Group Update: WordCamp Toronto 2018, open organizing, and a call for volunteers.

Hello WordPressers!

We’ve got a handful of exciting announcements this week. But first: congratulations to our friends in Niagara for hosting their inaugural WordCamp this past weekend. It’s great to see more local WordCamps popping up on the official schedule.

Now, speaking of WordCamps…

WordCamp Toronto 2018

We’re excited to announce that WordCamp Toronto 2018 (#WCYYZ) is a go. Join us for a day of WordPress on Saturday, December 1st at the North York Civic Centre, pictured above.

Local community is our priority, so we’ll be looking for speakers from around the GTA and neighbouring regions. Expect more details to come on that, and our call for sponsors and volunteers, in the coming weeks.

Check out the #WCYYZ 2018 website

A more transparent organizing team

In addition to running a leaner WordCamp with a tighter focus on community, we’re also taking steps to be more transparent & inclusive in how we organize events. To that end we’ve spun up a new P2 site at organize.wptoronto.com.

We’re using this site to discuss plans for WordCamp Toronto 2018, but it’s also the go-to site for WPToronto planning in general. If you’d like to get involved with our group planning, this is the place to do it.

Join the planning discussions on our new P2

A call for more volunteers

Previous updates have mentioned that we’re looking for volunteers to help with the meetups. We’ve just published a volunteer application form to collect more details about potential volunteers and what they’re interested in.

Our group organizers currently include Kristine Black, Alex Sirota, Robin MacRae, Kiera Howe, Dan Stramer, Jacques Surveyer, Jeremy Choi, and myself. While we’re a bigger team than in the past (yay!), we’re still lacking a diversity of views & experiences that reflects Toronto.

Help us make WPToronto even better. If you’re interested in joining us, fill out the volunteer application form. If you’d rather give us feedback about what we can do to improve, please send us a message.

From around the web: We’re sharing a bunch of resources for front-end design and development, ranging from free icons and email inspiration to UX case studies and in-depth guides.

Like what you see? Have something to add in our next update? Drop a comment below, or get in touch.

Jump to a section:

• Upcoming Meetups & Events
• Help Wanted
• WordPress News
• Extra Stuff

Upcoming Meetups & Events

Local WordPress meetups

• West End: Users’ Choice – Wednesday, August 15th
• North End: Fix Your Site – Monday, August 20th

Friends of WPToronto

• Peterborough WordPress Meetup – Wednesday, August 22nd

Upcoming web & tech events

• Ladies Learning Code: HTML & CSS for Beginners – August 18th
• Girls Learning Code: Summer Webmaking Camp – August 20th
• HTML & CSS for beginners (Toronto Public Library) – August 30th

Help Wanted

Looking for WordPress help? Let us know and we’ll add you to our next update.

• WordCamp Rochester is looking for speakers
  #WCROC is taking place on October 13th this year. It’s a short roadtrip south of the border. Check out their call for speakers announcement for more details. Submissions close on August 20th.

WordPress News

A quick roundup of trending WordPress and WordPress-related news from the past week.

• Gutenberg 3.5.0 was released last week
• Yoast SEO 8.0 integration w/ Gutenberg coming this week
• ACF 5.0 to add Gutenberg block support in September
• Justin Tadlock (Theme Hybrid, Members) releases new starter theme
• Watch the top 10 sessions from WordCamp Europe 2018
• First look at Gutenberg running in Drupal

Extra Stuff

Interesting articles, tools, and resources from around the web.

Techie stuff:

• Learn all about the Google Sheets query function
• Why old operating systems never really go away

Resources for content creators:

• How to create screencasts that don’t suck

Resources for designers & developers:

• Best practices for building “wizards”
• Grid Garden: A game for learning CSS grid
• Switching from billable hours to subscription billing
• Adding video playback in email
• instagram.css – Instagram filters made from pure CSS

Resources for eCommerce websites:

• Marketing checklists that make your life easier
• Conversion research methods that increase sales
• The best time to send a message to customers
• Confessions of an ex-personalization junkie
• How to build the best eCommerce page on the web

That’s it for this week. Press on!

Image credit: By PFHLai [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons