Author: Hugh

Sign up to use your skills for charity

24 May 2017Community, do_action, Events Leave a comment

We’re very excited to announce that sign-ups are now open for our fourth annual do_action WordPress Charity Hackathon! We have a great selection of 10 non-profits that we will be working with and we are looking for participants from the local community to work on their brand new sites.

All skill sets are needed!

As always, we’re looking for Social Media Managers, Content Managers, Project Managers, Designers, Developers, and Quality Assurance Testers for each of the teams, so if you have any experience managing websites in any capacity then you can participate!

The sooner you get your name in the better as these spots do tend to fill up fast – we already have half of the spots filled 🙂

This year we’re working with the following organisations:

  • The Homestead Projects for Street Children
  • Durbanville Children’s Home
  • Kidz Adventure Camp
  • Iliso Care Society
  • ASSITEJ South Africa
  • Usiko Stellenbosch
  • Daughters Of Destiny
  • Rotary Club of Constantia
  • Little Lambs Christian Day Care
  • Tygerberg Association for Persons with Physical Disabilities

When you sign up you can select which charity you would like to work with and what your role on the team will be.

What is do_action?

In case you haven’t heard about it before, do_action is a charity hackathon that uses WordPress to uplift local communities. The hackathons are community-organised events that are focussed on using WordPress to give deserving charitable organisations their own online presence. Each do_action event includes participants from the local WordPress community coming together to plan and build brand new websites for a number of local organisations in one day.

We first started do_action in 2014 in Cape Town and, in the last year or so, it has grown into a global movement with events starting up all over the world.

I’m really looking forward to working with many of at this event once again!

Meetup: ReactJS & WordPress

19 January 2017Community, Meetups, , 1 Comment

This is a joint event with the Cape Town Front-end Developers meetup group – you can RSVP on their event.

For the first meetup of 2017, we will be joining up with the Cape Town Front-end Developers meetup group to talk about ReactJS and how you can use it with WordPress.

The meetup will be held at the Media24 building (14th floor) on Wednesday, 1 February – it will start at 18:30 with the talk starting at 19:00. Food and drinks will be available, so come along and have a good time with the WordPress and Front-end Developers communities. This event is fully sponsored by Media24.

RSVP on the event here (also includes further venue details and such).

About the talk

ReactJS is the new kid on the block and WordPress has stood the test of time. This talk will cover how easily you can introduce ReactJS within an existing WordPress site. We will talk about React tooling (Webpack and Babel) and how to setup a modern JS workflow for development. Last we will talk about how you can package your code for production using Preact.

The talk is for anyone interested in ReactJS and how to get started.

About the speaker

Kurt Farao (Car Brochure, @kingramsi) is a Fullstack JS developer at Liquid Thought. His current Front-end stack is React. He also dabbles in MongoDB and NodeJS from time to time. When away from his keyboard, you’ll find him battling his best time at your local racetrack.

Meetup: Let’s talk about code quality!

9 December 2016Announcements, Meetups 1 Comment

On Tuesday, 13 December (this coming Tuesday) we’re hosting our final meetup for 2016. We will be gathering at Hint Hunt at 18:30 to hang out as a community and hear from Thierry Muller who will be talking about code quality and why it matters for businesses as well as for developers.

You can find out all of the info on the meetup event page.

As always, the event will include snacks and soft drinks – we will not be serving alcohol in order to be as inclusive as possible for the diverse community of Cape Town.

Thanks to WooCommerce for sponsoring this event!

WordCamp Cape Town 2016 session videos

24 November 2016WordCamp 1 Comment

In September this year, we all came together to improve our WordPress skills, build some community spirit, and just generally have a great time at WordCamp Cape Town 2016. One of the things we promised at the event was that all of the day 2 sessions would be recorded and the videos published online for everyone to watch, rewatch and appreciate.

Well now, thanks to the tireless work of the WordPress TV volunteer team, all of the sessions from day 2 are available on WordPress.tv! We didn’t record the workshops because they’re just a bit too impractical to film and watching a video of a workshop isn’t really all the beneficial as you need to really be there to take part. Sessions are different of course as they don’t require active participation on your part.

So, go forth and enjoy all of the talks from WordCamp Cape Town 2016 right here!

