There are only a few days (and a few tickets!) left until WordCamp Orlando begins! Make sure you spread the word, we want to sell out and make this the biggest and best #WCORL yet! If our amazing schedule and speakers haven’t enticed you to grab your tickets yet, maybe these new details about all the fun, food, and fellowship will do it!

Friday, November 13th

Our Friday Workshops are filling up fast. Whether you’re just getting started with WordPress, or you’ve already got your own site up and running and want to learn about building your own themes or plugins, we have a workshop for all levels of users!

We will have coffee service all day for the entire weekend, courtesy of Downtown Credo! Friday’s lunch will be catered on-site by Nature’s Table Cafe. They’ll have a variety of sandwiches and wraps, as well as pasta and green salad, and some tasty treats for dessert!

Once the day is over at 4 p.m., we invite you to stick around (your parking pass is good all night) and enjoy some of Downtown Orlando! There are plenty of awesome bars and restaurants within walking distance of the venue, you can catch dinner AND a movie at the super-comfortable Plaza Cinema Cafe across the street, and we have an exclusive discount offer from our friends at SAK Comedy Labs! Show your WordCamp Orlando badge at the ticket counter to get $5 off your ticket price! They have two shows on Friday, the Duel of Fools show starts at 7:30 p.m. and their Gorilla Theater show starts at 9:30 p.m.

Saturday, November 14th

Registration opens at 8 a.m. and we’ll have hot cups of Downtown Credo coffee waiting for you! Feel free to come grab your swag early and mingle with our sponsors before the first sessions start at 9 a.m. – Noble Juice will also be in the house, sampling their fresh juice blends all morning.

Saturday’s lunch will be a real treat – we’ve partnered with 4 local restaurants within walking distance of the venue (and the weather looks like it’ll be not too hot, no rain!). You’ll get a lunch voucher Saturday morning at registration that’s good for a combo meal at any of the participating venues. Check out their menus on our Saturday Lunch page! Note that we will also have a limited amount of on-site catering from Gringos Locos for our attendees who cannot easily leave the venue. We want to make sure everyone eats well!

Sessions end at 5, but the fun doesn’t end! Grab a bite to eat in the area (again, your parking is good all night!) because our free After Party will start at 7 p.m. at Big Belly bar! Come mingle, network, and have a drink on us!

The party runs until 10 p.m, and if you’re a night owl, skip out early and head to SAK Comedy Labs (remember your $5 badge discount!) for their new King of the Hill improv show at 9:30 p.m.!

Sunday, November 15th

It’s the last day, but we still have plenty in store for you! Come early for our annual Networking Brunch from 9-10 a.m. – we’ll have light bites, coffee, and Noble Juice available for you to enjoy as you make new friends and reconnect with old ones.

Sunday’s lunch will be provided on-site – if you’re not from Florida you’ll get to experience the wonder that is the Publix Sub! And if you are from Florida, don’t worry, you also get PubSubs, you just know how delicious they are already. We’ll also have a variety of chips and snacks to keep you going for the rest of the sessions. Make sure you stick around for the closing remarks – some fun stuff is bound to happen there!

Remember – spread the word about WordCamp Orlando, because we don’t want anyone to miss out on this fantastic event! If you have any questions about the events, shoot us a message and we’ll get back to you ASAP!

For the second year in a row, WordCamp Orlando has invited Be The Match to register new bone marrow donors on Saturday morning. All it takes is 30 seconds and a cotton swab of your inner cheek and you could potentially save someone’s life! To learn more about Be the Match, click their banner below.

Additionally, our venues are taking part in a holiday toy drive, and we’ll be showing off their beautifully wrapped collection boxes in the hopes that you’ll fill them with new, unwrapped toys! All of the donations go to Toys for Tots and every lego kit, doll, play set, and action figure goes to put a smile on a child’s face this holiday season!

And of course, don’t forget that you can volunteer your time and talent at WordCamp Orlando by being a time keeper, speaker introducer, or camera wrangler. And we’re always in need of our top wizards and witches to help tutor others in the Happiness Bar which will be open all weekend!

