A couple of points brought up at the beginning of the meeting:
- Gravity forms is a great form plugin. The paypal addon is nice, but will set you back another $100.
- Nivo slider plugin is a good choice for slideshow plugins; it has a nice admin.
- WordPress status dashboard is a good way to keep track of multiple sites.
Meredith demos plugin development. She recorded her screen with Screencast-o-matic. She will be posting the screencast on the blog shortly.
Meredith referred to http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin when she started the demo.
After the awesome demo, we talked about a variety of topics, from SEO (where Ken gave away the million dollar secret to SEO success; maybe he can post about it here?) to continuing the promotion of the group. I suggested a backup venue for the meetings I can’t make; Makerspace was brought up. I’ll contact Brian Yurko about the possibility of holding meetups there in the future. Also, Aspire Technologies was a suggestion, but the location in Orchard Park makes travel a factor. We looked at Hubspot.com as a good place to grade your website. We discussed topics for the next meeting; maybe something less technical. Ideas:
- site security
- development environments
Others?