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.