Author Archives: Aditya Kane

About Aditya Kane

I believe that the core tenets of open-source culture and philosophy should make their way into education, politics, law, economics and more.

Find yourself “WP Helpers” at WordCamp Mumbai

Often at a WordCamp you are confused whom to ask for help or how to ask for help about WordPress. Sometimes because there are many experts, some might feel their questions are too basic or too simple to be asked, some might just be shy to ask questions at a Q &A part of the speaker’s session.

This is why we are introducing WP Helpers at the WordCamp.

What are WP Helpers?

Many times you want some WordPress help on a one on one basis from an expert who has used WordPress for a long time. So people who are volunteering for helping out people with their WordPress queries at the WordCamp are called WP Helpers. 🙂

How to find WP Helpers at WordCamp Mumbai?

There are many experts at this WordCamp. Many of them are our speakers and also a lot of people who work on WordPress for a living. We will be co-ordinating various experts at the venue. Just ask any of the volunteers or the designated co-ordinator for help and they will answer your questions themselves or find someone who can.

How do I become a WP Helper?

When you register in the morning, just mention how you use WordPress and would like to be an WP Helper. We already have a co-ordinator who will handle and get the right queries to you.

Make some noise with #WCMumbai

The WordCamp is back in Mumbai. In just over a week from now on 7th and 8th March, WordCamp will get underway. The volunteer team has worked out details like WiFi, the menu for lunch on both days.

A lot of people who are attending WordCamp Mumbai, we really only interact with them online most times. One of the best way to get in touch with WordCamp activities is through various social channels.

#WCMumbai

Here is a list of all the social media pages we will be using:

Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Let’s make some noise as we enter the last week before WordCamp. Get our attention by using the hashtag #WCMumbai.

Something to remember!

Be respectful. We have a Code of Conduct to WordCamp Mumbai. This is to keep the engagement interesting, informal and fun but not disrespectful, discriminatory or hateful.

And since its just eight days left, go ahead and register for WordCamp Mumbai

Introducing Sponsor – WPEka Club (Bronze)

We would like to introduce WPEka Club which is a Bronze Sponsor at WordCamp Mumbai 2015. WPEka Club answered our “Call for Sponsors” and came on board as Bronze Sponsor to support the WordCamp in Mumbai.

WPEka Club Final Logo

WPEka Club is brought to you by a group of WordPress fanatics from India. It’s a premium WordPress themes and plugins store and has 35 themes and 49 plugins on offer right now. A new product gets released every week. Their plugins cover surveys, legal pages, advertisements, listings, backup, affiliates and more. You can find AdSense, corporate, directory, eCommerce, magazine and many more themes in their pack.

WPEka Club members enjoy premium support and exclusive gifts and discounts for products / services that help them make the most of their WordPress websites.

You can browse their full collection on their site and join them on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Introducing Sponsor – WPML (WordCamp Accomplice)

We would like to introduce WPML which is a WordCamp Accomplice at WordCamp Mumbai 2015 and part of the WordCamp’s Multi-event Sponsor program supporting many other WordCamps like ours.

WPMLSponsorsPageLogo

WPML turns WordPress websites multilingual. It works with caching, SEO and E-Commerce plugins, and allows the building of complete multilingual sites. WPML powers simple blogs as well as corporate and enterprise sites.

WPML allows users to translate everything in the site, including content, menus, widgets and even theme and plugin texts. WPML powers over 400,000 commercial websites from all over the world.

More information about going multilingual can be found at WPML.org

Our Last List of Confirmed Speakers!

We announced three lists of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2015. Today, I am announcing the final list of speakers.

Here are the seven we are proud to announce.

Roshnikumar Yambem

Roshnikumar is an open-source fundamentalist. He is the founder of Globizs Web Solutions Pvt Ltd
which has been developing websites on WordPress since 2006. They have developed more than 200 WordPress websites along with a few dozen websites for Government of Manipur.

