LightSpeed » WordPress-MU http://lsdev.biz Website Development - WordPress - Cape Town Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:56 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 WordCamp – Word’s out on WordCamp South Africa 2011 http://lsdev.biz/wordcamp-word-out-on-wordcamp-south-africa-2011/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wordcamp-word-out-on-wordcamp-south-africa-2011 http://lsdev.biz/wordcamp-word-out-on-wordcamp-south-africa-2011/#comments Thu, 09 Dec 2010 12:47:15 +0000 Ashley Shaw http://lsdev.biz/?p=9644 WordCamps are informal, community-organized conferences about everything WordPress. They are great networking and learning events put together by WordPress users of all types, from the casual user to the hard core developers and code wranglers. Everyone gets to participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.
wordcamp

WordCamp South Africa

The last WordCamp South Africa was held in 2008 with big success at the Wild Fig Restaurant in Cape Town (Mowbray).
Over a 100 bloggers, geeks and journalists attended the event and speakers ranged from WordPress founder and inspiration Matt Mullenweg to local legends like Adii Rockstar (born Adriaan Pienaar) founder of WooThemes and Dave Duarte self styled Marketing Geek.

LightSpeed wants to host the next WordCamp SA and we need your support!

We want to put the following out to the community for ideas and suggestions. Please contact us and share your thoughts by commenting below the post:

WordCamp Meetup

For the run up to the actual event we want to host an informal WordPress Meetup, open to anyone with an interest in WordPress and the WordCamp event, to share ideas and get the WordPress juices flowing.

WordCamp Meetup’s are usually smaller events held before the actual conference and help to set the tone for the big event as well as providing an opportunity for potential hosts, co-hosts, speakers and sponsors to meet and discuss ideas and come up with actionable plans for the conference.

Our initial ideas for a meetup is to have a small get together early in 2011, similar to the Geek Dinners for interested parties. If you have any suggestions for Venue, Topics, Date or just want to share some general thoughts, Speak up by commenting below.

The Big Daddy: Suggestions for WordCamp SA 2011

Call for Venue Suggestions

The Previous WordCamp SA was held at the Wild Fig in Mowbray, Cape Town. Ideally it should be held at spot that is close to accommodation and transport facilities for all out of town attendees, is large enough to host a crowd of geeks in excess of 100 people and has excellent Wifi to enable all those tweets, blogs and live streaming video feeds that will be generated on the day.

Call for Speaker Suggestions

We want to make WordCamp SA 2011 the best WordCamp possible, and the success of a WordCamp depends heavily on the quality of the Speakers available to attend the event and blow our minds with WordPress awesomness
Our suggestions for Speakers:

Call for Sponsors

Anyone interested in sponsoring WordCamp South Africa 2011 or has a suggestion on whom to approach for sponsorship can contact us here at LightSpeed or simply leave a comment below

Things to consider:

  • Wifi access is essential. Previous WordCamp brought down the first Hotspot and a second had to be initiated
  • AV equipment is needed
  • The Speakers really do make or break the event
]]> http://lsdev.biz/wordcamp-word-out-on-wordcamp-south-africa-2011/feed/ 16 Who is Automattic? http://lsdev.biz/who-is-automattic/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=who-is-automattic http://lsdev.biz/who-is-automattic/#comments Wed, 30 Jun 2010 13:09:30 +0000 Barend Potgieter http://lsdev.biz/?p=3497 Automattic is the parent company behind WordPress.com, a site that offers hassle-free blogs based on the open source WordPress.org project.

The difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org

There is often some confusion between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. WordPress (no .com on the end) is an open source free software project that lives at WordPress.org. WordPress.com is a free blogging service, owned and run by Automattic.

Some of the confusion could arise from the prolific Matt Mullenweg who is associated with both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. Matt is one of PC World’s Top 50 People on the Web, Inc.com’s 30 under 30, and Business Week’s 25 Most Influential People on the Web.

Matt Mullenweg, founder of Automattic, is also the co-founder and project lead of WordPress, but Automattic does not own WordPress. It’s a true open source project and the bulk of development is done by volunteers.

Blogging made easy

Automattic is a company devoted to making things simple on the web, aiming to give people the tools to make communication easy.

Founded in 2005 they have steadily grown to be one of the top companies in the consumer internet industry.

WordPress.com is the service that they are best known for, but by no means does that mean it’s all they are doing. Automattic has created over 25 plugins for your blogging needs ranging from simple blog graphs and stats to its function changing Blicki (blog + wiki) feature.

