Author: Lisa Melegari

This year we did something a little different. Instead of an after party right after camp, we’re giving you extra time to explore Orlando and play tourist for an evening before joining back up with us for more fun!

Our official after party will be at Game Changers from 9:00 pm until 11:00 pm (or later if you want!) where we’ll have some light appetizers and a chance to show off your vocal skills at karaoke!

Game Changers 
7500 International Drive
Orlando, FL 32819

What should I do before 9 pm?

Grab your new friends and go out for a group dinner! Our venue is just minutes away from the heart of International Drive (Orlando’s main tourist district) and there are hundreds of restaurants to visit.

While there are plenty of chains nearby, here are some of our picks for local eats.

Nile Ethiopian
7048 International Dr
Orlando, FL 32819

If you’ve never experienced Ethiopian dining and you enjoy sharing food with friends, this is a great option! Share platters of delicious foods (vegetarian friendly options, too!) and eat with your hands using delicious Injera bread.

FishBones
6707 Sand Lake Road
Orlando, FL 32819

Delicious steaks and dynamite seafood. Wonderful atmosphere for quiet conversation and a great bar with specials for Happy Hour.

Pointe Orlando
9101 International Drive
Orlando, FL 32819

This two-story entertainment destination is full of dining options, shops, and entertainment. Highlights include the Funky Monkey Wine Bar, Cuba Libre, Marlow’s Tavern, and The Pub (last year’s after party location!)

Boston Lobster Feast
8731 International Dr
Orlando, FL 32819

If you’ve ever wanted to eat your weight in seafood but don’t want to mortgage your house to do so, this is your place! All you can eat buffet of seafood plus other entrees, sides, dessert and more.

Cafe Tu Tu Tango
8625 International Dr
Orlando, FL 32819

You’ll find a delicious mix of art and food at this eclectic spot. Tastes of the Mediterranean  and tapas-style dining grace your table while area artists create new masterpieces nearby – and there’s even spontaneous entertainment on most nights!

Howl at the Moon
8815 International Dr
Orlando, FL 32819

Just looking for drinks? Join in the fun at Orlando’s iconic dueling piano bar!

Thank you all for an AMAZING response this year! We’ve sold out of our original limit of tickets, but don’t despair!

We are talking with our venue to determine if we can increase our catering counts a bit more to open more tickets. You won’t be guaranteed swag, but you’ll still be able to participate in all the fun!

If we can add more attendees, new tickets will go on sale on Friday, November 10th at 5pm EST.

There will be a VERY limited number released – less than 50 – so make sure you are ready to purchase when they go live!

WordCamp Orlando is ecstatic to feature an up-and-coming developer as our 2017 keynote: Sam Smith!

Sam is currently a Firefighter Paramedic who, for the past year, has been using WordPress to leverage a side gig. He works part-time for an agency, CE Squared, as a Web Developer and Digital Marketer. When Sam isn’t driving a firetruck he is creating and maintaining websites for clients. His goal is to continue learning as much as he can about WordPress and to give back to the community that has helped him so much.

Sam’s keynote will take us through his journey of self-taught WordPress discovery and inspire you to take charge of your career goals to get where you find your passion!

With our Keynote secure, we can now announce that the full schedule and session descriptions are up for your review! Start planning your days now – there’s so much to see!

Remember, tickets are still on sale and you don’t want to miss another amazing year at WordCamp Orlando!

In our darkest hour, these superheroes banded together to join our ranks and defeat the evil of the Internet!

Ok, no one can truly do that – but they are helping expand our knowledge of accessible site design, proper SEO, good coding, and most of all, the importance of open source!

Alicya Simmons

Brain Health Expert & Hypnotherapist: Affiliate of Dr. Daniel Amen Clinics
12 years of Hypnotherapy experience in helping people go into trance in their own mind to break patterns and behaviors that no longer serve them- business – personal – and self -identity. Data on your brain is supplemented by science based evidence that clinically supports brain wave speed, regions of your brain that is not working hard enough and that is working too hard. Solutions and strategies to function at optimal levels and enjoy doing it.

Rob Ruiz

Rob Ruiz has been doing web design/development for over 10 years now and a WordPress user for five years. He’s been developing plugins and themes for a little over three years now. Rob also does a lot of graphic design, UI/UX design, and teaching. He is also the lead organizer for WP Omaha and co-organizes Wordcamp Omaha.

He works a full-time position at Orion Advisor Services as a WordPress Software Engineer developing custom WordPress-based solutions that integrate a variety of web services and REST APIs with an industry leading Investment Advisor software platform. He is also the owner of Bizzle Designs, which specializes in extremely customized WordPress-based websites for small-to-medium-sized businesses of all kinds.

