WordCamp Phoenix 2014: Day 1

The first day of WordCamp Phoenix 2014 was amazing. Over 600 people registered and attended the “Foundations Friday” workshop day and it seemed the entire town of Chandler was taken over by people attending the conference.

This was the first year I’ve attended WordCamp Phoenix where I haven’t been a volunteer. I had a different (still fun!) experience than when I’ve been a workshop room host and had to worry about logistics of the venue, introducing speakers, answering questions about the workshops.

With the different structure for the workshop day, five tracks including beginning user, advanced user, designer, beginning developer, and advanced developer, I had a hard time making a decision which workshops to attend.

I ended up at the beginner developer track in the morning and the designer track in the afternoon.

My two favorite sessions for the day? There’s No Place Like Local workshop by Marc Benzakein from DesktopServer and Responsive Web Design in WordPress by Joe Casabona.

In Marc’s workshop, we learned how to install DesktopServer, a package that allows you to set up a WordPress development environment on your desktop. I already had some experience with DesktopServer; I bought it as a Christmas present for myself and set it up last month.

It was great to meet Marc and Gregg and chat with them about their product. I’m hoping we can have a DesktopServer presentation at our WordPress meetup group this year.

Check out Marc’s slides and my key takeaways from his presentation.

Key Takeaways

Setting up a local development environment allows you to:

• Create a simple workflow
• Import and test active sites on a local system
• Use a sophisticated text editor
• Save time
• Minimize risk of messing up live site
• Keep the site private from search engines

Risks to be aware of when setting up a local development environment:

• Additional content (plugins, themes, graphics) cannot be accessed without an Internet connection
• Certain things such as caching and content delivery network (CDN) plugins can cause problems
• Demonstrating site to clients can only be done in person (in general)

I was excited about attending Joe Casabona’s presentation on responsive design with WordPress. Joe and I met online last year when he spoke at the WP Summit 2013 online conference. I’ve been trying to get a better understanding of responsive strategies in WordPress and Joe provided a lot of excellent information and tips.

Joe kindly posted his slides and resources from his talk.