By Jared Novack

The Boston WordPress community has given me so much in terms of new ideas, connections and knowledge. I’m really excited to return the favor and sponsor this year’s event with my company, Upstatement.

It wasn’t too long ago that I was a full-time Drupal developer. That changed when I went to my first WordCamp here in Boston last summer. I remember going to some awesome developer sessions from K. Adam White, Sam Hotchkiss and Jon Heller that opened my eyes to WordPress as a full CMS and application framework.

Since then, we’ve built some incredible WordPress sites for GlobalNews.ca (with 10Up), Random House and Boston College — with a bunch more in the pipeline.

Upstatement specializes in building sites for magazines, newspapers and other media companies. My partners and I got our start in the newsrooms of The Boston Globe, New York Times and San Jose Mercury News. After leaving newspapers, we worked on lots of editorial projects like The Boston Globe’s responsive redesign in 2011.

Because we’re doing so much WordPress themeing, we brought along concepts from the JavaScript world (like Template languages) to make it even better. We created Timber, a plugin that lets you use the Twig Template Engine in your themes: making it easier to build sites and allowing clients to customize them for special sections and stories. Timber is now one of the most popular open source WordPress projects on GitHub.

I’m giving a special Workshop this Friday covering the ins-and-outs of Timber: how it can speed-up development and let you write themes with beautiful, simple markup + code (and less debugging!).

You can find us on Twitter at: @Upstatement or on regular internet: http://upstatement.com.

The team at Textbox.io is excited about sponsoring our first WordCamp at WordCamp Boston!  At Textbox.io we’re all about writing and what better place to talk about writing than at WordCamp, surrounded by a prodigiously passionate community of blogging awesomeness (See… I told you we are excited).

Our mission at Textbox.io is to evolve writing for the web and with WordPress, now representing almost 20% of the web. While so many applications depend on visual editing today, delivering a fantastic user experience remains a challenge.  That’s why we’ve created Textbox.io.  We understand that the state of the visual editor is one of the key challenges many face when using WordPress, and we want to work with the WordPress community to change that.

The team at Textbox.io comes with years of experience creating visual editors for enterprise applications, but we feel that the time is right for a new approach using the latest technologies from HTML5 through to cloud-based APIs.  

Textbox.io has only just launched in beta, but it already has some great features in a combination you won’t find in any other visual editor on the web.  

• Media embedding.  Simply copy a media URL from YouTube, Vimeo, Slideshare.net or hundreds of other services.  Textbox.io connects with media services to turn URLs into rich media directly in their content.
• Autocorrect and spell check as-you-type.  Textbox.io’s built in spell checking service runs in the background as-you-type saving you from embarrassing mistakes. Check content as-you-type rather than waiting until the deadline.
• Markdown support.  Whether writing is your passion or you just have an aversion to mice, Textbox.io’s markdown support will mean your fingers never have to leave the keyboard.
• Snippets.  Extend markdown with your own personalizations using Snippets.  Snippets use Textbox.io’s macro, enabling users to write a snippet but insert a passage – or any HTML for that matter.
• Over 800 emoticons. They’ve been loved (and sometimes hated) on iOS. Now Textbox.io makes the complete emoji character set available for WordPress.  

So if you’re as interested in an improved writing experience in WordPress as we are, then come and talk to us at WordCamp Boston.  We’d love to get your feedback and insight.  Together we can create the next generation of visual editing for the web.

Wait, WordPress turned 10 this year? Aww! We remember when it was still rocking onesies and hadn’t heard of plugins. It’s hard to believe this platform we work with daily–and that brings us together each year–has only been around for a decade.

Oh, nice to meet you–We’re Oomph. Formed in 2006 and headquartered in Boston, we create solutions across web, mobile, and social platforms. We’re a WordPress.com VIP partner, and we’ve work with Automattic and WordPress.com VIP to build large scale media sites for companies like NBC News, NBC Sports, NESN, New England Journal of Medicine, OK Magazine and Interactive One, to name a few.

You might remember us from last year’s WordCamp after-party at GameOn!. Since then we’ve moved to a shiny, new office on Boston’s Long Wharf, contributed to WP Core, and added some talented people to our team. We’re pumped to once more be a Platinum Sponsor of this year’s WordCamp Boston, mostly because it gives us the opportunity to meet like-minded people that are as unique as we are. Come next weekend, you can find us at our signature-red booth; be sure to stop by if you want to see our projects, join our team, or grab some candy.

Keep an eye out for our very own Steven Word and Bradley Jacobs who with both be speaking next weekend, and make sure to join us at this year’s WordCamp after-party at Firebrand Saints. At the registration table you’ll find our info sheet with directions, a free drink ticket, and a special something to help you make the most of Saturday night. Until then, be sure to check out our website and find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. See you soon! 