Other Web services and products include:

  • bbPress – Forum Software
  • blo.gs- RSS feed aggregator
  • Akismet – An anti-comment spam system capable of integration with many blogging platforms and forums.
  • WordPress MU – A multi-blog community system built on WordPress (merged with the normal version with the release of WP 3.0).
  • Ping-O-Matic – A pinging service.
  • Gravatar – Globally recognized avatars
  • IntenseDebate – Commenting Tools
  • PollDaddy – polls and survey tools
  • BuddyPress – Social Networking Plugin Suite
  • Vaultpress – VaultPress is the protection and backup service built on the Automattic grid
  • Plinky – Web-based promting software to help bloggers overcome writer’s block
  • After the Deadline – A spellchecker for the web
  • VideoPress – VideoPress converts your original video into multiple high-quality formats suitable for viewing on the web.
  • P2 – A real time blogging theme for WordPress

As of June 2010, over 22 million blogs have been created with WordPress, with thousands of new ones built each day. WordPress.com is a top 10 global site as measured by Quantcast.

]]> http://lsdev.biz/who-is-automattic/feed/ 0 8 Ways to make money with WordPress MU http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/#comments Tue, 01 Jun 2010 11:20:11 +0000 Barend Potgieter http://lsdev.biz/?p=3096

WordPress MU allows you to run limitless blogs and websites with one single install of WordPress. It is used by service based websites like Ancestry 24, HireBuzz, and most famously WordPress.com.

Setting up and maintaining such a large ecosystem of blogs is time consuming and expensive. It is only natural, unless you’re a philanthropist, that you’d want to make this investment work for you and make some money from the deal.

Here’s how:

1. Donations

Donations will not bring in a lot of money. It can be difficult to motivate users of your website to donate money to the running of your website and you will have no control over the amounts donated. Donations (barely) works for a site like Wikipedia because they are one of the largest and most frequented sites on the web and offer a unique service.

Your best bet is to allow donations by users, but use another of the models discussed below to finance your website and make some money.

2. Sponsorship

Finding a partner or partners that are willing and able to sponsor your website will rest on the possibility of you offering a mutually beneficial relationship for all parties involved. This model is also sure not to be very profitable.

3. Advertising

Advertising is a good way to bring in money to a site. The basic model is to set up your site so that nothing is expected financially from your visitors, while your advertisers only pay you after you accomplish certain goals such as sales or click-throughs.
Your main challenge when using the advertising model is to find an equilibrium between maximizing the number of ads and minimizing the visitors’ annoyance. This mainly has to do with the number, size and location of ads.

Flashing banner ads, bandwidth chowing movie ads and full page ‘Skip this ad’ pop-up Ads are to be avoided. The easiest way to go about placing ads on your WordPress blog is by using Google Adsense in combination with your text widgets. This gives you the freedom and control of placing your widgets containing the ads anywhere on your website that pleases you.

4. Subscriptions

Subscription can be a good way to make money with your website, but only if you can provide content or special features that is worth the price of admission. Many newspapers and Research resources that make use of this model offer a lot of content for free on their site, with ‘premium’ content’ only available to subscribers. This serves to let the casual reader experience what the website has to offer and if you work smartly with your content, it can serve as a powerful incentive to subscribe.

5. Selling Stuff

The business model for e-commerce sites that sell products is very closely related to the traditional Bricks and Mortar model as you have to worry about your gross margins and typically need to spend a lot of money on advertising.

With this model your site is aimed at promoting and selling products to the users.

6. Upgrades

You can offer upgrades that enhance and improve your website, or add additional functionality that is sought after by users. These upgrades can take the form of plugins, themes, extra storage space, the ability to upload video or any other novel or useful upgrade that users would want.

7. Affiliate Sales

Affiliate marketing is the practice of using one website to drive traffic to another.
Eighty percent of affiliate programs today use revenue sharing or cost per sale (CPS) as a compensation method, nineteen percent use cost per action (CPA), and the remaining programs use other methods such as cost per click (CPC) or cost per mille (CPM).

There is currently only one plugin that will transform your website into an affiliate marketing machine – WordPress MU Affiliate. It works with WordPress single user, WPMU, and BuddyPress. WordPress MU Affiliate allows you to provide your partners with compelling creative banner advertisements targeted to your niche market, without you having to touch a single line of code. It tracks unique clicks, signups, and paid memberships.

8. Supporter

WordPress MU Supporter is a plugin that allows you to offer and charge for premium features or use of your WPMU or BuddyPress site – collecting either subscriptions or single payments in return.

