Photo by Jeremy Lim. www.jeremylim.ca

This post is so long overdue, but it has to be written. For the last 6 months or so, my colleagues, Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Anny Chih and I have worked tirelessly to organize our very first WordCamp dedicated to developers and designers aptly called, WordCamp: Developers. And on May 5, 2011, the event finally came to be. We hosted 200 guests at SFU Harbour Centre for a full day of talks geared at WordPress developers and designers. Split between two tracks, talks ranged from HTML 5, CSS 3, and JavaScript to Information Architecture, Mobile, Forums, Video, Theme design, E-Commerce and more.

Photo by Jeremy Lim. www.jeremylim.ca

With speakers coming from all over North America, we were so privileged to have WordPress heavyweights, Andrew Nacin and Lorelle Van Fossen open the day with an unique Q&A Keynote where we learned all about the WordPress brainchild, Nacin and his insider look at what’s in store for WordPress in the coming months.

We were also incredibly lucky to have a stellar lineup of speakers including Catherine Winters, Cam Cavers, Brendan Sera-Shriar, Steve Heffernan, Toby McKes, Allen Pike, Alex Nelson, Beau House, Mark Reale, Justin Sainton, Ray Villalobos, Rick Bjarnasson, Gene Bernier, and Curtis McHale.

As an organizer for the event, all the hard work is made worthwhile when we hear all the great feedback from the attendees. We had many tell us it was the smoothest and best organized conference they’d been to in years. Others applauded the superb quality of the speakers. And my favourite comment still, from Ms. Minna Van of the The Network Hub was that, “WordCamp Developers is the Mercedes of conferences!”. Now how can anyone leave a conference without a big smile on their face with such love? Not I…

Photo by Jeremy Lim. www.jeremylim.ca

But foremost, WordCamp: Developers brought together many new and seasoned developers and designers in Vancouver (and a few Internationally actually!) for a day of WordPress commune. It was incredible to see familiar and not-so-familiar faces in the crowd all geeking out to one passion, WordPress. We may not know it, but our local community of WordPress developers is much larger and more active than we may have first imagined. And the congregation of them all under one roof on May 5, was and will be one of the best events I’ve ever attended and definitely ever organized.

Thanks to all the volunteers on the day of, including Kulpreet, Astra, Ryan, Lisa and Jeremy for their invaluable help and to all the sponsors who helped us make it possible to even dream of such an event, let alone put it on with the kind of success that we had! Of course, we would not have a conference without our rockin’ lineup of speakers! Thankyou!

For more photos of the event, check out Jeremy Lim’s photos from the day and at our WordCamp Developers Flickr group!

You can also read all about the “making of” WordCamp Developers in Anny’s post!

I’m so excited to announce the launch of the new Beauty Night Society website, http://www.beautynight.org.

Perhaps our work with Beauty Night was a destined one. About 6 months ago, I volunteered at the Vancouver NetSquared event held at SFU Harbour Centre. I was manning the WordPress Help Desk for the afternoon and happened to meet a lovely lady (who unfortunately, I do not remember her name! Apologies!) volunteering with Beauty Night to work on their WordPress website. At the time, she was looking for some help in maintaining the Beauty Night site, but various issues hindered its growth.

Fast forward 6 months, and I’m sitting down with Erika Harrison and Caroline MacGillivray, founder of Beauty Night Society, and we’re talking about the redevelopment of the site. I was immediately drawn to the project because as some may know, I’ve long been a proponent of mental health awareness and social change in the Downtown East side. So it was a natural choice for me to give my time to a such a worthy organization, such as Beauty Night.

Beauty Night is a non-profit society that hosts two evenings of makeovers a week for women living in poverty. Beauty Night builds self esteem and changes lives of women and youth living in poverty through 3 streams of programming: wellness, life skills development and makeovers. More than just physical makeovers however, Beauty Night is about building confidence and dignity among its participants, giving women a place to feel safe, respected, and cared for. Women have the opportunity to learn life skills, access various health services, and rejuvenate their physical and emotional spirit at each beauty night.

The redeveloped website takes this spirit of Beauty Night at heart. It showcases the society’s mission and work, and enables the organization to better reach its donors, volunteers, and constituents via various social media integrated tools (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr). It emphasizes the beauty and compassion of the organization.

Developed with WordPress, it is ultimately built to grow with the organization. It is made to be easy to use and easily expandable for future growth. For every non-profit, limited manpower and time, means a website needs to be flexible and easily maintainable. The new Beauty Night website is built with this in mind.

We are so happy to have been able to contribute to Beauty Night. The site was launched and showcased at the Vancouver Twestival 2011. We look forward to our continued work with this great organization!

I updated a site from WordPress 2.0.5 to 3.1 today and found that all my custom post types returned 404 errors. What happened?! Also, when I went to view my custom post types in my Dashboard, I noticed that my posts no longer allowed me to edit them. They all became static and could only viewed. Though when I viewed them, I’d get a 404 error. Problem! So I started hunting down answers and found a solution to the problem.

First, if you have capitalized your custom post type names, then you will need to fix them because in WordPress 3.1, the register_post_type() call has been revamped and the whole array capabilities have changed. This also means that capitalization of post type names no longer work. Here’s a step by step on how I fixed my capitalization problem.

Step 1

Check out the new codex on register post types. Notice the new arguments and change your register_post_type call in your functions.php file according to the new system. There’s a good example of what the new call may look like.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that in your new calls that you use ALL lower case for the post type name.

Step 2

Cut and paste this code into your functions.php file before your register_post_type() call.

if(!get_option('custom_type_updated')){
global $wpdb;
$wpdb->query("UPDATE $wpdb->posts SET post_type = 'portfolio' WHERE post_type = 'Portfolio'");
update_option('custom_type_updated','true');
}

This will change your database post-types from uppercase to lowercase. Smart! Save your functions.php file and your custom post types should be fixed!

I got this from dennis_f at this thread. Thanks Dennis!

Permalinks problem

If you find that your permalinks have gone crazy and are not showing the correct pages or still giving your errors, try going into your Permalinks settings and saving it as default, and then returning it back to your custom settings. This should reset your permalinks problem.