Speaker Session: WordPress Security – OWASP TOP 10 Protection

Akshay Raje

Akshay discovered WordPress in 2008 and has been in love with it since then. He started moonlighting on small client projects and custom plugin development. He subsequently tried to bootstrap a WordPress services firm just to discover that services is not something that he wants to do for a living.

By day, Akshay is a Human Resources professional and heads HR at the India office of Fab.com

Currently he occasionally freelances on interesting WordPresss projects and supports a couple of WordPress plugins authored by him. He aspires to build a successful WordPress product company some day.

Speaker Session: Embedding and consuming external content in WordPress: Requests, Caching, Parsing

Ramya Pandyan

IdeaSmith is the digital doppelgänger of Ramya Pandyan (middle-class Mumbaikar, intrepid train-traveller). As IdeaSmith, she battles obscurity, slays boredom and keeps a lot of people entertained with her stories about Mumbai, men, books and life at large. She blogs, tweets, Insta’s, FB’s, +G’s and Goodreads.

Her verbal performances air at The Idea-smithy and XX Factor. Tweet-bomb her at @ideasmithy.

Speaker Session: The Content Creator’s Life – Challenges, Motivations, Concerns

Raj Mehta

Raj Mehta is an 18-year-old blogger and designer, who is going through the throes of formal education. He got into web design when he was 15 and has never looked back since.

He blogs at “Raj himself“ about his experiences. When not attending college or working, he spends his time playing the keyboard and hanging out with smart folks.

Speaker Session: Typography for WordPress

Jatin Hariani

Born and raised in Mumbai, Jatin Hariani is a developer and designer with 4 years of experience under his belt. From major web applications to simple corporate websites, WordPress has been a major building block in most of the projects he has worked on.

He tweets about WordPress, Web Development in general and a bunch or random things at @JatinHariani.

Speaker Session: Simple WordPress Troubleshooting

Krishna Mehta

Krishna (aka Adaire) is a 17 year old from Mumbai who blogs at Ink on Pixels. She has been taken part in NaNoWriMo 2014 and is a national level TSEC 2014 debator. She has also written a novel.

Speaker Session: WordPress and the Youth!

Vishal Kothari

Vishal Kothari has been working with WordPress for the last 3 years. He is the founder of Tyche Softwares, a company that develops WordPress plugins. Vishal has been working with PHP since last 14 years.

Speaker Session: WordPress Settings API – Settings, Sections & Fields

Hope you are happy with our finalized list of speakers. You can view the entire list here.

So join us for WordCamp Mumbai, tickets are available!

WordCamp Mumbai Tickets are Available!

A couple of days ago, we made our tickets available. Though we shared this information on our social media channels, we have waited for a couple of days to announce it via a blog post. Mainly, we has a few glitches to iron out and more importantly we had not released the final list of speakers for WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

wordcamp-tickets

We think it is important that you see who is speaking and what they are speaking about at WordCamp before you buy a ticket. 🙂

So you can see all the speakers, check out who else are attending and then buy your ticket.

The ticket price is INR 500/- only and is non-refundable. We are not rolling out any discounts but some of our volunteers, organizers, speakers and sponsors get a free ticket.

Visit https://2015.mumbai.wordcamp.org/tickets/ and book your tickets.

Credits

Thanks to Vachan Kudmule our ticket wrangler and long time WordCamp Mumbai organizer/volunteer. He has written a Camptix plugin that makes it possible for us to process ticket payments from the WordCamp website itself. This plugin can be used by other WordCamps in India using INR currency. So it is good karma for community.

Also special thanks to Ian Dunn for helping us get this plugin working on this website.

Link: Tickets

Our Third List of Confirmed Speakers

We are announcing a third list of speakers today!

Karthik Magapu

Karthik is Co-Founder and Chief Explorer of Hummingbird Web Solutions, which builds and supports products for Web developers and Web Designers. WordPress is a big part of what Hummingbird does – WPeka

He also teaches Yoga, enjoys solving variants of the Rubik’s Cube and loves Open Source.