Features:

  • Premium Themes
  • Premium Plugins
  • Buddypress Integration, limiting messages and/or creation of groups to Supporters
  • You can rename Supporter to whatever you want… for example, ‘Pro’ or ‘Plus’ or ‘Premium’
  • Brilliant and powerful individual blog modification tools
  • Increase storage space for paid up supporters
  • Google Analytics for Supporters integration (supporters can get analytics if they sign up)
  • ‘Turn off Ads’ facility so you can display ads which are automatically turned off for supporters
  • If you wish, disable the “Write Post” and “Write Page” pages on non-supporter blogs (i.e. you must be a supporter to blog)
  • Allows you to provide a free trial period of supporter features to new blogs
]]> http://lsdev.biz/8-ways-to-make-money-with-wpmu/feed/ 2 WPMU DEV – Competition http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wpmu-dev-competition http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/#comments Fri, 18 Sep 2009 12:08:16 +0000 Ashley Shaw http://lsdev.biz/?p=1393 wpmuorg_logo

WPMU Dev Premium takes WordPress MU to a higher level. It offers polished themes and expertly crafted plugins to elevate your site.

By linking to  Countdown to 100 WPMU DEV Premium Plugins, Themes, Videos and More at wpmu.org, we might just be selected to receive another year of premium membership.

WPMU DEV Premium Plugins used by LightSpeed.

]]> http://lsdev.biz/wpmu-dev-competition/feed/ 0 BuddyPress to power the new Contribute to Change http://lsdev.biz/buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change http://lsdev.biz/buddypress-to-power-contribute-to-change/#comments Sat, 10 Jan 2009 09:22:43 +0000 Ashley Shaw http://www.lsdev.biz/?p=310 I have been working with BuddyPress (BP) since its very early stages in April/May. What is BP?

BuddyPress will extend WordPress MU and bring social networking features to a new or existing installation.

As an avid facebook and WordPress user I have taken to the idea of extending WordPress-MU with social networking features very well. Foxinni was the first person to tell me about BP, the I caught my attention immediately. I started testing out the very early stages of the software in May 2008 while preparing to do a talk at WordPress Cape Town Meetup.

Andy Peatling is the lead developer on the BP project. Andy started the project as ChickSpeak.com a WordPress MU Based Social Network, see about blurb below:

ChickSpeak is an organization for young women created to inspire Big Dreams, Strong Values and Success in the world.


Here are some important BP links for more detailed info on the Automattic driven project:

Buddypress

The past few months LightSpeed has been Contibuting to Change (C2C). Traffic Brand introduced us to the DA who needed a small volunteer registration website called Contribute to Change. We started with a standard 5 page website designed as a landing page for a PPC campaign and volunteer registration formto allow people sign up and help promote the DA.

We have been researching the Obama political campaign and how they built My.BarackObama.com a.k.a MYBO to enabled supporters to be more involved with promoting the party. We have been busy developing BP powered volunteer system to drive the C2C website. This will allow people to join in and help the DA grow its support base. More on how to sign-up to the live system at the end of this month when it launches to the existing & new volunteers.

We will be making use of all the existing BP features and adding some interesting new modules. See details below:

Modules:

  1. Authentication modules – Google’s OpenID Endpoint + Facebook Connect
  2. Recruit a friend + Contact Importer – Friend importer tool and more advanced tools for recruiting new community members
  3. Spread the Word – Tools for mailing the press or prominent blogs
  4. User/Volunteer Points System – Volunteers earn points for every action and these are displayed in a sidebar widget
  5. Action center – User dashboard page displaying member points, call-to-action tools and much more
  6. Import Users – Import existing volunteers into the C2C BP system
  7. Events – Create/host an event, find events, featured events
  8. Go-door-to-door – Voters use this module to organise neighbourhood walks going door-to-door to discuss and help promote the DA
  9. Make Phone Calls – Talk to Voters, record/update details and promote the DA
  10. Mobile Theme – mobile theme for buddypress making the site more accessible to users

BuddyPress Modifications:

  1. User Sign-up or User Registration needs to be extended and integrated into
  2. Members Only system accessible only to registered volunteers
  3. Buddy Press Top Menu Bar needs to be extended to cater for the new volunteer tools by adding new quick links

Potential modules:

  • Facebook style bottom bar with Jabber Chat built in to enable volunteers to chat to each other trough the system

Some interesting research links:

I will be blogging further information in the weeks to come. Stay tuned in.

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