team of 3-4 people across contrasting timezones and hence at are able to complement each other’s availability very well working remotely. This is quite difficult to achieve otherwise.
Umesh No more commuting in early morning traffic, better Pay Scale, more work responsibility, flexible work hours which further leads to better productivity, flexible leave policy.
Joshua Remote working is great. It gives you control over your work schedule, the way you work, and the environment that you work in.
Harshad Where you are located is of little importance in today’s connected workplace as long as you fit into the overall scheme of things at the company and contribute effectively to the brand’s growth.
It’s always been a dream of mine to set my own schedule, and working from home gives me the perfect opportunity to do just that. The only commute I worry about is the small walk from my bed to the computer desk and I consider that to be awesome. Your home is powerful in the fact that it’s a familiar place where you can shut the door and really focus. Also, working from home gives you the opportunity to step away and clear your mind with other activities when necessary. Just don’t get distracted!
Joe My answer to the last question covers this, I guess.
Sudar The single most important benefit for me is that I get to spent more time with my family, especially with my 2 year old son. Apart from that I don’t have to waste time in traffic and “wear pants” 😉
Akshay Same as the last answer of mine.
Umesh I can pursue my hobbies, as the work time is flexible. Like, I’ve been going for hiking, more frequently and I plan to indulge more in it.
Joshua It allows you to do things you love, more often, without the need to take a break from work. This keeps you a lot more happier and in turn makes you a lot more productive.
Harshad I highly recommend working remotely; it gives you so much freedom to manage your time. It doesn’t just offer benefits, you earn more money than in your country, you manage your time efficiently, you save money, and the most important of all, you get to spend time with your loved ones.
Joe The hard part is developing a routine and to finding a place conducive to productivity. Everyone is different – for me, I love working in cafes. I can’t work effectively at home and I dislike coworking spaces. I know others who work remotely that prefer working from home or coworking spaces.
The key is to experiment and find what works for you.
Sudar In the beginning it may be slightly difficult, especially when people might assume that you are free when you are at home. But once you set the proper expectations with your family and people around, it would become easy. Also once you are used to remote working it is like taking the “red pill”. There is no going back 🙂
Akshay I would not be able to comment on this as I part time remote along with my regular job. Not really a major switch for me.
Umesh It isn’t. It does takes around a month or so, to get used to the work schedule, you don’t have to wake up early and get ready for office, and since you are not staying with family, you’ve to make food arrangements and there are few other needs, which you’ve to take care of.
But sooner, if the schedule is not strict, maintaining the flow gets tougher, specially if you are staying at same place 24 * 7 for work and everything else.
The most important need I feel personally is, you need to keep in touch with people you know already, and keep looking for ways to meet new people as there is no workplace anymore.
Keeping the pace and all things together is more important than the initial switch.
Joshua At first it does seem a bit difficult to stay focussed and disciplined, but eventually you get used to it and start enjoying the benefits it has to offer.
Harshad Once you decide to change the way you work and don’t go to an office anymore, you have to organize your time and activities carefully, If you organize your time and activities carefully, I don’t think it would be much difficult to fit yourself in the remote work model.
So it looks like, remote working has a couple of hiccups when you start out. Howver, if you focus a bit and get a hang of what works for you, remote working seems to be most attractive, lucrative option available! All six of them have described the freedom with such glee, we guess remoe working is an option you must consider! Catch hold of a remote worker at WordCamp Pune (there are way more of them than the six here) and find out if it can interest you!
Joe, Sudar, Akshay and Harshad are all speakers at WordCamp Pune, Joshua is both a speaker and an organiser and Umesh is an organiser. See the list of speakers and of organisers for a more detailed introduction.
Every Friday till August the 28th, we’ll carry a similar post featuring short interviews with six people working with WordPress with a common role, context or situation. 6 posts about 6 groups of 6 people each that you can meet on 6th Spetember at WordCamp Pune 2015!
Do you know how you can build a highly successful and lucrative career building and supporting WordPress and it’s plugins and themes besides building websites with it? Do you wish that an expert guided you to a great career in development and support? Then you would be at the right place at WordCamp Pune. We have six experts from around the country and the world in a Panel Discussion on Careers in Support and Development with WordPress!
Expect a breadth and depth of information, knowledge and advice. Ask your questions and raise your concerns. Our expert panel will get you the insight you are looking for.
Developer, Stack Exchange hero, Remote worker, 10up
and many other experts in the audience right beside you! Read more about our panelists on the speakers’ page.
When we just started thinking of having a WordCamp in Pune, the first thing we decided on was that we should have a session on career prospects with WordPress by an expert.
Then we thought, why have one expert when we can have a whole lot! They could also guide, advise and answer questions from the members in the audience. Make sure you’re there to benefit from it by getting tickets before they are sold out!
Priya Florence Shah has been an online publisher since 2001 and an active blogger since 2003. When WordPress emerged as an open-source CMS, she became a passionate advocate for using WordPress as a blogging and publishing platform. As Founder and CEO of Blog Brandz, she uses the power of blogs and social media to help her clients build communities and nurture loyal customers online.
As an online publisher, with a passion for blogging, content and social media marketing, she publishes Naaree.com™, an online magazine for career and business women in India. She is also a published author on Amazon.com and Flipkart.com.
To listen to and interact with Priya and other awesome speakers and facilitators, get your WordCamp tickets fast. They’re going steadily and may just run out before you notice.
WordCamp Pune 2015 is over. Check out the next edition!
