Foundation Friday

ATTENTION:
If you have purchased a ticket that includes Friday, please make sure you’ve selected which track (101, 201, 301, or 401) you’d like to participate in. Seating is limited, read details below.

Alright, now that I have your attention, here’s the juicy details. I am super excited to be heading up the organization of this year’s Foundation Friday for WordCampPhx. I’ve taught the WordPress 101 class in past years, and this year rather than teach, I really wanted to improve the whole experience on all levels. 🙂 Excited to share what we’ve organized for you… so lets get started.

What is Foundation Friday?

Over the years, WordCampPhx has evolved to include a day of workshops dedicated to provide the community with at-skill-level foundational classes to get you introduced or revved up for a knowledge-packed Saturday, the main meat of WordCampPhx.

What Tracks Are Available?

This year we kept the structure of the 101, 201, 301, 401 tracks, they break down like this…

WordPress 101 – Capacity 110 – Chandler Community Center: Room 110
Crafted for the absolute website novice, these classes will be a hands-on start at the beginning and will cover everything from downloading, installing to setting up WordPress.

WordPress 201 – Capacity 110 – Chandler Community Center: Room 111
Moving on from the basics, these intermediate classes will cover topics like intro to site mapping, content strategy, information architecture, design and user experience. You will learn to be a WordPress “power user” including how to backup, extend, promote and secure your WordPress installation.

WordPress 301 – Capacity 100 – Chandler Library: Copper Room (Old Chambers)
These WordPress classes bridge the gap between user and developer and will give you a solid introduction to developing for WordPress and the development environment.

WordPress 401 – Capacity 65 – Gangplank: Magic Space
Advanced WordPress concepts for the seasoned developer. Topics will be selected by attendees, much like a developer unconference – whatever your super-dev heart desires – topics may include responsive width, supporting core, customizing the back-end interface or an in-depth look at WordPress’ inner workings… These discussions will be moderated by two super savvy WordPress development hot-shots.

If you are participating in the WordPress 401 track, take some time and specify topics you’d like to discuss/learn/hear about ahead of time to help out our moderators on these guided discussions.

How do I Select a Track for Friday Classes?

Each class has a different capacity, we want to make sure the rooms we have slated fit the number of people who are interested in attending a particular track. When you registered, you received a confirmation email with a link in it. The subject line of that email reads, “Your Ticket to WordCamp Phoenix 2013”. Inside this email is a link to your ticket. Click the link to edit your ticket and select your class. So if you’re a Friday ticket holder and you haven’t yet selected a track you want to participate in, I suggest you do so pronto. Otherwise, some of you might be left out of the fun, and we don’t want that!

This sounds interesting, but what else is new this year?

This year we’re doing some things differently…

Class – Structure: 8 classes for each track, 45 minutes each
There are 8 class sessions per track, check out the Friday class schedule to see a break down of classes per track.

For each class, we’re planning some kind of interactivity or “get started doing this asap” type of movement, our goal is to enable you to take what you’ve learned and apply it. Each Friday class will be an 45 minutes in length and break down something like this:

20 min – Lecture/Information
15 min – Activity/Next Steps/DIY
10 min – Q/A

Speakers as Teachers
Instead of getting instruction from a handful of experts, we wanted you to get a variety of voices, from all over (near and far) to give your their expert opinions on these concepts. To do this, we added the Friday topics to the speakers submission form, hoping we would get a few brave speakers that wanted to try their hand at teaching their subject of expertise. What we got was a resounding response from our speakers near and far who were willing to teach.

Class Locations
This year we have moved from Chandler City Hall (where we’ve held Foundation Friday in the past) to the Chandler Community Building, Library and Gangplank. More details on parking and classroom locations will be available immediately before the event.

Foundation Friday will be a great kickoff to your WordCamp experience. Don’t miss out, register today and select your classes.