We had a great turnout this month – even with the Cards game happening just a few blocks down the street. Thanks to everyone who came out!
Main Event
The main topic of the night was covering some handy tools […]

Two more videos have been published from WordCamp St. Louis 2014! This time we have Konstantin Obenland talking about options, transients, and theme mods – Oh […]

We’re famous! Well, famous enough to have the talented Benjamin S. Hammond record our last Meetup. This impromptu recording in our new space was done by the fine folks over at STLTechTalk.com.

You can check out […]

Since we recently changed venues for the General Meetup, and we haven’t asked in a while about our meeting times, we put together a short survey to check-in on how things are going. It’s 3 short multiple choice […]

We just got an email from the fine folks at WordPress.tv letting us know that the first of the recorded sessions from WordCamp St. Louis 2014 are now online.

The first one is from Chris Koerner and covers How to Get Involved in the WordPress Community.

As the rest of the videos are edited, uploaded, and approved they will show up under the WordCamp St. Louis 2014 page.

A big thanks to Chris Miller for agreeing to help edit and produce the videos. A hearty thanks to all the volunteers who helped to record the sessions throughout the day. Last, but not least, a big hug to the folks at WordPress.tv for hosting our videos for the world to see.

If anyone is interested in adding subtitles or translations for not only these videos, but any others on WordPress.tv, you should get involved!

After a roller coaster of scheduling fun we had our first Meetup in our new location at Lab1500 (home of Pushup). We talked about Themes and Plugins. For those who couldn’t make it we put together some notes from […]

A quick update. We won’t be having our General WordPress meetup at goBrandgo! moving forward. We’d like to thank the folks at GBG for the past 4 years of being gracious hosts and providing our rag-tag group a place to hang our hat. Thank you and good luck to you all in your future endeavors.

We were going to announce this at our last meetup there tomorrow night, but there was a scheduling snafu that has us moving a month earlier. I apologize for the short notice and hope everyone can still make it.

The leaders at GBG were kind enough to get us in contact with Dan Lohman at Pushup and Lab1500.  I met with Dan and Lindi and we talked about giving Lab1500 a chance. They have a nice space, and the location is right in the heart of the lively activity on Washington Ave.

The plan was to let the community know about our need to find a new home and see if Lab1500 would be a good fit. Since we’re moving a little sooner than anticipated we hope you understand and appreciate your feedback and thoughts.

We’re also going to take this opportunity to look at the time and date for the General meetup. Does the 3rd Wednesday of the month at 6pm still work for everyone? Join us tomorrow night and we’ll figure it out together.

Meetup Event Details

If you’ve been to the last few of our Meeups (both the Dev and General meetings) you may have noticed JJ Hammond and his crew. They run a technology news and community site for the St. Louis area called STL Tech […]

Editors note: This is a guest post by the wonderfully talented Tina Eaton from Integrity. If you’d like to be a guest writer here on STL WP, let us know.

Originally a traditionally trained journalist, I […]

We’re looking for folks in the St. Louis community to be guest writers here on  The St. Louis WordPress Community site.

Why would you want to write? It’s a great opportunity to get feedback, share ideas, toot […]

One of the more tricky aspects of using WordPress has nothing to do with the software itself, but trying to find a  good image to use as a visual anchor for your posts.

Adding an image to your posts is a great way to draw attention to an article and really make your writing stand out.

Not everyone has a large budget or the skills of photography to find a perfect photo for every post. Personally, even if I had both, I wouldn’t have the time to go out and shoot the specific image I needed.

The biggest boon to finding suitable photography is Creative Commons. Simply put, Creative Commons is a way for artists to preemptively declare licensing for their work. You can license your work under various versions of Creative Commons licenses and folks can use them accordingly without having to pre-negotiate terms.

Most of the time (remember, I am not a lawyer) you can use photos with a Creative Commons license for your work without having to contact the original artist. The catch, which isn’t insane to expect, is that you have to provide proper attribution to the author for their work. Basically, you have to give credit to the original artist.

My favorite solution to find Creative Common licensed photography is Flickr.

Why Flickr? The library is rich, hundreds of thousands of photos, and incredibly diverse, with Flickr users coming from all walks of life from around the world.

They were also one of the first photo sharing services to enable folks to license their photos under Creative Commons. You can search across all of Flickr, and using the Advanced Search Feature, filter to just show photos with a Creative Common license. Here’s an example search for “puppy dogs“.

You can easily see the license for any photo on Flickr in the photo sidebar.

Then, when using the photo, you can add something like this in your post (under the photo, in the post meta tags, or at the bottom):

Photo by Steve Wall –  licensed under Creative Commons

I hope this is a helpful introduction to Creative Commons and finding strong photos for your posts. If you have more ideas, suggestions, or feedback, please leave a note below.

P. S. There are  many more collections and options that have been talked about else ware on the web. Two other useful articles are this one from demosthenes.info and another from Dustin Senos on Medium.

Photo by Steve Wall –  licensed under Creative Commons

I was reading this thread on reddit the other day which asked the question, “Why do people hide the fact that they use WordPress as their sites backend/framework?”

There’s some prettying interesting […]

I’ve worked with a few clients that have a well established social media presence with Facebook who would ask, “Why do I need my own website? We already communicate and engage with our audience with Facebook.”

My counter, more often than not, is that you don’t control Facebook and are beholden to their whims when it comes to the experience of interacting with your business. If they want to change the way your page looks or works, they will do so for their benefit, not yours. Now, most times these changes are aligned as Facebook wants people to use their service, but recently there’s been some concern over how Facebook is handling the reach of pages.

From an article on PetaPixel regarding the decline in reach with Facebook pages:

“Back in December, the company acknowledged that the reach per post — in other words, how many of your followers see your post in their News Feeds — has declined. Various studies have confirmed this, one showing a drop in reach from 12% of all followers to 6% over the course of 4 months. And, another blog is reporting that reach will decline to just 1% of your total followers eventually.”

While you might have an active and growing population of ‘likes’, it doesn’t mean that you are actually reaching all of those fans. Do you know what you could do to ensure all of your content is reaching your audience?

Start your own website. 🙂

(via PetaPixel)

We just had our annual WordCamp here in St. Louis in March, but wanted to share with you a few upcoming WordCamps in nearby cities. These are great opportunities to learn more about WordPress, meet new people, and become more engaged in a great community (yeah, we’re a little biased).

WordCamp Nashville – Saturday May 3rd
WordCamp Kansas City – June 7-8
WordCamp Chicago – June 13 -15

This is just a short list, to see all upcoming WordCamps from around the county – and the world – visit WordCamp.org. Are you going to an upcoming WordCamp? Please let us know and we’d love to have you write about your experiences here on stlwp.org!

Everyone loves a good list of tips. These are a few of my favorite, but feel free to sound off in the comments with your own.

1. Access the Admin with /admin – You don’t have to navigate to yoursite.com/wp-admin to login. You can just point to your site.com/admin or my favorite and especially easy to remember your site.com/login

2. Command + K – What sounds like a funky European DJ is actually a recent update to the Visual Editor. When you want to add a link while writing, highlight your text and hit command + K to bring up the insert/edit link dialog box. Windows folks can use ctrl +K.

3. Turn off Comments for Pages – Nothing looks weirder than having a relatively static page (like the About or Contact pages) with random and ancient comments. Turn off comments for these sort of pages and funnel that dialog to posts, email, contact forms, or social media.