Washington Apple Pi

A Community of Apple iPad, iPhone and Mac Users

Octobrer 2019 General Meeting

WordPress sites for everyone

October 26, 2019, 9:30 a.m. to noon, Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church

Note: this meeting will be held in Maryland, at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Church, 9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, MD 20814. Please park in the upper parking lot for this meeting.

WordPress is the most popular technology for creating websites. Since this open-source software platform was first released in 2003, over a billion websites have been created using WordPress, and there are currently more than 70 million active around the world.

Users can use WordPress either as a personal blogging and social media platform, or as a content management system for an organization. In this Apple Pi presentation, Gary Vaughan will explain WordPress' breadth as both a blog and content management system, explore various WordPress hosting options, and show how WordPress compares or connects with other site builder or social media tools. He will also note the difference between complex WP.ORG sites and more basic but still powerful WP.COM sites, and demo the relatively new (as of Winter 2018) and powerful Gutenberg Editor. With a focus on a WP.COM application, he will then discuss and demo the details of doing website design and content, drawing on such WordPress components as Themes, Plugins and Widgets, plus a wealth of free or low cost support resources on the Web or at Meetups or conferences around the DC area.

After lunch Gary plans to do an extended demo of How to Create a WordPress.Com site, ideally using a real Apple Pi member application (see link below). He is happy to follow up pro bono over the next month with any individuals to set up a starter WP.COM site, whether for an individual blog, small business, or non-profit, and to hold a general Google Webinar Tutorial and Q&A Session roughly 3 weeks after the presentation. Anyone considering a WP.COM site, please fill out Gary's basic site questionnaire prior to the meeting at the following link: https://wpwebforpro.wordpress.com/help-contact-form/

Gary Vaughan is a contract Senior IT Advisor with the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department. Over the last 14 years he has provided user support on various knowledge management tools such as a Department-wide Mediawiki, SharePoint, and SearchState, and with a focus on internal WordPress-based "Communities@State" blogs since 2014. He has also volunteered as a Project Manager with the Taproot Foundation and with the annual Project Management Day of Service to help DC area non-profits. In a prior career, Gary was a Project Officer (Foreign Service) with the U.S. Agency for International Development, with various tours in Washington D.C., Egypt and Latin America from 1979 to 2006. He has an MBA from the George Washington University, an MS in Computer Science Administration from UMUC, and is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).

Gary Vaughan is a contract Senior IT Advisor with the Office of eDiplomacy at the State Department.

Contact the speaker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garyvaughan/ or Email: glvconsulting@hotmail.com

Vaughan's presentation (90 page PDF, 4 MB)

Question and Answer Session

Questions and Answers will be posed and answered prior to the main presentation. With anly luck at all, they will involve Macs, iPhones, iPads, Apple TV, Apple Watch, HomePod, and other topics we might know something about.

If there is adequate bandwidth, and it isn't entirely used up by the attendees and their iPhones, iPads, iPods, etc., we will stream the meeting over the Pi's YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeX9TuhjBL7n1HGlHOaNCmQ