Thomas Giella

Thomas is the owner of Complete I.T. Service and Solutions. A company whose sole goal is to provide businesses simple website solutions and office network solutions. Thomas began his career with a degree in design in 2006, leading to a degree in management in 2011. Thomas is also the developer behind Divi Mobile Menu, a popular Divi Theme Plugin. He has also been a WordCamp Tampa organizer since 2014, and was the lead WordCamp Tampa organizer in 2016.

Joshua Walker

Joshua Walker is an honorable Army Vet turned tech looking to shake up the world with Cloud, Code and Big Data.

Adam Soucie

Adam Soucie is a WordPress developer based in Orlando, FL. Adam has participated on the core WordPress Accessibility Team and is also a member of the WordPress Orlando & WordCamp Orlando organizing teams.

For more information on Adam, visit adamsoucie.com or impossiblycreative.com.

James Tryon

The Creative Director & founder of Easily Amused, lead ambassador of Wapu.us, Husband and father of 3. James is also one of the co-organizers of WordCamp Orlando and the WordPress Orlando meetup group. He’s been in the creative industry for more than 18 years and has an eye for design & usability. He also possesses the know-how to plan, design, code, and market it all if needed.

An avid collector of random awesomeness, thrift-store artifacts, and some just plain weird crap, James is always finding something interesting to spark his creativity. When he’s not working, you can find him building/creating something, playing with toys, or hanging with friends and family.

Angel Yarde

Angelica Yarde is the co-founder of Sevenality, a brand strategy agency, located in Orlando, Florida. She is also the owner of Studio 404 Paper and co-host of the Heart + Hustle Podcast, a weekly podcast focused on giving creative entrepreneurs the tools they need to achieve with life-work balance. She has been a designer and developer for over a decade and is passionate about helping brands achieve their goals using design and user-experience based solutions.

Andrew Norcross

Andrew (or Norcross, as most know him) is a Senior Engineer and Developer Advocate at Liquid Web, focusing on internal product development and being a voice inside the WP community itself.

Previously, Norcross was the founder and lead developer of Reaktiv Studios, an agency focused on solving complex problems with killer WordPress solutions. After quite a few years in the finance industry, Norcross switched to coding and hasn’t looked back. He’s got experience in both the service game — Reaktiv Studios is a WordPress VIP Featured Partner, helping top-tier clients with their WordPress development— and the product game, with Reaktiv’s flagship plugin, Design Palette Pro, continually being developed and supported. An organizer for WordCamp Tampa, Norcross loves to keep giving back to the WordPress community with free plugins, education talks at conferences, and core contribution to WordPress. Norcross lives in Tampa, Florida with his amazing son and a rescue dog that believes he’s a human.

Thank you all for your patience after a hurricane once again puts a slight delay on WCORL things.  We’re working on finalizing the last of the speakers and will finish announcements this week with the schedule going up next week.

Tickets are finally on sale for the weekend, as well as microsponsor tickets and KidsCamp!

We are also working on finding a suitable venue for Friday, November 10th to hold a Workshop day as we have done in the past. If we can secure a venue, we will put up separate tickets for workshops only – so don’t wait to buy your weekend tickets!

Refunds are available until October 27th at 9AM. Any tickets purchased after October 30th are not guaranteed a T-shirt – so get your ticket sooner than later!

Note: The Call for speakers is closed, and we are not accepting new speakers. We received a record number of submissions and thank you for your support!

Sorry for the delay in announcements, our organization team was caught by a supervillain. Thankfully, a new group of superheroes appeared and saved us, and we were so grateful we inducted them into the WCORL Speaker League!

Miles Lifton

Miles, who is currently 11 years old, lives to learn about tech. With several years of study already under his belt, Miles specializes in C++ and web development languages, but also finds time to study object oriented programming.

Miles contributes as a passionate committee member for Be The Difference Foundation, Sophia’s Hope, and Polyblox Totems educational toys.

When hanging out at home, Miles can be found solving Rubix cubes of all shapes and sizes, practicing American Sign Language, and working on his newest web project using WordPress www.LanguageIsNotaBarrier.com a site devoted to helping people around the world foster world peace. You can find him on Twitter at @KidCoderDev.

Nathan Ingram

Nathan is the Host at iThemes Training where he teaches WordPress and freelance business development topics via live webinar.

He is also the creator of >ADVANCE Coaching. He works with WordPress web developers individually and in groups to help them become more successful in their freelance businesses.

Nathan has been a freelance web developer since 1995, and is based in Birmingham, Alabama where he is the lead organizer of WordCamp Birmingham and co-organizer of the Birmingham WordPress Meetup.

You can learn more about Nathan at https://nathaningram.com.

