Category Archives: Speaker News

Epic Panel: The Business of WordPress

The second year of our business track (being held on Sunday, May 11th) will be epic in many ways thanks to our new lineup of speakers and sessions. But what could be the highlight of the track is a special panel – “The Business of WordPress”.

There are all sorts of challenges to building a WordPress business. Come hear the “behind the scenes” stories and lessons learned as the brilliant entrepreneurs behind WPBeginner, Gravity Forms and iThemes answer questions in this business panel moderated by the famous Chris Lema.

We are proud to have these insightful speakers – all of which have created blogs and plugins that many thousands of WordPress users work with EVERY DAY – with us this year at WordCamp Miami.

Syed Balkhi

He is the founder of WPBeginner (the largest free WordPress resource site) and List25 an extremely popular entertainment site with over 725,000 subscribers and 90 Million video views. Syed’s work has been featured in NYTimes, HuffingtonPost, Yahoo Small Business, Wired, Mashable, and countless other well-reputed online magazines. Syed has worked with some of the largest brands in the industry including but not limited to WarnerBros, Webs, Mercer, and more.

Cory Miller

Cory is a former newspaper journalist turned full-time web entrepreneur. In January 2008, he founded iThemes in his home, fulfilling a lifelong dream of running his own company. Now iThemes has grown to over 20+ team members, hundreds of products and thousands of customers worldwide.

Carl Hancock

Carl Hancock is one of the co-founders of Rocketgenius, Inc. A premier provider of WordPress plugin solutions and the creators of one one of the most successful commercial WordPress plugins: Gravity Forms. He loves building innovative solutions for WordPress, and is a devoted father, loving husband, amateur photographer, startup founder and travel addict.

Historical Podcast Panel at WordCamp Miami 2014

This year we are proud to be hosting a unique and a WordCamp-first panel this year at WordCamp Miami on May 10th (Saturday). We will be hosting a “Podcasting And WordPress” panel, with some of the biggest and most popular WordPress podcasters all in one room. One *physical* room. They will be telling us how they do what they do, what mistakes they’ve learned, and how they run a successful podcast. Plus a special surprise which we won’t tell them about yet.

If you will be attending this panel, we suggest you check out and listen to these WordPress podcasts:

Here’s the dirt on the speakers on this panel, guaranteed to knock your socks off (so bring extra socks):

Dre Armeda

Dre is the Co-Founder of Sucuri Security. Dre is a Harley enthusiast, and a Chargers fan. he wears many hats, and love tacos. He is infatuated with WordPress, web design, and web security. Dre hopes to make the internet a safer place! Dre presents at various WordCamps and other events every year. Dre is a proud WordPress contributor and was the lead organizer that brought WordCamp to San Diego. Dre can also be found attending local WordPress meetups at the Inland Empire WordPress Meetup and the WordPress San Diego (North County) Meetup. Dre is the Co-Host of the DradCast on Wednesday nights. Pressing all the words!

Brad Williams

Brad is the co-founder of WebDevStudios.com, a co-host on the DradCast podcast, and the co-author of Professional WordPress (1E & 2E) and Professional WordPress Plugin Development. Brad is also one of the organizers of the Philadelphia WordPress Meetup Group and WordCamp Philly. Brad blogs at http://strangework.com and tweets at @williamsba.

Suzette Franck

Suzette Franck is the WordPress Evangelist Lead for Media Temple, a web hosting company located in Culver City, California. She has been doing web development for 17+ years, but discovered WordPress four years ago and has used it to create over 200 WordPress sites, ranging from BuddyPress, multisite, membership to portfolio sites, with a variety of different designs and requirements. Suzette is passionate about open source software, loves to blog and teach others on the wonders of WordPress.

Jeff Chandler

Jeff is the man behind WPTavern.com. On WPTavern, you’ll find reviews, news, screencasts, guest blog posts from some great WordPress community members and much more.

Matt Medeiros

Matt Medeiros is co-founder of Slocum Studio a custom development and theme shop. He is the founder of WPMentor.org a website dedicated to helping WordPress people find mentorships. Matt hosts the popular podcast Matt Report which aims to help new WordPress freelancers and agencies grow their business.

Pippin Williamson

If you are a WordPress plugin developer, you probably have used or seen one of Pippin’s plugins. He’s written more than 100 plugins (we are looking to see if he has a social life) He has spent a long time working on improving community involvement on projects by developers / designers. Not to mention contributing to the WordPress core and WordPress Codex.

Fourth Round Of Speakers

We are closing in on announcing the remaining speakers, but we wanted to get the word out today on these three excellent and intelligent speakers. Truly honored to have these present at WordCamp Miami this year.

Diane Kinney

Diane Kinney is the Creative Director and co-founder of The Versatility Group, a full service firm providing websites and other online solutions for 15 years. She is an award winning designer focused on WordPress design and development, graphic design, and marketing services. In her previous corporate life, she led large scale application development projects, managed multi-disciplinary teams, and oversaw Operations including marketing, customer service, and business development. She gets excited about applying the lessons from her diverse background to web and marketing projects.

Alison Foxall

Alison Foxall is a founding partner and lead designer of Gobble Logic; a web design, development, and marketing firm located in Tampa, FL. She has a traditional background in design, but has been a front-end web developer since the early 2000’s. Alison has been using WordPress since 2004, and developing for it since 2006. With her leadership, her team has created custom plugins, themes, and application platforms all with WordPress. When she isn’t running the business, Alison is learning Japanese, reading books or periodicals, and being active in political groups and discussions.

