I am very excited, and honored, to be speaking at WordCamp NYC next weekend.  I have grown very fond of WordCamp get togethers whenever I have the time, and opportunity to attend.  It is great fun for every type of WordPress user out there – - from total beginners to advanced developers, there is literally something for every single type of user.  If you get the chance to attend a WordCamp – definitely DO – just meeting other people, networking and sharing experiences is worth the price of admission alone!

When I saw that WordCamp was organizing in NYC this month, it was a no-brainer for me to attend.  I LOVE New York City – - anytime I get the chance to spend an evening at the Peking Duck House in Chinatown for some of their amazing Peking Duck – - I am SO there!  Plus, it gives my husband and I the chance to spend time with his mother and do an early Thanksgiving the week before the actual holiday.  Keeping the in-laws happy is always a bonus in my book!

What I am really excited about, however, is the opportunity I have been given to speak on a topic that I love and am really excited about right now!  At 9:15 am Saturday morning – November 14 – I will take the stage and talk about growing communities with BuddyPress.  This presentation will take a look at the features BuddyPress currently offers to help you grow your own community on your web site, including some tips and tricks I’ve come across along the way to help de-mystify the BuddyPress themes and templates to help you on your way to customizing your own BuddyPress community site.

As many of you may know, I just finished up writing BuddyPress For Dummies, which I am really excited about!  The two books that I have written, so far, WordPress For Dummies and BuddyPress For Dummies – have been really challenging because the development of both of those projects move so very fast.  As an author who needs to meet deadlines AND keep the content of the book relevant and as up to date as possible – - this can sometimes cause a lot of late nighters… nights without sleep at all and sometimes a LOT of fingernail biting and wall climbing!  With a platform as new as BuddyPress – I very much (sometimes) had the feeling that I was making it all up as I went along!  Heh – of course, that isn’t true… but there isn’t a whole lot of documentation on BuddyPress currently, so I really had to pick apart the program and get to know it rather intimately in order to write about it in the book to help other users make sense of it all.  It is really one powerful platform – and the development, as it grows, is so exciting in terms of what you can do with it on your own site.

During the writing of this book – I have been eyebrow deep in the development and design of several BuddyPress sites for my clients.  Notably, during the writing of it, I have worked on and completed two large community sites at: WeEarth.com and NourishNetwork.com – both powered by WordPress MU and BuddyPress – - and both very challenging sites to complete using those platforms, considering the amount of customizations and special features each client site wanted to integrate.  They were both really great projects to be working on during the writing of BuddyPress For Dummies because they really helped me explore the platform more deeply that I normally would if I were just testing it out and playing around with it.

In addition to my presentation on Saturday morning, I am also running an open BuddyPress Workshop on Sunday, November 15th….the time has yet to be determined, but the basic idea is to sit down with new users and take you, step by step, from install to launch – helping you get familiar with the installation, setup, configuration, management and features/components available to you within BuddyPress to help you build, and maintain, an active and fun community site on your own domain.  This workshop will be totally informal – so bring your laptops and your questions … as well as your own experiences to share!  Considering that BuddyPress is so new and many people are just now discovering the potentials of the platform – - I hope for the workshop to be an open discussion where people can share their experiences and we can all learn new things from one another.

I am really looking forward to speaking about BuddyPress at WordCamp NYC – as well as meeting other BuddyPress users and developers who I can chat with and share experiences and hopefully learn from one another, as we all go down that path of discovering the amazingness that is BuddyPress.

Are you planning on attending WordCamp NYC?  If so – drop a line in the comments – let me know where to find you on Twitter so I can add you and we can hook up and say hi in NY!  I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone – - and a bit nervous about speaking publically .. so encouragement is required!