Neha Patel

Neha is a Web Developer and Designer by profession, an Artist and an Entrepreneur at heart. She is a WordPress Enthusiast who runs and operates a Business of her own in Montreal, Canada and work at a multi million dollar marketing firm as a Digital projects specialist. She likes how WordPress is such an amazing platform to build great things and how millions of people can use it to achieve their passion with a little bit of dedication. She also mentors at a non profit organization called Ladies Learning Code and other such organizations that make a difference.
Twitter | LinkedIn | Website

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. Nile also works as an Infection Cleanup Specialist at WP Fix It.

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.

Nile founded and runs a 9,000 member Facebook group 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.

Olivia Skrzypek

Energetic, intelligent, fast learning and devoted… Those are just a few words to describe Olivia. She is very passionate about learning and exploring new things, is very motivated, and not afraid to take new challenges.

She worked for a large corporation for 12 years. It was okay, but Olivia always felt like she was missing something. Her husband worked from home as a Freelancer at the time, and every day when she had to leave for work and saw him in his pajamas by the computer, drinking his coffee and listening to the music – she was simply jealous. One day she just decided to do something about it.

Olivia decided to start her own company and ever since then she has been working as a Web Designer and Search Engine Optimization consultant. She loves working with different businesses and helping them their business endeavor.

Olivia’s keys to success are good time management and organization.

Patrick Alexander

Patrick Alexander is the CEO and founder of WPBICO, an all in one WordPress platform which provides every tool (domain,email,theme,hosting, plugins & training) required for a WP website at one affordable price. An avid WordPress enthusiast and lover of all things tech, Patrick has devoted himself to the tech industry for over 15 years gaining extensive experience in Programming, Web Development, System Administration and Technician; and a resume with related positions in the U.S military, Universities and several Internet Start Ups. He is also the founder of several startups www.balambico.co, www.wpbico.com and www.collegepaperreview.com.

Pratik Ghela

Working as a CTO at PSD To Manythings and Founder at PressMate, Pratik has been actively involved with WordPress since 2012. While working at PSD To Manythings, he and his team has managed to develop about 500+ WordPress websites. Programming since 2008, he lately moved into the role of Customer Happiness and makes sure his customers are happy. His core interests revolve around Frontend Development , WordPress & PHP.

Aaron Reimann

Aaron is a designer that turned into a developer and now an agency owner (but he still tries to write code when he can). He’s been working with WordPress since 2008 and has worked with a couple of Fortune 100 companies but also with the local sewing machine shop. Aaron co-leads a WordPress developer Meetup and the Atlanta WordPress Meetup.

Dwayne McDaniel

Dwayne has been working in tech and open source sales since 2005. He knew as soon as he started working with Java middleware developers he never wanted to work outside of open source ever again. Dwayne first started building in Drupal and WordPress when he needed to build projects for the San Francisco Improv scene. He fell in the love the community of developers and then found his position at Pantheon at the end of 2013.
As a Community and Agency Success Manager he has had the privilege of presenting at Stanford DrupalCamp, Drupal Northern Lights (Iceland), WordCamp Europe and many other conferences.
Outside of tech he loves producing and performing improv theater, and also loves comic books and karaoke!!!
Reach out at https://mcdwayne.com or on twitter @mcdwayne

Evan Mullins

Evan Mullins uses WordPress daily at the office as well as for his own projects. He is currently Lead Web Developer at Brown Bag Marketing, an integrated marketing agency in Atlanta. He blogs at circlecube.com and has even been known to dream in WordPress. With a background in digital media art, he now embraces the dark side and has found a strong creative outlet programming websites. Evan loves the problem solving aspect of web development and shines at harnessing WordPress as a true CMS & making interactive designs interactive. He strives to make the web a prettier, more pleasant and all-around better place for you & your grandma. Outside of work, Evan is a dedicated husband, father of four and soccer coach who loves rock music, audiobooks, chocolate and good pizza.

Irina Blumenfeld

Irina Blumenfeld is a founder of Netmagik, a WordPress development agency, based in Orlando. She has been building websites for more than 15 years. Irina is passionate about website performance and security.

John Hughes

Golf Professional, Entrepreneur, and WordPress User

Micah Wood

Micah Wood is the Technical Director at Narwhal Digital, an agency in Atlanta. He’s written and publicly released over a dozen WordPress plugins, is a core contributor and specializes in enterprise WordPress development. He has a passion for learning best practices and sharing his knowledge with the greater WordPress community.

Michelle Schulp

Michelle is an independent graphic designer and frontend developer in Minneapolis. Prior to beginning her career, she studied Visual Communications, with minors in Psychology and Sociology. As her work progressed, she also branched into front-end development and user experience design to round our her skillset. This combination of disciplines led her to adopt a strategy-based approach to design, focused on solving tangible problems and achieving real goals based on how people think.

She loves the open source community, and when she is not working on projects she speaks/volunteers/organizes at events and workshops around the country. Her passions are communication and empowerment, and she believes in the power of “Why?”

