This is the slides I used at the meetup held at Faculty of Engineering, National University of Laos, 16th, Jan. 2016.

1. a start guide for
How WordPress
changes your life.
WordPress Meet-up
on 2016/01/27
in Vientiane, Thailand
by Shinichi Nishikawa

2. about Me
❖ Shinichi Nishikawa
❖ I have lived in Bangkok for 2 years
❖ I am building themes and plugins for clients
❖ I write blogs with WP, I write books of WP, I ran WP
events in Thailand and in Japan

3. My challenges today
❖ Very slow English with really easy words
❖ Presentation will be uploaded later
❖ A follow up blog post will be published afterward

4. Your challenges today
❖ Don’t hesitate to ask questions, any time!
❖ You’ll get WordPress sunglasses :D

5. Menu
❖ How WordPress changed my life and people’s lives.
❖ Asian people/company running business in the World
has sent you messages.
❖ What is WordPress?
❖ How to learn and contribute.

6. After this session, you will…
❖ want to write your own blog.
❖ want to create your own themes and plugins.
❖ want to run WordPress meetups.
❖ be able to imagine your future with WordPress.

7. Enquete
❖ Have you ever installed a WordPress?
❖ Who has WordPress blogs or sites?
❖ Who can make WP Themes?
❖ Who can make WP plugins?
❖ Who knows php?
❖ What programming languages do you know?

8. Enquete (answers)
❖ Have you ever installed a WordPress? 20%
❖ Who has WordPress blogs or sites? 10%
❖ Who can make WP Themes? 0
❖ Who can make WP plugins? 0
❖ Who knows php? 10%
❖ What programming languages do you know?
html, css, javascript, VB .net, Java

9. Other conversations
❖ From the conversation with the students, what they
really want to learn is,
❖ how to install a WordPress and set up their websites
❖ What some of them want to learn are,
❖ how to create an original themes
❖ how to create plugins

10. WordPress as a people’s lives
changer.

11. WordPress.org/about/testimonials
People love
WordPress
And I love WordPress. Let’s see what
people talk about it.

12. People have their stories with
WordPress

16. Shin in Japan and Thailand

17. starts in 2008
❖ I lost my job in 2008 and studied html/css, photoshop/
illustrator and WordPress at a cafe, everyday for 1
month.
❖ After 1 month, as the first project of mine, I built an e-
commerce website. I sold things to the world you can’t
buy outside of Japan.

18. My first personal
project.
- List products of other e-commerce
shops in Japan.
- Once sold, I bought and shipped.
- Not sustainable at all and fell down in 2
months.
- But a lot of learning.
- how to create themes
- how to use plugins

19. My first client work.
• The budget was 14000000 KIP
• It was my mother’s friend’s company
website.
• I payed the half of it to a friend of
mine who was a developer and asked:
“I’ll do everything and you don’t do
anything. Please teach me when I need
help.”
• I did the same things until I feel
confident.

20. My second project.
- Private parents blog
- Contents shared only with
user’s family
- Learned how to php

21. Meetups
❖ You can learn,
❖ share,
❖ make friends,
❖ drink,
❖ get feeling of learning
together.
While learning how to create themes I was joining

22. I learned a lot …
❖ at the Support forum
❖ from People’s blogs
❖ by writing everything on my blog
❖ by asking questions on twitter
❖ at the meetups
❖ through all my client / personal projects
I’m calling all of them “WordPress community”.

23. And now

24. I’m doing the same thing in Bangkok, Thailand.
WordPress meetup
in Bangkok
I definitely recommend you to
do the same!

25. Sakin from Nepal

26. From Nepal
Sakin Shrestha From Nepal
@ WordCamp US 2015

27. Sakin Shrestha
❖ The founder of 4 companies
❖ Catch Themes: Simple and Elegant theme shop
❖ Theme Palace: theme marketplace to help Nepalese theme
developers
❖ Catch Internet: custom WordPress site development company
❖ DevotePress: Tutorials and resources of WordPress
❖ Co-owner of ThemeReivew.co
❖ Themes and Plugin Reviews

28. Catch Themes

29. Theme Palace

30. Catch Internet

31. 1 of top-5 downloaded theme
“I got my first taste of meaningful
success because of WordPress,
when the first free theme I
uploaded became one of the top-5
most downloaded themes on the
WordPress.org.”
“Since then, WordPress has become a major part of my life. “
Read more at HeroPress

32. Sakin grabbed the chance
❖ He uploaded a theme and it was downloaded a lot.
❖ He grabbed the fact and built theme business.
❖ Now he has his employees.
❖ He contributes back to the WordPress project.

33. Message from Sakin
“Today, 25% of the world’s websites are in WordPress,
and anyone can contribute to the ecosystem,
from anywhere in the world.”
“You don’t have to be a hard-core programmer to be successful.
You don’t need an academic degree.
The barrier to entry is very low.”
“All you need is lots of passion,
and the willingness to learn.”

34. Menn from Thailand

35. From Nepal
Chakkrisn Menn Talawat From Thailand
@ WordPress meetup in bkk

36. Chakkrisn Menn Talawat
❖ Had developed his own CMS since 2004
❖ Tried a lot of CMSs such as Drupal, TextPattern, Mambo,
Typo3, etc.
❖ Through his experience, he found out that “Everything
is about content”.
❖ WordPress is the easiest for his clients who want to
create their contents.
❖ He concentrated in WordPress and started his business.

