Category: Updates

Everybody knows Topher in Pune, thanks to the HeroPress project and a very popular campaign to fund his trip to this WordCamp. A lot of known members of the local and global communities, including Matt Mullenweg saw the value of his coming here and funded him so he could talk to us about HeroPress: Stories of Success.

His full name is Christopher DeRosia; Topher comes from the second half of Christopher. He started building web sites with plain html on a VAX VMS system in 1994 but switched to PHP/FI when it came out. He was using plain PHP/MySQL until 2010 when WordPress 3.0 came out with Custom Post Types. Since then, he hasn’t really built with anything else. He’s been a freelancer, the CTO of a Startup, a super hero with X-Team, and now documents Easy Digital Downloads.

He’s married, has 2 teen daughters and two cute little dogs. He lives in the small city of Grand Rapids MI, where it rarely gets above 30C, but occasionally gets below -30C. It’s a very snowy world in the winter.

Here’s an old but interesting list of 25 random things about him.

We really feel blessed to have received great response to both our call for Volunteers and Volunteer Photographers. Thank you to all of those who applied. This community loves you and loves your intent.

Thanks to your overwhelming response, we’re now closing the call for Volunteer Photographers, as well. We’ve already closed the call for volunteers. We’ll be introducing everyone to the short-listed volunteers, asap.

We are now looking for are speakers to provide content and we are doing that for just two more days. Apply before it’s too late!

We’re also looking for bloggers to showcase their blogs and developers to showcase their products in lightning talks.

If you were at WordCamp Mumbai, there’s no chance that you escaped being mesmerised by Mahangu’s presentation skills. He’s coming to Pune to discuss Beyond the Blackboard: Building Education Products for South Asia. Whether you are an educator, learner, interested in the social and economic impact of education or education is just your business, he’ll help you see WordPress in a new light, as a simple but powerful educational tool!

Hailing from Colombo, Sri Lanka, Mahangu first found WordPress when he stumbled upon 0.70 in the dark recesses of #wordpress on Freenode. He has used and provided support for every major release of the software, and is excited about the impact the platform can have on South Asia.

Though once a high school English teacher, his desire to make online publishing more democratic led him to Automattic, where he now works as a Happiness Engineer. He sincerely believes that stellar support will play a pivotal role in helping WordPress power the next 24% of the web!

Puneet is a WordCamp veteran, having participated and spoken at almost every WordCamp held till date. Very enthusiastic about WordPress evangelism and spreading his knowledge, he frequently conducts training sessions and Workshops for beginners. At WordCamp Pune, Puneet conducts a Workshop on Theme Customisation for developers (beginners) and non-developers (advanced users). You’d learn how to change the look and feel of a WordPres website without any specialised coding chops.

Puneet’s first encounter with WordPress was when he started blogging at a then popular social media blog.  Later he started with WordPress development, co-founded a city blog which received great response and became the most popular of all the local blogs.

After more than 5 years of freelancing, he now runs a web design and development agency where all their web projects are proudly powered by WordPress. In between, he tried hands at building and selling WordPress themes and WP maintenance services. These were fairly successful however their main success was in helping him lay a strong foundation for his agency.