Updates | WordCamp Orange County 2017

Russell Aaron started out in WordPress like many others. After training as a sidekick to Batman (his favorite comic hero), Russ started building MySpace band layouts. He would create table based layouts all day and use the blog feature on MySpace to share his triumphs and failures.

Once he’d written his first 50 blog posts, a friend introduced him to WordPress.com. Russ signed up for free and started to blog. After his next 50 blog posts, the same friend showed him how to install WordPress on his own website. Since that day, Russ has spent every minute of every hour learning WordPress. He’s obsessed, to say the least. His first WordCamp was Las Vegas 2011.

Citing his mentors as John Hawkins, Jason Tucker and Gary Kovar, Russ has determined that if he could claim a super power, it would be the ability to see the future, in full detail. When asked to predict the future of Plugin-A-Palooza, Russ replied, “My plugin is very simple. It’s not jam packed full of code and functions, but it’s something I think all WordPress site builders need to have.”

His plugin gives the super power of linking directly to the plugins page in wp-admin. You can add a new plugin (new, featured, recommended or favorite), see active and inactive plugins and MU plugins, and a link to the plugin editor from the front end of the site. To a new user, Plugins Admin Bar gives you the capability to jump directly to wp-admin plugins page, from anywhere on your WP site. Russ believes plugins to be the biggest part of WordPress, and can’t believe users have to click two or three times in order to get to the plugins page. With his new plugin, access is now a one time click.

Though he’s from Las Vegas, NV, Russ travels to WCOC because he has a lot of friends in the OC community. He reports, “It’s by far my favorite Camp and there are cool competitions like Plugin-A-Palooza.”

Tickets for WordCamp OC sold out in just a few hours this year. We want to let in everyone who wants to come, but our venue has capacity limits, and we prefer happy fire marshals. If you didn’t get tickets, here are a couple ways that you might still be able to attend:

~~1. We may have some more tickets to release before the start of WordCamp OC (no promises.) If that happens, we will make an announcement on Facebook and Twitter.~~ (Tickets are completely sold out.)

2. Some people who bought tickets might have their plans change. We’ll retweet these when we see them. People might also post about tickets in the OC WordPress Facebook group, and in the official Facebook event. These are first come, first served since you’ll be dealing directly with the person selling their ticket.

3. We are trying something new this year. If an attendee can’t make our Sunday lineup, we’ll ask them to donate their badge after camp Saturday so that someone can attend in their place. We’ve started a waiting list, and will invite 1 person on the list to attend Sunday for each donated badge.

Please sign up for the waiting list to receive updates.