We hereby declare 2012 as the Year of the WordPress Meetup. You’ll want to get in on this action. So what is a WordPress Meet up? Basically, it’s people in a community getting together — meeting up — who share an interest in WordPress, whether they be bloggers, business users, developers, consultants, or any other category of person able to say, “I use WordPress in some way and I like it, and I want to meet other people who can say the same.” Meetups come in different shapes and sizes, but they all carry the benefit of connecting you with potential collaborators and friends, and helping you learn more about what you can do with WordPress. Here are some of the common types of WordPress meetups:

Hang out and work on your WordPress sites together
Social/happy hour type gatherings
Mini-lectures/presentations
Developer hacking meetups
Show & tell of how group members are using WordPress
Formal instruction on how to use WordPress
Lecture series (possibly with visiting speakers)
Genius bar/help desk

There’s no prescribed format, as each local group can decide for itself what they want to do. Some groups mix it up from month to month, while others have multiple events each month to satisfy the needs of their community.

The tough part? Running a popular group takes time and money. Just as we worked last year to remove the financial burden for WordCamp organizers and provide logistical support so they could focus more on their event content and experience, we want to start extending that kind of support to meetup groups as well. We don’t want it to cost anything for someone to run a WordPress meetup, or to attend one — building local communities should be as free as WordPress itself!

Since there are so many more meetups than there are WordCamps, we’re going to start with the cost that is the same for every group: meetup.com organizer dues. We’re setting up an official WordPress account on Meetup.com right now, and over the next couple of weeks will be working with existing meetup group organizers, people who want to start a new meetup group, and the helpful folks at Meetup.com to put this program in place. WordPress meetup groups that choose to have their group become part of the WordPress account will no longer pay organizer dues for that group, as the WordPress Foundation will be footing the bill.

This is exciting for several reasons. First, it means local organizers who are giving something back to the project by way of their time won’t also have shell out $12-19/month for the privilege. That alone is a big step. Second, it will open the door to more events and leaders within a community, since leadership and event planning won’t need to be tied to “owning” the meetup group. Third, more active meetup groups means more WordCamps, yay!

In addition to the financial aspects, we’ll be working on ways to improve social recognition of meetup activity by incorporating feeds from the official meetup groups into the WordPress.org site, and including meetup group participation in the activity stream on your WordPress.org profile.2 I’m also hoping we can do something around providing video equipment to meetup groups (like we already do for WordCamps) to record presentations and tutorials that can be posted to WordPress.tv, helping meetup groups offer WordPress classes in their community, and getting involved with mentoring WordPress clubs at local schools and universities. Oh, and we’ll send out some WordPress buttons and stickers to the groups that join in, because everyone loves buttons and stickers.

We’re also putting together some cool resources for people who want to start a new meetup group. There will be a field guide to getting started and some supplies to help you get your group going, and a forum for organizers to talk to and learn from each other.

Over time, we’ll be talking to organizers and looking at what other expenses we can absorb and what other support we can provide to local groups. For now, we’re starting with the organizer dues. If you currently run a WordPress meetup group (whether you are using Meetup.com or not) or would like to start a WordPress meetup group in your area, please fill out our WordPress Meetup Groups survey. Filling in the survey doesn’t obligate you to join the official group, it just gives us a starting point to a) find out what groups are around/interested, and b) get some information on existing groups and their expenses and needs. Meetup.com will contact the group organizers who’ve said they’d like to join the new program, and will walk them through the logistics of the change and answer questions before helping them to opt-in officially.

Read more by clicking here.

WordCamp Phoenix Returns to Chandler, Arizona as One of the Nation’s Largest WordPress Education Events.

There’s a good chance your favorite blog, website or online store is powered by WordPress, the free online DIY website software that has put web publishing power in the hands of anyone with a keyboard and Internet access. February 24th-26th, more than 650 small business owners, non-profit agencies, realtors, photographers, designers, journalists and even kids will swarm downtown Chandler to learn easy website publishing and development at the 2012 WordCamp Phoenix.