Register Now for Friday’s WordPress Wizardry Workshops!

Our WordPress Headmasters have been hard at work developing the curriculum schedule for our new Friday WordPress Wizardry Workshops, and now tickets are available to grant you admission to this exclusive hands-on tutelage! Act fast, because just like the swiftest owl post carrier, these tickets won’t stay around for long!

Book Your Stay at WordCamp Orlando’s Official Enchanted Inn!

We’re making things at WordCamp Orlando even more magical this year with the introduction of our official enchanted inn! The Aloft Downtown Orlando has given us a limited number of rooms available at a bewitching rate of $159/night!

The Aloft hotel chain is a magical place for tech-savvy business travelers because it’s hooked up with all the stuff WordPress Wizards and Witches need to work, rest, and play! Check out our Hotel page for the exclusive registration portal.

Our faculty roster is complete! Join us November 13-15 and learn from these WordPress Professors of all things magical about our favorite web platform!

WordCamp Orlando tickets are flying away faster than a Golden Snitch, grab yours now before it’s too late!

Stephanie Brinley

Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Stephanie. Her toes were cold. Like many little girls, Stephanie loved to dance, she loved to draw, and she loved to try out every typeface available on the computer when designing birthday cards for her family. Several years passed, and the little girl grew up. Now Stephanie loves to dance, she loves to draw, and she maintains a library of countless typefaces so she can always have just the right one for birthday cards, logos, and websites. After discovering a place where her toes are sometimes warm, Stephanie moved her family and her business to North Florida, where she attempts to balance web design, homeschooling, and exploring the world of flavors she can invent in her kitchen.

David Khourshid

David Khourshid is a front-end web developer and speaker in Orlando, Florida. He is passionate about JavaScript, Sass, and cutting-edge front-end technologies. He is also a pianist and enjoys mathematics, and is constantly finding new ways to apply both math and music theory to web development.

Jean Perpillant

I am the owner of Design Theory, which is a local web design business based out of Orlando, FL. I’ve been freelancing in web design and photography for over 7 years. My main goal is to help people get their ideas and visions into reality.

Nathan Porter

After 10 years in implementing and advising on enterprise software solutions, Nate has ditched the suit and tie for T-shirts, jeans, and a mountain man beard. He’s totally serious about his work though—and the beard. When he’s not teleporting to meet with our clients or speaking at technology conferences, he leads our team of talented designers, developers, content creators, and yoga fanatics through the daily obstacle course of code, pixels, and deadlines.

Jonathan Brinley

Jonathan has been building WordPress websites and plugins for eight years, taking the plunge into full-time freelancing shortly thereafter. He has collaborated with the distributed team at Modern Tribe for five years to build delightful and creative solutions on top of the WordPress platform. When he’s not coding, Jonathan is busy homeschooling his two children and enjoying the beautiful weather of Northeast Florida.

http://xplus3.net/ • http://tri.be/ • http://flightless.us/

Chris Lawson

Chris Lawson is an Interactive Strategist that helps solve issues through the use of technology. With over a decade of digital product development and marketing, Chris has helped organizations from start-ups to Fortune 1000’s grow their digital footprint by crafting and growing their online communities.

Before co-founding Live Pulse, Chris was the Director of Marketing, Communications, and Strategic Partnerships at Ruckus, an early music and movie social network that grew to over 1000 college campuses and 2 million users, and was acquired by Total Music, a joint venture between Sony and Universal. Chris is also a serial entrepreneur and start-up junkie, having started five companies and working with dozens more.

Chris holds a B.S. in Advertising from the University of Florida and a M.A. in Communications in Digital Media from The Johns Hopkins University. Chris is also a ConvergeUS fellow. Co-Chaired by TechNet’s CEO, Rey Ramsey, and Twitter’s Co-Founder, Biz Stone, ConvergeUS drives technology-based breakthroughs for critical social problems and thus accelerates social innovation.

