Category: Events

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!

WordPress Global Translation Day recap

14 November 2016Community, Events, Meetups 5 Comments

Saturday 12 November 2016 was the second WordPress Global Translation Day. It was my first event, not only as translator but also as co-event host. I was a little nervous as I would also mostly be meeting the attendees for the first time, so I had no idea how things would go down.

Fortunately the WordPress community is a great place, and this is because of the people in it. From the moment the first attendee arrived to when we eventually packed up for the day we had a blast, translating WordPress into our chosen languages, telling stories, cracking jokes and just generally having a good time.

Attendees included (from left to right in the picture above) Shabier, Wesley, Rosy, Sello and myself. Wesley, who submitted the locale request with the help of Trisha from the Johannesburg meetup group, was also translating Xhosa for WordPress for the first time. Not only that but Rosy started working on Sotho and Sello on Setswana. By the end of the day we had two translation files for these languages that we’ll be looking to submit requests to be added as locales for WordPress. We’re almost halfway towards adding all 11 official languages, just in one day.

At around 12pm we had the opportunity to share the live stream with Petya Raykovska (the WordPress Polyglots team lead) and the team from Johannesburg, led by Trisha. We had a few feedback/echoing issues but it was good fun to be able to share our story with the translation teams around the world. It was also pretty amazing to see all the other teams from Europe and India and share in their fun.

After a great lunch from Woolies and Vida (sponsored by the great folks at WooCommerce) we had a group Skype with John Parkinson, a volunteer with WordPress TV from Ohio in America, who is putting together a short video showcasing the day. Afterwards we had another Skype with Trisha and the team from Johannesburg, sharing stories and meeting our Gauteng counterparts. I for one am looking forward to seeing them all again in person at WordCamp Johannesburg this coming weekend.

Thanks to our generous sponsors, Ashleigh Norris and the team from The Business Center for the amazing venue and WooCommerce, who sponsored our data and lunch for the event. Also thanks to my co-host Hugh for helping with getting the sponsorships in place (and checking in with me from time to time to see how things were going.) To Petya and everyone in the Polyglots team, thanks for organising this amazing event. I’m looking forward to the next one

Finally a big thanks to Shabier, Wesley, Rosy and Sello for taking some time out of there day to help translate WordPress in their languages. I look forward to seeing you all again at our next meetup!

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