The non-profit event brings together WordPress enthusiasts from around the globe to share best practices and strategies for a wide variety of businesses. Headlining speakers include Lisa Sabin (@lisasabinwilson), author of WordPress for Dummies, Sean Herron (@seanherron), Technology Strategist at NASA Headquarters and Jane Wells (@janeforshort), Head of User Experience at WordPress.com. Users of all skill levels and backgrounds are encouraged to attend.

“It’s an amazing mix of folks at all ability levels,” said Dallin Harris, one of the event’s organizers. “I’ve watched small business owners go from zero net knowledge in the 101 class to publishing their own business website by the end of the conference.”

Not just for novices, WordCamp Phoenix has become the valley’s must-attend networking and continuing education event for professional web developers. A series of panel discussions and workshops aim to cultivate a creative community among design, web development and communication professions.

Several of last year’s popular activities will return, including FREE Friday workshops and an after party hosted on the beautiful grounds of Chandler’s new City Hall. Other highlights include:

Saturday classes and talks geared toward specific industries such as publishing & media, eCommerce, visual arts, education, government, nonprofit and real estate
Developers’ Day and WordPress for Kids hosted at Gangplank on Sunday
And for networking fun, a Friday evening bar crawl and ice cream social

Tickets are $35 and are available at 2012.phoenix.wordcamp.org/attend/register/

Ticket holders get access to more than 30 sessions, classes and networking events across 3 days. As an added bonus, event sponor WP Engine will supply each attendee with free lifetime website hosting.

The Friday workshops are open to the public at no cost. For updates on speakers and scheduling, visit the official Wordcamp site by clicking here.

WordCamp Phoenix 2012
Friday, February 24 – Sunday, February 26
Chandler Center for the Arts | 250 N. Arizona Ave., Chandler, AZ 85225

Give your site a boost! Implement crucial optimization techniques that will improve not only your ySlow score, but your Google rank too. In this tutorial, wp.tutsplus.com covers all aspects of W3 caching, ySlow, Google page speed, CSS sprites & htaccess rules, to achieve a high ySlow score.

Read more by visiting wp.nettuts

Studiopress announces that Genesis 1.8 Beta is now available for users to test. The update boasts several new features including a new default look for Genesis. Studiopress also dded 2 media queries to the style sheet, which makes it mobile responsive for devices such as the iPad and iPhone.

Many other new features have been added, you can check out the Genesis 1.8 changelog to see a number of things were fixed, added and modified. One of the biggest features that we’ve added is the Color Styles function.

Many of our child themes have color styles, which are currently being made available by code that’s included in the child theme’s function file as well as an additional file found within a ‘lib’ folder.

The new code that is required in the child themes would look like this:
/** Create additional color style options */
add_theme_support( ‘genesis-style-selector’, array( ‘agentpress-gray’ => ‘Gray’, ‘agentpress-green’ => ‘Green’, ‘agentpress-red’ => ‘Red’, ‘agentpress-tan’ => ‘Tan’ ) );

As with all functions that end up being placed into a number of child themes (custom header, footer widgets, etc) we’ve extracted that code out of them and placed it in to Genesis core.

To learn more about Studiopress and Genisis visit StudioPress Themes for WordPress

MassivePress.com was announced bringing together some of the titans of WordPress. The team (Cory Miller, Lisa Sabin-Wilson, Grant Griffiths, Michael Torbert, Jason Schuller, and Carl Hancock) announced they are formalizing their collaboration via MassivePress. and looking work together on upcoming projects.

View the top 2010 WordPress picks by clicking here.

Every year wphonors.com puts out the vote for the best of the best in WordPress. From themes to developers, the public picks their favorites, then wphonors makes them known.

View the top 2010 WordPress picks by clicking here.