We had a record – or should we say – “super” year of talk submissions this year! While we wish we could accept everyone into the WCORL Speaker League, time only allows us to choose the speakers with the powers we need most.

That being said, join us as we reveal some of the superpowered speakers for WCORL 2017!

Alex Sanfilippo

Alex specializes in business consulting and life coaching. He’s also passionate about WordPress! His purpose is to help businesses and individuals grow and develop into their full potential. His vision is to help you achieve yours.

Brian Richards

Brian Richards, creator of WPSessions.com, has been using WordPress since 2007 and training and leading development teams since 2011. In addition to investing his time into training, Brian has had the opportunity to work with many amazing WordPress agencies and experts over these last several years. This has allowed Brian to help develop sites for Microsoft, Disney, TIME, YMCA, and numerous others. Brian has an affinity for self-directed learning and helping others to develop skills and workflows to better solve important and complicated problems. He can’t resist helping good people do great things.

Carol Gann

Carol understands the beauty and power of WordPress, that it can give a voice to people who otherwise may not be heard. Carol is a WordPress developer, public speaker, consultant and WordPress trainer. She is a Lead Generation Specialist and Project manager for Orlando Web Wizard a local WordPress hosting and development company.

Chad Windnagle

Chad Windnagle is an experienced software engineer who has experience working with a wide array of software development teams, languages, and organizations. He has worked with nearly every well known, and even some obscure CMS on the market – examples include WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. He spent nearly 10 years working with the Joomla Project with roles varying from the Joomla Framework Development team, Google Summer of Code coordinator, and documentation team member. He is currently working as an software engineer in Port Orange, Florida.

Chris Edwards

Chris is co-owner of CE Squared, a WordPress Maintenance and Marketing agency. He is a 17-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 and is very active in the WordPress Orlando community. Chris has held development and Internet marketing positions in some of Orlando’s top technology companies.

Chris Wiegman

Chris is a developer for UF Health at the University of Florida who has been working on WordPress since 2008. Over the years he built one of the largest security plugins on WordPress.org as well as numerous other plugins, themes and other 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.

Christina Siegler

Christina is the Director of Operations and Project Management at Crossfield Digital. What does that mean? She plans out resourcing and leads the project teams on all of the awesome sites and apps we build. Christina loves process and think it is important to provide a fun and rewarding working environment for my team and clients. She has over 7 years of Project Management and is a certified Scrum Master. Yay process! In her free time you can find her running! Last year she did the “Dopey Challenge” which consisted of a 5K, 10K, Half Marathon and Marathon- in FOUR days! Because of all the running, she is super obsessed with carbs- most notably donuts and french fries.

Are you interested in WordCamp Orlando but are not exactly sure what we are all about? No problem! We’ve put together a handy FAQ to answer your most common questions.

Q. What level of WordPress knowledge do I need to attend?

A. None! Seriously, we have talks and workshops for every level of WordPress user, from those of you who don’t even have a site yet to developers, designers, and marketers.

Q. How much does WordCamp Orlando cost?

A. Thanks to the generosity of our sponsors, we are able to keep the costs down to a mere $20 a day. For that $20 you get:

• Access to all talks and workshops that day.
• All-day coffee and hot tea service.
• Hot, catered lunch by the Rosen College Catering Class.
• Swag from us and our sponsors.
• A WordCamp Orlando 2017 T-shirt
• Access to the Happiness Bar (WordPress free help desk)
• Networking opportunities with local and out of town WordPress users, professionals, and companies.
• Attendance to our after party to mingle and relax after a day of learning.

If you want to help make WordCamp Orlando a success and get your company’s name out in front of 400 attendees, we’d love to have you as a sponsor!

Q. What qualifications do I need to be a speaker?

A. You need to have information that would be useful to WordPress users OR people who make things on the Internet. You don’t need to have prior speaking experience, but it is helpful to have some to show us that your presentation will be beneficial to our attendees. Take a look at our Speaker FAQs for more info!

Q. Can I bring my kids?

A. Children are welcome at WordCamp Orlando as long as they are well-behaved and have a ticket to participate in the events. For the 7-14 crowd we have KidsCamp, now in its third year, to teach the next generation of WordPress Superheroes, bloggers, and Internetters. If your child is already WordPress-savvy they can attend WordCamp Orlando’s full programming with a regular ticket.

The WordCamp Orlando team is gearing up for another fantastic year of learning, networking, and fun!

WordCamp Orlando will take place November 11-12, 2017 at the Rosen School of Hospitality Management.

We are currently accepting sponsors and speakers – two of the most important types of heroes necessary to make our camp a success!

Apply to be a speaker here. Speaker submissions are now closed.

Inquire about sponsorship here.

To stay updated with the latest news, please use the form to sign up for our announcements, follow us on Twitter (@WordCampOrlando) and like our Facebook Page.