Community co-working #coworkpress

22 November 2016Community 1 Comment

As a local WordPress community we have an opportunity to connect with each other in a way that we can never really connect with those outside of Cape Town. To foster those connections and to give us space to become a more close-knit community of WordPress users, we’re going to be getting together as a community on the last Wednesday of every month to simply work alongside each other – otherwise known as ‘co-working’ (hence the incredibly clever hashtag #coworkpress).

These days will be informal and we will meet at a different location each month – each location is more than likely going to be a coffee shop, but we have no set rules on the type of place at which we’ll meet. We will not ‘plan’ these days in the sense that we will not be booking a table or anything – it’s more of a relaxed Capetonian day of working alongside each other with good coffee and good food.

You can arrive at any time during the day and leave at any time during the day – there’s no pressure to stay for any length of time other than that which your job allows and what you’re in the mood for. It’s also worth noting that these are not sponsored days – anything you eat or drink will be on your own tab.

Given that we will be changing the venue each month, you will need to follow our meetup group for details on where we will be each time.

The upcoming co-working day will be on Wednesday, 30 November at Tribe Coffee in Woodstock. On the day, we will collectively decide what venue we will use for the following meeting – obviously noting that we will not be doing this in December as it will be year-end holidays and this is Cape Town after all.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

#coworkpress

Global WordPress Translation Day – 12 November 2016

8 November 2016Announcements, Events Leave a comment

The Global WordPress Translation Day is 1 full day (24 hours) dedicated to bringing WordPress to more people around the world. It includes 24 hours of live training sessions on WordPress internationalisation & localisation as well as communities getting together to translate WordPress into their local languages. You can find out more on the Global WordPress Translation Day website.

For the Cape Town event on this day, we will be joining together to watch the live training sessions as well as work on translating WordPress into our local languages. The schedule for the live training sessions is on the Translation Day site, so you can see what to expect there.

If you would like to join us for the event, then please RSVP on the event page!

The details for our local event are:

Date: Saturday, 12 November
Time: 11:00 – 16:00
Venue: The Business Centre – No 1 Bridgeway Road, Bridgeways Precinct, Century City

If you can only attend for part of the event, then that’s not a problem – come when you can and join in the fun. If you can’t make it at all, but you would still like to take part then you can do that too! All you need to do is join our local Slack group here and head into the #localisation channel – that’s where all the translating discussion will be happening.

Translating WordPress is super easy to do! You don’t need any technical knowledge to get involved – all you need is some mild proficiency in any non-English language and you’ll be able to help out.

The only local South African languages that WordPress is able to be translated into at the moment are South African English and Afrikaans. If you would like to start translating WordPress into a different language (that does not appear on this page) then please comment on here with the language name as well as your username for WordPress.org ASAP, so we can get the Polyglots team to add your requested language to that list before the day starts. This is very important, otherwise you may not be able to work on translating WordPress into your language on the day.

I can’t personally make it on Saturday, but Jon Bossenger will be there to make sure everything runs smoothly. It’s going to be a great event!

#WPTranslationDay

Back to Basics

7 November 2016Announcements, Community 1 Comment

This blog has been somewhat neglected of late and that’s largely because we just haven’t been putting in the time into it that we should be. To some degree, the same can be said for our local meetup group – while we (the organising team) have endeavoured to organise regular events for the community, we have fallen far short of what we intended. This is steadily changing though as more people are getting involved in assisting with event organising – a fact that make me exceptionally excited.

So, from here on out you will start to see more activity on this blog (now that it is living at it’s new home on WordPress.com) and we will be pushing for more local events as well. Keep an eye out on the blog for some announcements real soon, as well as some new ways that you can get involved in the local community. You can follow the blog via email from the form in the footer.

WordPress is all about community and we only work if more people get involved in making it happen – the more that everyone helps out, the more effective we can be.

I’m looking forward to pushing this community further, together!

Charity Hackathon Recap: Video & Photos

5 September 2014do_action, Press Leave a comment

[box]This post originally appeared on WooThemes.com – head over there to leave a comment.[/box]

Since we posted a wrap up post about the first do_action( ‘wordpress-charity-hackathon’ ), we have heard from a number of people all over the world who are interested in replicating the idea in their own cities. We will soon have a greater resource online that will assist people with getting their own do_action events going, but in the mean time you can get a pretty good idea of how it all worked from the video and photos taken at the event.

If you were at the event then go ahead and tag yourself in the Facebook album (embedded below). Read More…