Tammie Lister

Tammie Lister is a theme wrangler with Automattic. Before moving there focus on themes, she was focused on creating sites with BuddyPress. She’s a contributor to the BuddyPress project having worked on the UI refresh and most recently the template pack. Tammie has also written a book on BuddyPress theme development. Themes are her world and she is passionate about raising the standard of BuddyPress themes.

Lightning Talk Speakers Announced

WordCamp Miami lightning talks shine a spotlight on talent from the local community, and this year we are proud to present our three local speakers:

Pascal Depuhl

Depuhl-Bio-Pic 4x4@300

Pascal Depuhl has been telling stories with pictures for his clients as an advertising photographer for over 20 years. Seeing that video is quickly becoming the online language of choice, he began to learn filmmaking. In the winter of 2012 he found himself filming in Afghanistan, telling the story of what a flight service does. Pascal’s first documentary, “On Wings of Hope”, has gone on to win Best of ASMP 2013 and just was selected to be screened at the Palm Beach International Film Festival.

He grew up in Germany and Chicago and now lives in Miami with his wife and 2 daughters.

Anna Tuttle

Anna Tuttle is a 13-year-old girl who writes a blog about her life at annatuttle.com and has been writing reviews for restaurants and attractions in Miami since she was 8 yrs old as a kid reporter at Miami Fun Guide. She also enjoys cooking, baking, playing guitar, singing and watching or reading her favorite movies and books.

Diana Espino

Diana Espino is a Software Engineer with a Master’s Degree in Business Administration. She specializes in PHP and Zend Framework 2. Diana is co-organizer of South Florida PHP User Group & SunshinePHP Developer Conference and former co-organizer of WordCamp Miami & South Florida WordPress Meetup Group. She particularly likes working with companies who have a strong engineering focus, teams who share research and knowledge with each other, and individuals who value learning. Diana teaches PHP, JavaScript, HTML, CSS to kids and adults in her community.

Second Round of Speakers Announced

WordCamp Miami is proud to announce the next wave of confirmed speakers. After this, be prepared for an exciting announcement of some of our local speakers.

Tracy Rotton

Tracy Rotton is a lead web developer for RP3, an advertising agency in Bethesda, Maryland. In 2012, she discovered responsive web design, and became obsessed. Since then, she’s built responsive websites for the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Norfolk Southern Corporation, FrontPoint Security, and Long and Foster Real Estate, the latter two on WordPress. Deciding to combine her passions for responsive websites and WordPress, she’s writing a book all about responsive WordPress theming.

Brian Richards

Brian is a developer with WebDevStudios.com and creator of the StartBox theme framework. Brian has been selling commercial themes since 2010. He enjoys hanging outside down in avatar photos.

Trisha Salas

Trisha Salas works with the awesome team at WP Valet. As a Lead Account Rep she is responsible for everything from debugging code to custom designs. She is a regular contributor to BuddyPress, is part of the dev team working on the Admin Help Plugin (an experimental feature plugin intended for WordPress 4.0) and routinely helps in the WordPress forums. She has recently helped to start the Tulsa WordPress Meetup and – as a part of the Tulsa Web Devs group – worked to host the 200 OK Conference in 2013, Tulsa’s first all web conference.

Aaron Jorbin

Aaron is a polyhistoric man of the web. Currently Technical Architect on the Conde Nast Platform Team and a WordPress contributor, he works to improve developer happiness and is dedicated to making the internet usable and enjoyable by everyone. In the past he worked at AddThis and Privia Health.


Michelle Schulp

Michelle is a graphic designer and co-founder of Marktime Media, a multimedia design and video production company based in Chicagoland. She was formally schooled in many aspects of 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, infographics, and high-end presentations for her clients. She is a lover of WordCamps and the WordPress community, a Meetup junkie, @3themes contributor, and WordCamp Chicago lead organizer.

Dre Armeda

Dre is the Co-Founder of Sucuri Security. Dre is a Harley enthusiast, and a Chargers fan. he wears many hats, and love tacos. He is infatuated with WordPress, web design, and web security. Dre hopes to make the internet a safer place! Dre presents at various WordCamps and other events every year. Dre is a proud WordPress contributor and was the lead organizer that brought WordCamp to San Diego. Dre can also be found attending local WordPress meetups at the Inland Empire WordPress Meetup and the WordPress San Diego (North County) Meetup. Dre is the Co-Host of the DradCast on Wednesday nights. Pressing all the words!

Call For Speakers!

Screen shot 2013-12-12 at 12.06.10 AMWith our dates officially announced (May 9-11, 2014), we are immediately opening up our call for speakers.

We always like to make this call as soon as possible for a few reasons. Main reason is speakers (especially out of town ones) need time to schedule and book travel. Speakers with experience sometimes wish to submit speaker submission requests to conferences as soon as possible. These make a decision (or at least are fairly sure) they will attend WordCamp Miami – either they come every year, or they live close to the area. In either case, we are opening up speaker submissions now and the deadline for submissions will be February 3rd, 2014.

All the information you need to know – including the link to submit a speaker proposal – is located here.

We welcome back anyone who has attended and spoken at WordCamp Miami in the past – repeat speakers welcome! On the other hand, we are looking especially for those who might not have spoken at WordCamp Miami before – or perhaps those wanting to make WordCamp Miami their first speaking conference!

We are looking for unique and interesting topics that beginners, advanced users, or both would be interested in (and that relate to WordPress in some way – read this page).

When submitting proposals, please assume at this time you will have 30 minutes for your session, plus some brief time to answer questions. Also assume your talk will be recorded, so you will have to sign a media release before giving your presentation.

Again, the deadline for speaker submissions is February 3rd, 2014.