Speaker Session: The Philosophy that drives WordPress

Bigul Malayi

Bigul is from Kozhikode, Kerala. He started his career as PHP developer in 2005. In 2008 he came across WordPress and from 2009 onwards started to develop websites in WordPress for clients.
Since 2012 January he works as a QA Analyst in OnTheGo Systems (The makers of WPML, WCML, Views, Types, CRED and Layout).

In short WordPress is his bread and butter for last 6 years 🙂

Speaker Session: Translate WordPress to Your Language

Joel Bronkowski

After living in the same 10km for the first 23 years of his life, Joel Bronkowski decided to take on a new adventure and help launch a non-profit in Cape Town, South Africa.

Towing the line most of his life between non profit and the business world Joel is now enjoying the entrepreneurial challenge of pioneering WooCommerce partnerships with global ecommerce services and the developer community.

He is currently working nomadically in 2015 following his wife around the world as she gets experience in the field of museum studies.

Speaker Session: Empowering global ecommerce: a look into the value of open source ecommerce, globalized product strategy and localization.

Mahangu Weerasinghe

Hailing from Colombo, Sri Lanka, Mahangu first found WordPress when he stumbled upon 0.70 in the dark recesses of #wordpress on Freenode. Since then, he has provided support for every
major release of the software.

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 23% of the web!

Speaker Session: Teaching Happiness: What WordPress Support Can Learn From
the Classroom

We will be announcing a few more local speakers in the 4th and final list of confirmed speakers. We are also in the process of making tickets available inside a week.

Link: List of Confirmed Speakers

Second List of Confirmed Speakers

Last week we had announced four speakers in our first list of speakers. Now its time to announce the next four speakers who have confirmed participation at WordCamp Mumbai 2015.

Gaurav Pareek

A free software fundamentalist and an avid GNU/Linux advocate, Gaurav started his WordPress journey in 2010. He ran a successful design agency from 2009 to 2014, and built more than a hundred websites using WordPress.

Currently, he works as a Senior Software Developer at Digital Vidya and learns things about digital marketing.

Speaker Session: Better WordPress development with Vagrant

Prasad Ajinkya

Prasad Ajinkya loves to tinker with all things web. He is a co-founder at 13 Llama Studio and works with organizations to solve their business problems through technology.

Speaker Session: WordPress for the Enterprise

Faishal Sayed

Faishal has been in the world of WordPress since past 4 years, and since then has had a great time. WordPress is his hobby, passion and a big part of his profession. He has been contributing to WordPress core along with the handful of plugins released on the official repository.

He is currently working as a Web Engineer at 10up playing full time with WordPress.

Speaker Session: Best Practices for WordPress Development

Bryce Adams

Bryce is a WooCommerce Ninja at WooThemes, who has spent the last several years travelling around South East Asia while developing WordPress plugins and recently handling WooCommerce support. He’s currently based in Bangkok, Thailand and blogs over on bryceadams.com, talking about nomad life.

Speaker Session: The Settings Experience – Why It Sucks

Hope you are happy with our Speaker List so far. We will announce a few more in a couple of days. 🙂

Link: List of Confirmed Speakers

Last Call for Speakers! [Closing 25th Jan 2015]

Note: Speaker Applications are now closed.

We are closing the “Call for Speakers” form on the 25th of January, 2015. We increased the timeframe by a further ten days to allow more local applicants to apply.

So if you think you can talk about WordPress to a bunch of WordPress enthusiasts, do apply. If you know someone who can speak, tell them to apply fast!

What happens after 25th January 2015?

We are already in the process of finalizing some speakers and announcing them on the site. All applications will are being jointly handled by a “speaker review team”.

Based on feedback we got from our local meetups and community at large, we will announce a complete and final list of speakers and sessions.

Hopefully by the end of this month itself, we should roll out ticket sales and you will be able to decide better more or less all speakers being listed.

Then through first ten days of February, we are hoping to announce a complete schedule.

Link: Call of Speaker – Application Form