WordCamp 2013 — Thank you all!

Overall, it was mix of awesome sponsors, dynamic personalities, talented developers, enthusiastic WordPressers and vibrant energy on this WordCamp! We really had amazing pool of Speakers who shared really fantastic stuff. There was one hot topic where discussions were held on one of the most sought subject – How to bring your $$$ to Nepal. It was one packed room and people who have been working on outsourcing business for long shared their experiences and what new platforms are being developed upon. Please do write in the comments of how you experienced and benefitted from this WordCamp.

Moreover, the best part of all the WordCamps is to get to know fellow WordPressers and network with professionals and learn a lot. I met many of the WordCampers and I could see the energy and inspiration that brought to them by this WordCamp. I really hope that events like this will keep pushing everyone further and deliver their best. Afterall, development of each one of us will lead to a development of our overall community, recognized by the world and at one point, we are the ones to define and shape the whole IT Industry. Next year, we will have more stories to tell!

Lastly, we would like to thank all of you who came to this WordCamp. Without you, there is no community!

We are very grateful to all of our Sponsors who helped make this event a very affordable one and a grand success!! We would like to sincerely thank our Platinum Sponsor, Web Experts Nepal.

We would also like to thank our Gold Sponsors, Grassblade and Last Door Solutions.

Thank you to our Silver Sponsors, Jasper IT, Catch Themes and Nhuja Concepts.

Many Many thanks to our sponsors from WordCamp Central, Bluehost as WordCamp Champion Sponsor and Code Poet as WordCamp Accomplice Sponsor!

We cannot thank enough our Media Sponsor, Annapurna Post who helped us cover WordCamp Nepal 2013 in detail and our Internet Sponsor, Vianet Communications for providing free WiFi for the day!

We would also like to thank all our Bronze Sponsors, suBi (Subigya Shakya), WPHub.in, G16 Media and Theme Horse Team.

And most importantly, thank you to all the supporters, volunteers and organizers who have been spending a LOT of their time getting things ready for WordCamp as well as helping bring together the whole community since past 2 and half years and growing every day. The contribution you have made is priceless and as a result WordPress Nepal has been protruded as the best and the strongest IT communities in Nepal and we sure are going to boom this industry. Thank you Biruwa Ventures, a place for startups to grow, for continuously supporting our WordPress Meetups and Thank you IT-S, Nepal group for continuously helping spread WordPress and organize/manage this WordCamp.

Here are the few sneaks from the event in case you missed it! 🙂 Photos by Sanam Maharjan.

Are you ALL ready ?!

Just a day left for our second WordCamp. Are you all excited? We definitely are. We have some awesome sessions for the event tomorrow.

Philip Arthur Moore, Premium Theme Team Lead at Automattic, is here and he will be speaking on how to become a better WordPress Theme Developer. If you are a beginner or even selling Premium themes, it doesn’t hurt to attend this session. I guarantee that you can only become better at it and you will also know how they code at Automattic!

We also have the “Most Wanted” Q&A session for all the aspiring outsourcers! In every meetups we have had in the past, we have had questions about how to bring the money you earned to Nepal. We have Bal K Joshi, a remittance industry expert and co-founder of Thamel.com, who is beta testing a new Payment Gateway called Machnet, Pravash Karki, who is running multiple business houses including an outsourcing company called Last Door Solutions and a professional freelancer, Mohammad Tajim who have been freelancing for a long time. All these professionals will be sharing what platforms are available and what have worked for them.

We also have very attractive sessions for all the niche. Saurabh Shukla is coming all the way from India to share how you can use WordPress as an API. If you are into more hardcore stuff, this is not to be missed. Similarly, we have Pankaj Agrawal, founder to Next Software Solutions, Nepalgunj, who will be talking about how WordPress can be used for eLearning.

For Bloggers, Ujwal Thapa will share his experience on how you can set it up and how you can use social media to publicize your blog. Santosh Raut explains how you can use SEO tools to get better ranking at search engines and for all kinds of websites Roshan Bhattarai explains how you can add a better search for WordPress using Sphinx.

And last but not the least, if you are worried about being hacked or have been hacked several times, you should not miss the session by Mahadev Subedi. He is a security expert and has found a lot of security flaws and won awards for his findings from Facebook, Mozilla, Google, PayPal, Yahoo and many more companies. If you want to discuss more, you can simply find this guy and talk during break or lunch time.

So, to conclude, we are going to have a blast this year! Remember all the speakers are one of the best in their respective fields and there might not have been any session like this where the best meet and share their experiences!!

For those who are not familiar with the event location, please come to Patan Dhoka in Patan (Lalitpur). You can take the local bus if there is one or can take a taxi to Patan Dhoka. You can look for Dhokaima Cafe or Yalamaya Kendra after reaching there. We will also hang a WordCamp Nepal flex so you know where to come. For more clarity, please find it in this map.

If you have any questions or confusions, please feel free to call our co-organizers Ghanshyam Khanal (9849141057) and Suvash Khadka (9841797599) and they will help you will the map.

SEE YA THERE!!

Speaker Highlight: Sakin Shrestha

Sakin Shrestha is the founder of Catch Internet Pvt. Ltd. It is the same company which builds World Class WordPress Sites and Products such as Catch Themes and Devote Press. His involvement with WordPress has grown strong in the last 6 years. When you don’t find him working on WordPress, he will be either blogging, reviewing themes, taking photographs, traveling or playing the Guitar.

