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Last weekend we went to WordCamp Bhopal, it was the second WordCamp of 2016 that happened in India. This was a rush event for us as we reached there early morning on the day of event and left by night, so we could to see Bhopal. Next year we will plan it little better :)

In most ways it was the usual WordCamp, except that it was organised by students(from Oriental and LNCT) & for students, which reminded us of WordCamp Jabalpur and we had to keep reminding students not to call us Sir. 

Another thing worth noticing was that venue sponsor for the event Laxmi Narayan College of Technology not only provided the venue but they also provided the students with a dedicated room for future WordPress user group meets.

Two of the most popular talks were by Rahul  who talked about building high quality WordPress Agency and Nirav who talked about how to become better developer, while Saurabh in his usual style become the most popular person for the day.

In true spirit of WordCamp's all the speakers were seen interacting with students during breaks and I believe attendees got most out of this event during these discussions.

Amit was one of the speakers at WC Bhopal and he talked about how lot of things can be build without writing any code in WordPress and also talked about our initiative in that direction.
http://www.slideshare.net/teamphp/stop-coding-start-assembling-your-websites

During the panel discussion on "Career Opportunity in WordPress", Amit mentioned about our hiring process, and promised to share one of our hiring test online for everyone to try.
https://twitter.com/ethicaladitya/status/779592697325744129
Over all the organizing team did a great job in making WordCamp Bhopal happen, and we would like to thank all of them for putting up a great show.

Now that WordCamp Bhopal is over it's time to prepare for upcoming WordCamp Nashik. If you haven't yet booked your ticket you should do so now.

Last weekend we went to WordCamp Mumbai. This was first WordCamp of 2016 in India, and our experience can be summed by  this tweet from Nisha. https://twitter.com/iNisa/status/709241456742035456 Day 1 We reached the venue by 8:45 AM, and watched the volunteers arrange the registration desk and got our registrations done. First talk for the day was by Shilpa Shah which set the tone for the day, all the talks on day one were good, I especially wanted to mention two talks from that day, which I think stole the show for us

1. What Customer Wants by Shilpa - Where she shared her insights on understanding customer expectations. This talk made us think about our customer engagement activities.
2. WordPress accessibility by Raghavendra - He showed us the importance of accessibility, and pointed to resources. This talk forced us to re-evaluate the accessibility of modules that we are building for Awesome Studio , and we are going to make all of them accessible.

https://twitter.com/wpoets/status/708524522748530688 Day 2 We came little late, and almost missed the first talk by Ramya, all talks of day two were aimed at users of WordPress. Suggestions by Fairy Dharawat on researching the humor and keeping your mind open for humor helps in content writing, Vijay Nallawala talking about how WordPress enabled him in reaching out to more people for providing support group to people affected by bipolar disease. Naoko shared insights on how WordPress went on to cover 70% of CMS market share despite language barrier. Though best talk of the day was from Mahangu, where he talked about the Jugaad Way of starting with development, basically the way  many of us have learned WordPress development. https://twitter.com/wpoets/status/708974088451035136 We also suggested to those attendees who found this way of development  difficult to use to try Awesome Studio plugin for WordPress. https://twitter.com/wpoets/status/708976437991112705 We would like to thank all the Organizers, Volunteers and Speakers of WordCamp Mumbai, they have raised the bar for WordCamps in India. For us day two ended with a visit to Band Stand and Bandra Fort.

In September we had announced the private beta of our Awesome Studio plugin. Since then we have received lots of feedback from our users, and based on them we made many changes to the platform and added documentation. We now feel confident enough to make it public( internally we have been using awesome studio in production for more than a year), so go ahead and download the plugin from WordPress repository and start assembling you website today. To understand the flow of Awesome Studio plugin, start by reading our overview article and checkout the list of shortcodes that you can use. Now that we have released the platform, our next challenge is to add at least 250 modules by coming WordCamp Mumbai, so that you can actually start assembling the website instead of building it.

WordPress 4.4 "clifford" is here, lets check what all cools things we will get in this upgrade.

Responsive Images

Now no need to write extra lines of code in theme for the responsive images, WordPress 4.4 handled responsive image using srcset in img html tag. Using this Browser will figure out which image to load based on client's browsers capacity, so its browsers magic now.

 Embed Everything

Till now WordPress allows to Embed external videos, tweets using oEmbed, in WordPress 4.4 you can embed posts from other WordPress sites as well. Simply dragging and dropping the link of post will do the job, it will show title, excerpt and features image as well if set.

Twenty Sixteen Theme

WordPress 4.4 came with Twenty Sixteen. Beautifully design with Mobile first principal.

For WordPress Developer and Plugin Authors

REST API infrastructure into Core

WordPress 4.4 comes with REST API infrastructure into Core, now WordPress developer can create new API or use existing API in their own applications and can include Rest API in plugins by adding custom endpoints.

Term Meta

Terms now support metadata as well which was required in most of the complex WebApps is there. Can user add_term_meta(), get_term_meta(), and update_term_meta() to play with terms.

New Objects

WP_Term, WP_Comment, and WP_Network objects are now available for more powerful coding. Comment form fields gets rearranged, now comment first comes first and then name, email etc.

WordCamp Pune 2015 has released all the videos of the sessions and panel discussion happened on 6th Sep 2015 at Modern College Pune. Nisha, WPoet's QA lead who is also a WordPress Theme Reviewer shared her knowledge on "Building a Good Quality WordPress theme". There was a panel discussion on "The Business of WordPress" where Amit had shared his views here is the full video. All the videos are available on youtube playlist

If you want a website that stands apart from your competition, loads with blinding speed and is supremely cost-effective and to continuously improve and enhance your web presence we have started "Awesome Websites". We are offering monthly subscription plans for small and medium businesses to continuously improve their web presence. We make sure your website is a valuable sales aid for your business. Know more about Monthly Subscription Plans

After working for more then a year on Awesome Studio, we are happy to announce that Awesome Studio Framework for WordPress is now available to everyone, albeit still in limited fashion. Go check out the most WordPress developer friendly framework, and register for the early access.

After a gap of one year, we have a WordCamp happening in Pune on 6th September 2015. It's being organized by Wordex meetup group. This year it is going to be one day, multi track event and we can promise you that it is going to be better then all other WordCamps that has happened in India. Organizing team has decided to give special focus to हिन्दी and मराठी talks. You should buy the tickets and attend or you will miss out on best WordCamp in India.

Welcome to Awesome Websites. In last 6+ years at WPoets we have created 100s of site and web application and only about 10% of them are actually active or upto date, rest are either outdated or no more in existence. The reason we found that those of our customers who were routinely tweaking their website/app based on feedback they received are still up and running, as they kept improving things on their site and engaged with us. Once this insight hit us, it was no brainier that we need to offer our customers risk-free way to engage with us and improve their website, and Awesome Wesbites was born, so that not only we build but also operate it for you. It is a Continuous Improvement Subscription Plan to make your website awesome, in this plan we will take full ownership and responsibility of your web presence, and work with your team to ensure those good things you do is also represented beautifully on the web. We will look into visitor analytics and convert it into actionable insights for your business.