ServerPress is SUPER excited to be a Silver sponsor for WordCamp Boston, 2013!

Two team members, Marc Benzakein and Gregg Franklin, will be there to answer questions, demo DesktopServer and help in any way we can to help make this a WordCamp to remember.

At ServerPress, we love the WordPress community and developed DesktopServer specifically for Developers, Designers and others who run their own WordPress websites to create local versions in minutes. Whether you’re hardcore or new, we know you’ll fall in love with our software the minute you see it.

Saving you time and frustration is our passion. No cowboy coding. Simple local development. Easy deployment. All in minutes rather than hours. That’s what DesktopServer is all about. Here are just a few of our rave tweets from clients:

@DesktopServer is amazing. Just got a whole wordpress archive up and running in 2 clicks. No messing with DB files. Well worth going premium. –@matt_essam

Did my first local-to-live direct deploy with @DesktopServer last night… omg so easy #lifechanging –@marktimemedia

Thanks @DesktopServer for another easy morning 😉 #WordPress #Famous30SecondInstall –@RevConcept

I’ve made a default install of WP just how I like it… using @DesktopServer to clone gets me ready to code in like 2mins. Love it. –@JiveDig

@DesktopServer is sooooo fluffy!! Just paid for the premium version, worth every penny. pic.twitter.com/xHuH0xRDR3 –@deadcatdreaming

And the list goes on . . . forever!

Anyway, enough about us! It’s really about us going to meet the wonderful people that make up the WordPress Community at one of the premiere WordCamps of the Northeast! Come find us! Say ‘hi’! We might even have a cool piece of swag to give you!

Find us on Twitter @desktopserver or Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/ServerPress or, most importantly, our website at http://www.serverpress.com.

Strategy, Experience, and Technology all come together on WordPress

NorthPoint Digital is thrilled to sponsor WordCamp Boston!

We are a leading Digital Agency helping organizations build enterprise digital platforms to support and transform user experiences and interactions across the web, mobile, and social touchpoints. We have over 140 employees and are headquartered in New York, with offices in Boston and Philadelphia. We work hard to make WordPress work smarter for organizations – helping them increase revenue through their online channels.

By plan or by luck, WordPress was designed from the ground up to meet the needs of people who have stories to share allowing them to easily communicate digitally. WordPress has been on the market since 2003 and has garnered the lion’s share of the blogging market. WordPress’ capabilities have since extended far beyond blogs. The platform now offers better support for all types of content, and there are thousands of people who use the software to create full-featured and robust websites. According to Wikipedia, it is used by more than 18.9% of the top 10 million websites as of August 2013. This is truly an exciting time for this CMS and the larger community of those who build the web.

We have been fans of WordPress since the get-go – and have used, recommended, and delivered blogs, mobile apps, and full-fledged enterprise websites for global brands likeShaw Media (6 sub-channel blog sites for shawmedia.ca [travel, breaktime, music, etc], ET Canada, Slice.ca), Hearst Magazines (Elle Décor,Car and Driver,Woman’s Day),Siegel + Gale, rGenerator Sony Music Platform, and Christie’s (Andy Warhol Blog). Our expertise stretches across Content Strategy and Information Architecture to Blogs and Mobile. And it is this breadth of strategy, experience, and our deep WordPress relationships and technology acumen that have contributed to our inclusion in the exclusiveWordPress VIP Partners club.

We are working on some of the most exciting WordPress and WordPress.com VIP projects, and we can’t wait to tell you more in person!

Giving back to the WordPress Community is an important part of our organization. We have sponsored, attended, and presented at numerous Meetups and Camps; check out our session onEnterprise Do’s and Don’ts at a previous WordCamp. In addition, we feel that the multi-site capabilities of WordPress are a tremendous feature that lends itself to the Enterprise (check out the video here). Project managers will appreciate our session on discovering strategies for ensuring successful outcomes of WordPress projects of any size (view video here). And we have more! Our most recent WordCamp Providence session provides real-world tips and tools on how to leverage the JSON API Plugin for WordPress Maintenance.

Stop by our booth and say hello at this year’s Camp. We’d be happy to share a story or two on the success we’ve had with this versatile CMS. We’ll tell you how we have been optimizing organizations’ digital presence through a perfect blend of: strategy, experience and technology.

By the way, we’ll be looking for you too, because we’re hiring fellow WordPress stars. We can’t wait to see old friends and meet new ones at this year’s WordCamp! And hope to contribute to your great Camp experience.

See you soon!