David Parsons

David Parsons, a recent Computer Science graduate over at The University of Central Florida, has been working with WordPress for over seven years now. His passion for the web originally started by making a simple website with WordPress back in high school. Over the years he has branched out his skill set with responsive design, web apps, SEO, theme and plugin development.

James Aubele

James Aubele attended the University of Pittsburgh where he got his masters of Arts Teaching and Rochester Institute of Technology for his MBA. He takes MBA topics and makes them practical for small business owners.

Andrea La-Rosa

Andrea has been a WordPress developer and website builder for nearly ten years and currently also servers as a technical consultant for several major startups and online businesses. She also has a strong background in community management, having professionally managed online communities and social networks of up to 8 million people, so her passion is helping businesses develop strong online communities with the WordPress platform. Her web development and consulting agency, WP Sesame, was recently named one of Seminole County’s Top 30 Small Businesses of 2015, which was super exciting. When not geeking out about all things WordPress, she resides in sunny Lake Mary, FL, which she enjoys very much.

Cliff Seal

Cliff is a Senior UX Engineer at Pardot, a Salesforce company, where he’s also the resident WordPress nerd.

He’s the co-founder multiple profitable side projects, such as Evermore and TuneDig. He co-organizes amUX, a morning meetup focused for local UXers. He’s an accomplished speaker who’s given talks around the world.

Cliff lives with his wife, April, in Atlanta, where he can be found at a concert, cycling around the city, or playing guitar.

Barry Nadler

Barry Nadler brings over two decades of experience in the learning and media industries. He has worked in several industries including news, entertainment, personal computer peripherals, conferences, enterprise software systems, and internet marketing. In those two decades, he has also owned three businesses.

Barry currently is the owner of eLearningDeconstructed.com, as well as a full-time Sr. Instructional Designer and Media Developer for the world’s largest financial services company – FIS Global.

Over the past three years, Barry has actively been involved with the local ATD chapter. He has hosted and presented at several events, been a board member for two years, and was the Director of Social Media for one year.

Our sponsors are world-class patrons of the magical WordPress arts! From outstanding WordPress-friendly web hosts to amazing plugins, we couldn’t do our WordPress work or our WordCamp without them!

Jetpack is a free WordPress plugin that simplifies managing your sites by connecting to WordPress.com. This connection enables Photon (global CDN for images), uptime monitoring, brute force protection, traffic-boosting tools, single sign on, multiple site management, and automatic or bulk plugin updates. Additionally Jetpack includes several features that help you customize the look-and-feel of your site without needing extra plugins. More information can be found at jetpack.me

MainWP brings full control to your WordPress management with a simple, streamlined interface that lets you control all your sites in a snap. Now schedule automated backups, monitor up-time, manage content and plugins across multiple sites with push-button ease.

MainWP is self-hosted, open source and free. You can download it directly from WordPress.org and take advantage of a cutting-edge, open-source solution that helps you get more done in less time. You get one central and intuitive Dashboard for 1-click updates, adding and editing posts and pages, and creating backups for all connected sites.

You can also broaden the scope of MainWP and make it your own using purpose-built Extensions designed to expand its capabilities. Choose from a wide selection of add-ons including backups, SEO, marketing, security, maintenance and more, MainWP gives you a powerful line-up of Extensions to choose from.

With MainWP, it’s time to make WordPress management effortlessly efficient.

These WordPress Professors are masters of the design arts, powerful business wizards, and self-taught conjurers of creative spells and potions for amazing web work! Tickets for WordCamp Orlando are apparating away, grab yours now before it’s too late!

Jessica Stewart

Jessica, a graduate in Video Game Design at UCF, found her calling as a web developer with BrandCo after dabbling in WordPress. She also finds it strange to talk about herself in the third person.

Adam Soucie

Adam Soucie is the Founder and CEO of Orlando web development agency Impossibly Creative. He is a member of the WordPress Orlando organizing committee where he helps wrangle both monthly Meetups and WordCamp Orlando. You can find more of Adam’s musings on WordPress on at impossiblycreative.com.

