Featured Speaker: Paul Bearne

Paul is a forward thinking developer, with over eight years experience in an international team.

He has in-depth knowledge of commercial & IT issues. Accustomed to delivering state of the art, Ajax based internet business applications for a diverse audience.

Delivering complete solutions, using WordPress as a CMS platform, that create an experience that delights and rewards the user whilst effectively meeting business needs.

Presentation: How to Set Up a Vagrant Development System

Vagrant is a tool to create and manage local virtual machines that provide local development web servers.

What do you want people to learn from your presentation?

What Vagrant is and why it is better than local LAMP/ WAMP or FTPing to remote web servers for developing.

The basics of the how to setup and configure Vagrant.

What attracted you to WordPress in the first place?

I started with WordPress when the company I was working for wanted an internal blogging site and WordPress was the best option.

So my first WordPress install WPMU 2.3 running on IIS7 with several hundred blogs. I found I liked the hook and filter method of extending and its open-source ethos.

What are you most looking forward to at WordCamp Toronto?

I always learn some new tricks or techniques and I get to meet my WordPress peers, some of whom are becoming old friends.

Why did you decide to speak?

It’s the best way to be part of the community and to give something back.  Even though I still have lots yet to learn, I hope I can help others by passing on some of the knowledge I’ve gained so far.

What is your favourite plugin or theme, and why?

Both WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML) and WooCommerce have been a pleasure to use and extend in recent projects as both are great examples of how to create good WordPress code.