Sakin has developed Popular WordPress Themes like Catch Box, Simple Catch and Catch Everest. These themes consistently stayed on the Top 15 Most Popular Themes’ positions in WordPress.org. This year he will be sharing his theme development experiences. The focus of his presentation will be on how to build WordPress Themes that would unfailingly make it to the Top 15 Popular Themes in WordPress.org.

Speaker Highlight: Pankaj Agrawal

Pankaj Agrawal is the founder of Next Software Solutions Pvt Ltd. He has worked on several eLearning platforms and is a significant contributor to the latest eLearning standard called Experience API. GrassBlade xAPI Companion, the brain child of Pankaj, has been a great step towards bringing eLearning content from major authoring tools to WordPress that was never before possible. He believe that LMS technology needs to be significantly simplified and he finds WordPress as a great solution. With an educational background in electronics, he has been a robotics enthusiast and educator before he returned back to Nepal and found love in software.

Pankaj, in his talk, will touch upon the huge potential of the Learning industry, and how every individual and company spends most of their time as well as resources on training. His talk will plant the belief in everyone that with eLearning on the rise, every individual has a potential to tap into this growing market and reap the rewards. He will show you the Why, What and How of “eLearning on WordPress”.

Speaker Highlight: Saurabh Shukla

Saurabh Shukla is a WordPress developer. He has co-authored 5 open source plugins for WordPress with a combined download count of over 1,60,000. He is one of the creators (and till recently, was the lead developer) of rtMedia, one of the most popular plugins for BuddyPress. He is a FOSS evangelist, choice fanatic and has extra love for WordPress.

Saurabh will be speaking on using WordPress as a distributed Social Network (WordPress as an API).

He’d be exploring the structure of WordPress and how it can be utilised to build a social network where every user has full control on their content and privacy. He’ll discuss ways of implementing such a system with examples. In doing so, he hopes that a lot of concepts about WordPress will become clearer and that some of his listeners will actually take up building such a solution with an open source license!

Speaker Highlight: Santosh Raut

santosh-raut Santosh Raut is Managing Director of Ocean Web Technology where he has been developing and servicing various WordPress, Joomla and SEO projects. He has provided freelance technical support for Catalyst House as WordPress Developer for 3 years. He is also Working for Visual Reflection GmbH as a lead Joomla Developer. He has worked as freelancer in Odesk and Freelancer.com for over 3 years.

His talk on WordCamp this year will be 14 Steps to Optimize WordPress for Google. He will guide you how to optimize your WordPress site for Search Engines, i.e Google, Bing, Yahoo. What will help your site to be visible in google and improve your page rank, as well as the alexa rank.

Thank you to our Bronze Sponsors: suBi, WPHub, G16 Media & Theme Horse

We are very happy to announce that we have 4 more sponsors for our WordCamp 2013. suBi, WPHub, G16 Media and Theme Horse. Thank you so much for your support!

Subigya Shakya (suBi) is a WordPress supporter from USA. He has supported WordCamp Nepal and hopes community events like this would benefit WordPress and all its users.

Thank you Subigya. Its great to have you as a supporter of this event.

WPHub is a group that was formed to grow and connect different local WordPress communities across South Asia. It was formed in India in 2012.

Thank you WPHub. We are very glad that we have supporters from across the border as well.

G16 Media is a slick, professional Design & Development company that provides services and offer high level of Optimization and Functionality.

We cannot thank you enough for your support.

Theme Horse is a new theme shop in the market that provides beautiful and elegant design, Free and Premium Themes with bunch of easily customizable options and features. Theme Horse also provides unmatched support for their customers.

Thank you Theme Horse. We are very happy to get support from a home grown WordPress theme shop who have one of their themes as Featured Theme on WordPress.org! Way to go!!

Speaker Highlight: Utsav Singh Rathour

utsav Utsav Singh Rathour is a WordPress enthusiast and a developer by passion. He bumped over WordPress some 5 years ago but let it go back then. Until he fell for it again 4 years back and since then the love has only grown. Working as senior PHP developer, he works on WordPress whenever free and keeps himself updated. He is the CEO of Code Pixelz Media and blogs at his site http://codepixelz.com for which he tweets as @codepixelzmedia while his personal twit address is @rathour

His talk on WordCamp this year will focus on child theme and will explain why it is important and how to create a child theme. A WordPress child theme is a theme that inherits the functionality of the parent theme. A child theme is the best and easiest way to modify an existing theme, whether you want to make a few tiny changes or extensive changes. This session is a most for all WordPress developers and users who wants to tweak WordPress themes.

Speaker Highlight: Raushan Jaiswal

raushan-jaiswal Raushan Jaiswal is the Co-founder of Codewing Solutions, a digital agency which works in WordPress platform. At Codewing Solutions, Raushan manages WordPress projects and ensures standard of websites powered by WordPress. He has been using WordPress from last 2 years and is great fan of WordPress’s simplicity! Raushan calls himself a WordPress enthusiasts. He is a passionate salsa dancer and public speaker.

He will be talking about starting business with WordPress and lowering the initial cost. In addition, he will talk about common essential plugins that should be installed in most of the websites. Moreover, how WordPress can be helpful for IT companies.

Speaker Highlight: Roshan Bhattarai

image-roshan-1 Roshan Bhattarai has previously worked in various IT companies in Nepal and India as a Software Engineer and Technical Lead. Currently, he co-owns and is working as a CTO at Proshore. He co-authored the book PHP Ajax Cookbook from Packt Publishing. Sometime, he writes about web development stuffs on his blog as well.

Roshan will be talking about what are the problem with search of WordPress in fetching the relevancy of data and How it can be improved using Sphinx Search Engine.