Scott Buscemi

Scott Buscemi started his web & app development agency at the age of 17. Since then, he graduated from college before he turned 21 and has successfully grown Luminary Web Strategies into a reputable company that builds and manages eCommerce systems and interactive websites for organizations across the globe.

Judi Knight

I run a small agency, New Tricks to empower companies to grow their businesses helping them sell online as easily as they can in person – with a stellar WordPress website. We are fanatics about making websites that people like to use. This is my fifth year conjuring WordCamp Atlanta with a great team from our WordPress Meetup Community.

James Tryon

My name is James Tryon. I’m Creative Director of WP Valet, founder of Easily Amused, Inc, and a father of 2. I’m also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Orlando and the WordPress Orlando meetup group. I’ve been in the creative industry for more than 17 years and have an eye for design and usability. I also possess the know-how to plan, design, and code it all if needed.

An avid collector of random awesomeness and thrift-store artifacts, I’m always finding something interesting to spark my creativity. When I’m not working, I am more than likely building something, playing with toys, or hanging with my friends and family.

Adam Bradford

Unicorns are the best.

Josh Shashaty

I am the Lead Developer of WP Valet. I’m primarily a back-end developer with strong passions in workflow, team collaboration, and making my life efficient/easier. I’ve been involved with WordPress since 2010.

Tim Sisson

Tim loves WordPress and enjoys leveraging it to help businesses meet their needs. He leads the Customer Community Team at InMotion Hosting where they create documentation and help customers with issues related to WordPress. He’s passionate about all things nonprofit and eCommerce.

When he’s not tinkering with WordPress he spends his time on adventures with his wife Lisa, three daughters Autumn, Stella, and Petra.

Scott Mann

I’ve been managing teams of creatives and makers in non-meatspace with my company Highforge since 2001. I was an early adopter of WordPress for delivering powerful websites to small and medium businesses and we’re big fans of Genesis these days. Highforge is also one of the few small WordPress shops that has deep experience with the Shopify platform.

I enjoy speaking and storytelling, I’m a certified Google Adwords Partner, and I’m a social impact advocate in Orlando. I founded Highforge in 2001 as a boutique digital agency with the purpose of helping good people grow good businesses online. Since then our agency has helped hundreds of businesses reach millions of customers. Some of our clients include Adventist, Florida Hospital, Image Skincare, Dynafire, Global VRS, Rebuild Globally and Florida Abolitionist.

I’m a gamer and I play racquetball recklessly in my free time. I’m also an advocate for Be The Match, a non-profit organization that saves lives.

Zac Gordon

Zac Gordon teaches WordPress for Treehouse, the online technology school. Before that he taught WordPress, web design and web development at the high school and college level. In addition to teaching, Zac runs a Web Hosting for Students.

Topher DeRosia

Currently Chief Documentarian for Easy Digital Downloads, Topher has been the CTO of a WordPress based startup, freelanced, been part of a WordPress VIP agency, and worked in a cubicle farm. He’s been a WordPress developer for 5 years now, and a general web developer for 20 years.

And check out some more of our amazing sponsors – true patrons of the magical WordPress arts!

From its inception in 1998, (mt) Media Temple has been on a mission to help people and businesses succeed online.

Over 125,000 customers in 100 countries now rely on Media Temple’s tools for domain registration, web hosting, business applications, virtual servers, and other cloud services to power more than 1.5 million websites. With 200 dedicated, U.S.-based employees, Media Temple takes pride in our 24/7 customer support. Our customers range from everyday people to top bloggers, creative professionals, and small businesses, as well as large enterprises like Starbucks, Adidas, Samsung, and Toyota.

More information can be found anytime on the web at http://mediatemple.com or on Twitter @MediaTemple.

Since 2008, iThemes has been creating WordPress tools to help you build and grow your freelance web design business with WordPress.

The original WordPress backup plugin to backup, restore & move WordPress.

More WordPress Professors have joined our magical ministry! Let them teach you to conjure new plugins, apparate your website to new levels of amazing, and charm your visitors with beautiful visuals! Don’t forget, tickets are now on sale!

