Reno’s second annual WordCamp was a huge success! Thanks for everyone who came out. Check out pictures from the event!

Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2010 is in 9 days! Here are the shirts for this year’s event, designed by Diego Sabogal. Only the first 150 registered attendees will receive a shirt so sign up now!

Here is video from the presentation I did at the Orange County WordCamp 2010 discussing specific methods for using WordPress as a content management system, including when WordPress is best for your site and how you can optimize your WordPress use for a complete site.

Video provided by Blaze Streaming Media

Here are my slides from my presentation at OC WordCamp this weekend. It was a great event and I hope everyone learned a few things! If you’ve never been to an event like this and you use WordPress, or are interested in learning more about the platform, look for a WordCamp in your area. The 2nd annual Reno-Tahoe WordCamp is just around the corner on June 12th!

I submitted an application to Google’s Summer of Code last year on building a CMS Theme Framework for wordpress and I’m back at it this year.

An IDE for WordPress Plugins & Themes

My proposal for GSOC 2010 is an integrated development environment for WordPress to allow for integration between the code editor, publishing, developer collaboration and the WordPress codex.

Features

• Open Source: Built on Eclipse
• Code Share: Share and collaborate on WordPress projects with fellow developers using Git or SVN
• Publishing: Setup FTP to allow for publishing your plugin to a WordPress installation to see your progress and test out functionality
• WordPress Codex Autocomplete: Start typing out a wordpress tag and the IDE will display autocomplete options and relevant parameters for each.
• WordPress Codex Wizard: Forgot what codex tags to use when you’re developing a theme or plugin? The Codex Wizard can help you browse the WordPress Codex and build your queries without leaving the IDE.

Example of a WordPress Theme developer’s workflow in WP Builder

1. Start Eclipse
2. Create New Project
3. Select WordPress Theme Project
4. WP Builder will create a project with a basic template structure (index.php, page.php, single.php, etc.)
5. Edit theme files within Eclipse
6. Browse the Codex for template tags within the Codex Wizard
7. Enter FTP information for a WordPress installation to see changes live on the web

Example of a WordPress Plugin developer’s workflow in WP Builder

1. Start Eclipse
2. Create New Project
3. Select WordPress Plugin Project
4. Select options such as “Include backend admin panel, etc.”
5. WP Builder will create a project with an empty plugin shell
6. Share project files with another developer across the world using a GitHub repository or SVN
7. Enter FTP information for a WordPress installation to see changes live on the web

Future Roadmap Features

These features are a little ambitious for the GSOC program timeline but as future features could include:

• Testing & Debugging
• WYSIWYG editor for theme development

It’s a busy time in the world of WordPress. The Lively Labs crew will be out and about for various WordCamps over the next couple months. We use WordPress heavily as our content management system of choice for most projects and are always glad to be involved and contribute to the community.

April 24th: Orange County WordCamp

I’ll be presenting on “Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS)”  at the OC WordCamp down at UC Irvine. Come check it out!

May 1st: San Francisco WordCamp

Ed, Chelsea and I attended SF WordCamp last year and it was great to meet a lot of new people in the WordPress community such as our friends over at Shane & Peter and NextSpace. We are definitely looking forward to it again this year.

June 12: Reno-Tahoe WordCamp

The 2nd annual Reno-Tahoe WordCamp is going to much larger than the first. We have already confirmed it will be held in the ballrooms of the university thanks to sponsorship by the UNR Business Student Council. This event is key to the development of Reno’s tech culture. We have a lot of great developers, bloggers and more in this town and we want to continue to help them in any way possible. The call for proposals is now open so if you’d like to speak, make sure you get your presentation submitted! A new website is going up soon but for now, you can find details at www.renotahoewordcamp.com.

The first Reno-Tahoe WordCamp was a great success and we are looking forward to an even better one this year. We have a lot of great things lined up but we can’t make the day a success without your help!

Are you a WordPress guru, blogger, podcaster, writer or community builder? If so, then you should consider submitting a proposal to present on  June 12th April 10th.

The official website for Reno-Tahoe WordCamp 2010 will be available soon with more information. If you have any questions, feel free to send an email to renotahoewordcamp@gmail.com.

Formatting dates has always been the bane of my existence and tonight, I couldn’t figure out how to calculate the day of the week based on a date when coding in apex on the Force.com platform. I found this wikipedia article: Calculating the day of the week and used it to build the following function.

This function will determine the day of the week for any date, including leap years. It can be cleaned up considerably but I figured I would share my geekery with you all in raw form. (Y3k bug: note the - 2000 to calculate the last two digits of the year.)
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For the Force.com developer hackathon, I developed an integration toolkit between 37Signals‘ Basecamp application for project management and Salesforce.com. This little bit of work earned me the top prize in the Dreamforce 2009 Hackathon so a big thanks to Salesforce.com for putting on the event. It has easily become my favorite part of the Dreamforce conference.

Salesforce.com, in its simplest form, allows for the tracking of business leads, contacts, accounts, opportunities and its development platform extends its functionality to include pretty much whatever a developer can come up with. For many organizations, these salesforce opportunities represent products that are being purchased by another company. What if, however, you are a professional services group? Your services are products in a sense, however the native salesforce.com functionality of products is fairly limited for use for professional services.

Enter Basecamp
Basecamp allows you to manage companies, projects and the various messages, to-do lists, milestones, files and time tracking for each project.

Your Basecamp is in my Salesforce
This Basecamp+Salesforce.com toolkit allows you to tie Salesforce opportunities to Basecamp projects right out of the box. The toolkit includes methods for all of the Basecamp API methods so developers can build their own applications using whichever Salesforce.com objects and business logic they desire using visualforce and apex code.

Due to the time constraints on the Hackathon competition, the toolkit requires a little bit of work on my part before I deem it ready for releasing to the Force.com Code Share.

Features

• Tie your Salesforce user account to your Basecamp user account
• Associate opportunities to existing Basecamp projects
• Create new Basecamp projects from within Salesforce
• Create, read, edit and delete project messages, to-do lists and milestones
• Manage completion of to-do lists

Considerations
Both Basecamp and Salesforce have methods for alerting users regarding upcoming tasks. The initial version of this integration relies on Basecamp’s notifications, which can be selected from within Salesforce.

Roadmap
Due to the short timeframe provided during the Dreamforce Hackathon there are a few Basecamp functional areas that were not written into the toolkit. I plan to add these items soon but they may not be in the first version released to the code share.

• Time tracking
• Writeboards
• Files

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with either Salesforce.com, Dreamforce, 37Signals or Basecamp.

Example File:

Reno-WordCamp plugin (save and rename to reno-wordcamp.php)

Slides: