WordCamps get the photos and the keynotes, but most WordPress learning happens on a weeknight in a borrowed room with a projector and pizza. Our founder, Brian Messenlehner, has spent years in those rooms, as an organizer of the New Jersey WordPress Meetup group and as a speaker at meetups around New York and New Jersey.
New York City, May 2014
In May 2014, a few weeks after Building Web Apps with WordPress came out from O'Reilly, Brian presented AppPresser to a full room at a New York City WordPress meetup. The topic was turning a WordPress site into a mobile app. For a crowd of publishers, agencies and freelancers, the appeal was obvious: they already had the content and the users in WordPress, and they wanted to know how far they could take it without hiring a separate mobile team.
BuddyPress at the burbswp meetup, January 2015
In January 2015, Brian gave a BuddyPress talk at the burbswp WordPress meetup. BuddyPress was a natural meetup topic because so many local organizations wanted a members area or a private community and did not know WordPress could provide one. The talk covered what BuddyPress adds to WordPress, including profiles, groups, activity streams and messaging, and how to plan a community before you install anything.
Montclair, July 2018
On Monday, July 23, 2018, the WordPress Montclair Meetup hosted a session called Build a Mobile App From Any WordPress Website, which ran from 7:00 to 9:00 pm, and Brian demoed AppPresser for the group. By then AppPresser had matured a lot since that first New York demo, and the session focused on taking an existing WordPress site and getting it into the app stores.
Why meetups matter to us
Meetups are where we hear the real questions. Not the ones from a conference stage, but the ones from a nonprofit volunteer, a school webmaster or a small business owner who just inherited a WordPress site. Questions like:
- Which plugins can I trust, and which ones will break my site on the next update?
- Can my site handle members, payments and courses without a rebuild?
- How do I move off the platform I am stuck on without losing my search traffic?
- Do I really need an app, and what does it cost to keep one running?
Those questions shaped the services AlphaWeb offers today, from platform migrations and WooCommerce builds to LearnDash courses, BuddyPress communities and AppPresser mobile apps.
Still showing up
The New Jersey WordPress scene has been good to us, and we still show up for it. If you are in the area and want to talk WordPress over coffee, or you run a meetup and want a speaker on migrations or mobile apps, reach out.
At a glance
- May 2014: AppPresser talk at a New York City WordPress meetup
- January 2015: BuddyPress talk at the burbswp WordPress meetup
- July 23, 2018: Build a Mobile App From Any WordPress Website at the WordPress Montclair Meetup, 7:00 to 9:00 pm
- Ongoing: organizer of the New Jersey WordPress Meetup group
Related: WordCamp Montclair 2023: A Family WordCamp Close to Home, WordCamp Miami 2014: Two Sessions on Web and Mobile Apps and BuddyCamp Miami 2015: Move All the Things to BuddyPress.
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.
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