Mike Hansen

Mike Hansen is a WordPress Developer and core contributor working on the Open Source Team at Bluehost. He is active in his local community, lead organizer for WordCamp SLC and co-organizer for the UtahWP meetup. He enjoys helping WordPress users solve their problems.

Thomas Giella

Thomas is in charge of venue logistics, lunch, signage placement, and has all around been an integral part of WordCamp Tampa. Thomas is the owner of Gear Spinners LLC. A company whose sole goal is to provide small to medium businesses great online solutions and online presence. Thomas began his career with a degree in design in 2006, leading to a degree in management in 2011. Started using WordPress in 2007. In his spare time, Thomas enjoys the fruits of life including Xbox 360, learning Python on Raspberry Pi, family, and friends.

Michelle Schulp

Michelle is an independent graphic designer in Minneapolis (formerly Chicago). Her formal education is in design including print, branding, packaging, etc., with additional education in Psychology and Sociology, all tying together in a love of How To Solve Problems. Lately she has been specializing in WordPress websites and high-end presentations for her clients. She loves the WordPress community and speaks/volunteers/organizes at WordCamps and events around the country.

Frank Corso

Frank is the founder and president of My Local Webstop and has been working with WordPress since 2009. He is the lead developer of Quiz Master Next. He is an organizer of the Gainesville WordPress Meetup where he helps WordPress users of all levels. When not focused on improving sites, he actively blogs and speaks about WordPress, Security, and Business. Above all else, he enjoys spending time with his wife and daughter.

Chris Edwards

Chris is currently the Director of Technology at Effin Amazing, an analytics and growth consultancy. He is a 16-year Internet marketing veteran with experience in web design & development, search engine optimization, online marketing, social media marketing and mobile development. He specializes in WordPress custom development utilizing either Genesis Framework or underscores. Chris has held development and Internet marketing positions in some of Orlando’s top technology companies.

Angelica Yarde

From a child experimenting with as many artistic outlets as possible, Angelica found her specialty in design. With a focus in identity design, print design, and project management, she enjoys creating solutions for brands of all sizes.

She uses her nine years of experience to combine the world of digital aesthetics with strategic functionality to develop and implement successful branding techniques.

If she’s not curating her extensive typeface collection, Angelica can be found on her yoga mat, seeking inspiration, or connecting with local creatives over chai tea lattes.

Jesse Petersen

Husband. Adoptive Dad x1. Foster dad x28. Preferred Genesis framework developer. Founder: GenesisThe.me :: Genesis Product Manager @ thewpvalet.com :: ISTJ

Nile Flores

Nile Flores is a long time WordPress designer and Developer. While she grew up a military brat, she’s settled in the St. Louis metro east region. Nile blogs at Blondish.net, where she covers topics on WordPress, Blogging, SEO, Social Media, and Web Design.

She also loves contributing to WordPress, and that includes speaking at WordCamps across the United States. She loves helping people and supporting Open Source projects.

In other news, Nile is a proud support member at Team Yoast. She also runs a 7,000 member Facebook roup dedicated to helping WordPressers, called All About WordPress. When Nile isn’t knee deep in coding and design, she’s spending time with her son, who is also a WordPress user.

Micah Wood

Micah is an Atlanta-based, full-stack developer committed to continuously improving his craft and sharing his insights with the development community. He is currently the CTO at NewClarity Consulting, LLC which specializes in building websites and applications on the WordPress platform for enterprise clients.

Chris Wiegman

Chris is a Senior Web Engineer for 10up and has been working on WordPress since 2008. Before joining 10up Chris built one of the largest security plugins in the WordPress community as well as numerous other plugins and solutions. When not coding Chris loves to teach and has presented at numerous WordCamps and other conferences as well as taught computer security for St. Edward’s University and other University courses ranging from computers to aviation.

We couldn’t run such an extraordinary school of WordPress wizardry without the support of our generous sponsors! Big thanks to the following sponsors!

Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over one million WordPress sites. Their goal is to provide outstanding hosting services and customer support for the best possible price. Bluehost is also constantly innovating and upgrading their services and infrastructure at no additional cost to their customers. Join the millions of other website owners that have already chosen Bluehost and see how they can help you with your site.

Pantheon is the website management platform top developers, marketers, and IT use to build, launch and run all their Drupal & WordPress websites.

Pantheon includes all of the tools professional developers need to build best-practice sites—like staging environments, version control, backups and workflow. Powering 80,000+ sites with hundreds of millions of page views, Pantheon’s container-based infrastructure allows you to launch websites faster, without worrying about traffic spikes, security or performance. It’s free in development. You can scale in software on the same infrastructure from day one, and never touch a server again. Create your free account now!

You should already have received your post by owl announcing that tickets are now on sale for your classes at the Magical Ministry of WordPress. Now that we are accepting new WordPress wizards and witches, we are ready to reveal the first round of your WordPress Professors!

Jeffrey De Wit

Just a humble guy that spends time making the web better, one website at a time.

Front-end developer/developer lead at Highforge and primarily focused on building accessible websites.

I’ve built government websites under the strict Dutch web guidelines for three years before moving to Florida and finding employment with a digital agency that uses WordPress, Django, and Shopify to build websites.

Brian Jessee

I am an independent developer and work with Modern Tribe doing support and development on the Events Calendar, where in the last year I personally supported over seven thousand (7,000) inquiries. Since 2012, I have I supported and developed my own plugin, the Coupon Creator. Because of these roles, I have gained extensive experience supporting WordPress plugins.

Bess Auer

Bess Auer is the founder of the Florida Blogger & Social Media Conference (FLBlogCon), a one-day gathering of the state’s biggest bloggers and social media pros. Bess is dedicated to helping bloggers grow and monetize their websites through her annual conference and through her website GottaGetBlogging.com. In her other life, she’s owner of FloridaSwimNetwork.com, a WordPress Multisite that covers competitive swimming through blogging, video, and live streaming, including broadcasting for the University of Florida, the SEC Network, and ESPN.

Brian Richards

Brian is the creator of WPSessions.com and a Senior Solutions Specialist with Crowd Favorite. He has been using WordPress since 2007 (version 2.3). Over these last several years Brian has had the opportunity to work with many amazing WordPress experts and agencies and help develop sites for Microsoft, Disney, TIME, YMCA, and numerous others. Brian has an affinity for self-directed learning and helping others develop skills and workflows to better solve important and complicated problems.

Taylor McCaslin

Taylor McCaslin is a Technical Product Manager living in Austin, Texas. He currently works at WP Engine, a managed hosting platform for websites and apps built with WordPress. WordPress has been Taylor’s platform of choice for over 5 years. He even paid his way through college by freelancing as a WordPress developer!

Since then, Taylor has created custom WordPress themes and plugins for a large range of clients from SMBs to multinational corporations. Previously, Taylor helped people find jobs as an Interaction Designer at the world’s largest job search engine, Indeed.com. Before that, he worked as a Product Design Intern at Bazaarvoice. Taylor graduated from UT Austin in 2013, where he studied business, digital art and media, theatre, and computer science.

When not pushing pixels or coding, Taylor can be found geeking out with the latest tech gadget or experiencing the rich Austin, Texas art scene. You can learn more about Taylor at taylormccaslin.com or by following him @Taylor4484.

Josh Pollock

Josh, is the owner of, and a developer for CalderaWP, makers of fine WordPress plugins including Caldera Forms, a drag and drop, responsive form builder and URL Builder, the visual editor for WordPress permalinks. He also writes about WordPress for many sites and listens to a lot of heavy metal, and is trying very hard not to become a coffee snob.

We will announce more Professors in a few days. In the meantime, grab your admission tickets now for a weekend of magical learning! Also keep your eyes peeled for another owl with post regarding special lessons on Friday – limited to only a small number of witches and wizards! And our House Elves are working on a special event for our little WordPress wizards and witches in training – details to come soon!