Board of Directors

The extensibility of the action and filter ecology.

A sense that we're truly helping folks prepare for their lives and careers, even if only indirectly.

Arriving at Canisius College for my first in-person WPCampus conference.

It took some time in the beginning, but I love coding WP templates in Twig. Writing patterns in Twig allows us to more easily create templates for our themes, and now we also use those patterns for custom blocks as well. theme.json really lets us adjust core and custom blocks to make content creation not so scary for our editors.

I enjoy working in higher ed because being in an academic environment surrounded by scholarly pursuits is inspiring. The website is often the first impression a prospective student has for the university, and I want to make our websites as accessible as possible for all our users, both in-house editors and outside audiences.

My first WPCampus memory is working with my colleague Danielle Held on a lighting talk for the 2020 online conference. Neither of us had presented at a professional conference before, and everyone involved with the conference committees were so helpful in guiding us in putting together a great talk. We opened the conference, and we nailed it!

For me, WPCampus means "community". People are welcoming and warm, and excited to share their knowledge or support others in learning new things.

Working in higher ed is a way of fostering education and investing in positive change in people’s lives. It holds a strong sense of constructive purpose. I also love how universities can feel like their own world. It’s a special community that you belong to.

As the Founder of WPCampus, I have a wide variety of “first” memories. But our first conference, WPCampus 2016, in Sarasota, Florida, is one of my favorite early memories. After months of online planning, we were finally able to spend time together in person. It was magical to meet people and learn more about them and their work.

Community. I founded WPCampus because I wanted to find folks working on the types of projects I was working on. I wanted to find my people. And find them I did. WPCampus is filled with warm and welcoming humans eager to share knowledge and support one another.

Auto-upgrade to themes and plugins. I cannot believe that there was a time when we did not have this feature.

The room to create something from nothing (and by nothing, I mean budget. LOL). Sometimes you have to be scrappy and creative at the same time to make something happen.

Tarheel / Ramses the Ram

Getting the first email discussing WPCampus as an organization/group and being excited because it was sorely needed at the time.

Evolving.

I’m a huge fan of WordPress Multisite. It’s part of what allows me to manage sites for hundreds of students at my institution. The first multisite I managed was a Pressbooks network, where each subsite is an OER textbook. I also manage our institution’s OpenLab which uses Commons in a Box OpenLab so that students and faculty can have sites for portfolios, courses, organizations and projects.

I like the variety of my job. I work across campus on projects at a variety of levels in completely different fields. In a day I can go from meeting with fashion faculty designing a web magazine, into a meeting with a biology faculty member building an online lab manual, and finish my day working with museum students who are publishing oral histories. Working in higher ed means I’m constantly learning.

The first time WPCampus came on my radar was the accessibility review of the Gutenberg editor.

Support. It’s so important for institutions that choose open-source solutions to have that affinity group of other professionals who are dealing with the same and similar issues. I love seeing community members support each other in Slack, answering questions, making recommendations and sharing successes.