WordPress is well known for its ease of installation. Under most circumstances installing WordPress is a very simple process and takes less than five minutes to complete. Many web hosts now offer tools (e.g. Fantastico) to automatically install WordPress for you. However, if you wish to install WordPress yourself, the following guide will help. Now with Automatic Upgrade, upgrading is even easier.

Visit wordpress.org to read more.

WordPress recently was awarded the Hall of Fame CMS platform award by the Open Source Awards. WordPress was up against Drupal and Joomla for the award.

The Open Source Awards is a contest that aims to encourage, support, recognize and reward Open Source projects.

Visit this page to read more about the CMS Awards.

Akismet was one of Automattic’s first projects, and after 5 years of sporting the same design, the entire site has received a major facelift.

On first glance, the new site presents Akismet’s benefits in a much clearer way, and offers clearer distinction between the free and paid licenses. Fans of the old spam stats will probably notice that they are no longer featured on the front page, but fear not, they have just been moved to the About page.

Akismet’s anti-spam offerings have continue to grow dramatically over the last 5 years. What began as a single WordPress plugin is now available in 24 plugins and 14 libraries.

What do you think of Akismet’s redesign? Do you use Akismet on your blog? If not, how do you protect your blog from spam?

Visit webtoolscollection.com to read more about the top plugins.

Weblogtools Collection offers its WordPress plugins geniuses use in every one of your WordPress install. Without further delay, here are the top ten of your top five plugins.

A few days ago, Mark asked to hear about your “top 5 plugins that you WordPress geniuses use in every one of your WordPress installs.” With almost fifty responses, it’s great to see that so many people consider the same or similar plugins as their top five. Without further delay, here are the top ten of your top five plugins.

1. Akismet: This plugin should be the front line of your blog’s anti-spam defenses. According to its directory listing, it’s been downloaded individually over 4,060,000 times, but it’s also bundled with WordPress. Just to give you an idea, the current version of WordPress has been downloaded over 15,800,000 times. Considering those numbers, it’s no wonder that this is the most popular WordPress plugin and the top of almost every commentator’s top five list.

2. Google XML Sitemaps: This plugin was the first XML sitemap generator for WordPress. Though the concept of a dynamically generated XML sitemap took a while to catch on, the popularly of this plugin should be a clear sign of the protocol’s success.

3. All In One SEO: As its name proclaims, this plugin takes almost everything you’d need for search engine optimization and wraps it into a nice package. If you’re concerned about SEO, this is as close to set-it-and-forget-it as these SEO plugins come.

4. WP Super Cache: This plugin reduces server load and improves load time by serving html copies of every page without the need to run PHP or access the database. It’s the oldest surviving cache plugin for WordPress. By that I mean that it’s been around since 2007 and it’s still under active development.

5. WP-DBManager: This all-in-one plugin allows you to backup, optimize, and repair your database, empty/drop tables, and run SQL queries. Perhaps one of the most interesting bits of trivia on this plugin is that it hasn’t been updated since June of 2009, it still works perfectly, and there’s no other plugin like it.

6. Google Analytics for WordPress: This is so much more than your typical “enter your Analytics code here” plugin. It includes the ability to track outbound and download links, ignore visitors with specified user levels, track meta data via custom variables, and much more.

7. Contact Form 7: This is one of the first WordPress contact form plugins, it allows you to manage multiple fully customizable contact forms with spam protection, and it continues to be updated at a very steady rate.

8. W3 Total Cache: This is one of the newest caching plugins. Thanks to its promises of an easy setup and compatibility with most hosting environments, its user base is growing rapidly.

9. Subscribe2: This is the oldest email subscription plugin for WordPress. The plugin was first released in 2005, and although it may have changed hands a few times, it’s still under active development.

10. WordPress.com Stats: This is the official plugin for the one and only hosted stats solution from Automattic. The adoption rate has been a bit slower than expected due to some interface and usability problems, but with a new user interface on the horizon, things are bound to improve.

Visit webtoolscollection.com to read more about the top plugins.