WordCamp Miami 2020 ran February 29 to March 1, 2020, at FIU in Miami, Florida. Our founder, Brian Messenlehner, was on the program with Clever Ways To Help Automate Content Creation With WordPress, and he shared his slides after the talk. It was one of the last big in person WordPress events before the world shut down that spring, which makes the photos feel even more special now.
A busy start to 2020
The Miami talk capped a busy start to the year. In January, O'Reilly released the second edition of Building Web Apps with WordPress, the book Brian co-authored with Jason Coleman. At the end of January, Brian was attending and speaking at Affiliate Summit West 2020 in Las Vegas, which ran January 27 to 29 at Paris Las Vegas. And in late February, AppPresser 4 launched with automated app store submissions.
The weekend
The event kicked off for speakers and sponsors on Friday, February 28, with a dinner at the Royal Ballrooms Banquet Hall. Then on Saturday, Brian posted that WordCamp Miami 2020 was on, with lots of great WordPress knowledge being shared at FIU that day and the next. On Sunday, he spent time talking shop with Rowan Hoskyns Abrahall, then President of Joomla, a good reminder that open source CMS communities have a lot to learn from each other.
The talk
The session grew out of the content automation talk Brian and David Vogelpohl first gave at Affiliate Summit West 2019, adapted for a WordCamp audience of developers, site owners and content teams. The core idea: much of the work of publishing is repetitive, and WordPress gives you the tools to automate it responsibly.
Topics included:
- Importing structured content from feeds, spreadsheets and APIs into custom post types.
- Templates that turn data into consistent pages automatically.
- Scheduled tasks that refresh content and flag pages that need an editor.
- Plugins and services that help with media, tagging and formatting.
- Keeping a human in the loop for anything that represents the brand.
Looking back from the AI era
In 2020, automating content meant feeds, scripts and templates. Today it also means AI. The principle from Miami still holds: automation should take the busywork off people, not take judgment away from them. That is how AlphaWeb approaches AI implementation for clients, with clear review steps and a preference for tools that keep data inside systems the client controls.
Miami, again
WordCamp Miami holds a special place in Brian's speaking history, with sessions in 2014, 2015 and 2017 and this talk in 2020. In his previous Miami talk, in 2017, he dressed up as Axl Rose and gave a live demo of building social mobile apps with WordPress, BuddyPress and AppPresser. The WordCamp Miami code is poetry shirt even made a return appearance that week.
If your team is spending hours on content tasks that should be automated, AlphaWeb can help you find the right balance of automation and editorial control.
At a glance
- Event: WordCamp Miami 2020
- Dates: February 29 to March 1, 2020
- Venue: FIU, Miami, Florida
- Session: Clever Ways To Help Automate Content Creation With WordPress
- Earlier that winter: speaking at Affiliate Summit West 2020, January 27 to 29, Paris Las Vegas
Related: Affiliate Summit West 2019: Clever Ways to Automate Content Creation with WordPress, WordCamp Miami 2015: Move All the Things to WordPress and Webinar: 12 Fresh Strategies Super Affiliates Use to Optimize Their WordPress Sites.
Have a question about this event or a project like the ones mentioned here? Reach out to AlphaWeb and Brian will be glad to talk it through. We are always happy to compare notes on WordPress, mobile apps and migrations.
Photo gallery