37. Chakkrisn Menn Talawat
❖ Now he is the owner and co-owner of
❖ http://mennstudio.com
❖ http://tigeridea.com
❖ http://vaivaisoft.com

38. Menn Studio

39. New project Seed Themes
❖ Funded 2.5 million baht from an angel and he got the time to concentrate on this.
❖ It’s a Theme publishing platform.
❖ Everything will be _s based so that the team can maintain & support.

40. Message from Menn
“ I've written a lot of tips both technical and business how-to.
You can read Thai, I recommend read them for the first resource.”
http://mennstudio.com/blog/

41. Perth from Thailand

42. From Nepal
Woratana Perth
Ngarmtrakulchol
From Thailand
@ WordPress meetup in bkk

43. Woratana Perth Ngarmtrakulchol
❖ He is a designer and a theme developer in Thailand.
❖ I work with him a lot in my client works.
❖ Began blogging with WordPress from 2009, which
brought him a lot of reputation, friends, colleagues and
jobs.
❖ Now runs a web school too.

44. his blog Designil.com

45. school.Designil.com

46. Message from Perth
“WordPress is quite a versatile platform for website development.
Please try it.”

47. Hiromichi from Japan

48. From Nepal
Hiromichi Koga From Japan

49. Hiromichi Koga
❖ CEO of DigitalCube
❖ Started from consulting and moved to theme business.
❖ His focus was on automation of websites creation and recurring
incomes.
❖ Found that hosting was the key for it.
❖ Now they are AWS advanced consulting partner and he
connects it with WordPress.
❖ They now creates high traffic websites and hosts them on AWS.

50. digital cube

51. Message from Hiromichi
“Learning AWS and WordPress is acquiring worldwide common skill.
I’m waiting for you to make the world better with your great ideas.”

52. It’s your turn.
WordPress has changed my life and other people’s lives.
We share similar experience and now we are friends.
I want you to join us.

53. So, what is WordPress?

54. 1. Blog tool
❖ The mission of WordPress is “Democritization of
Publishing”.
❖ It empowers you to publish to the World.
❖ Publishing will empowers your skills, business, and life.
❖ Basically your business will be empowering others to
publish to the World too.

56. 2. Content Management System
❖ You can build websites with it.

59. 3. Application platform
❖ You can build apps on top of WordPress.
❖ This will be the next trend of WordPress world.
❖ It means that WordPress can be a backend of web
application.
❖ And it will not only stay in the browsers, but also
spreads to desktop, smart phones, watches, IoT
application platform.

61. 4. Free software
❖ It’s free as in free beer ❖ It’s free as in free speech

62. GNU GPL
❖ If you get a source code, you can do anything you need.
❖ If you give a source code, you must give the same
freedom to the receiver.
❖ This is one reason WordPress has spread as it is.

63. 5. Community

64. Community
❖ You can and should learn, share, make friends through
the community.
❖ It’s the place where all WordPress users, developers,
writers, podcasters, designers come together.
❖ It’s in the internet, and in the real world.

65. Let’s do it!
❖ Face to face community exists in Thailand, Japan,
America, African countries, and everywhere.
❖ Why not in Laos?

66. Make WordPress Org

67. 6. Market
❖ You can be a freelancer.
❖ You can build business or join business.
❖ In Laos, or in the world.

68. 7. Wapuu

69. WordPress is
❖ a blog tool to empower you to publish yourself and your
friends/customers,
❖ a CMS to manage various contents,
❖ an application platform to serve services,
❖ a Free software,
❖ a big community,
❖ and a huge market.
❖ Also, it has Wapuu.

70. What do we need to learn?

71. What do you think you need to
learn?

72. I have 3 suggestions.

73. Coding, Programing.
How to develop stuff.
What do we need?
No. 1

74. How to develop
❖ html/css
❖ php
❖ Javascript
❖ servers, deployment
❖ design
❖ These will be the basis to build blogs, websites, apps
and business.

75. Learn “how to learn”.
What do we need?
No. 2

76. Learn “how to learn”
❖ It’s you to decide what to learn.
❖ There are a lot of online resources.
❖ Codex, Forum, Blog posts, Tutorials, Videos,
Podcasts, and etc, etc…
❖ We need to find them.
❖ We need to choose the right ones.

77. How to find/choose the right ones?
❖ Be in the community.
❖ Make blog
❖ Slack
❖ Community leaders
❖ Feel what people who build the WordPress says. You can
see easily what, how and why they do something.
❖ This way, you will know what the right things to learn are.

78. At last, what I think the most
important thing to learn.

79. English
What do we need?
No. 3

80. All the people I introduced today
speak English.

81. My English and their English are
not perfect.

82. But I can read documents,
I can understand 80% of what they say.

83. If you can’t speak English, the resource,
community, market, and the world will be
limited inside your country.

84. What you get with English
❖ More resources to learn.
❖ 100000% bigger market.
❖ Much more community you can join.
❖ More friends.
❖ A lot more place to live in.
❖ Reputation inside your country.

85. Contribution you can do now.

86. https://lo.wordpress.org
Translate
lo.wordpress.org
- ask the current editor.

87. https://translate.wordpress.org/locale/lo
Translate
WordPress
- Just join :D

88. https://wordpress.meetup.com
Running meetups
- Meetups are chances for you
to learn, and for others to
learn.

89. Ideas for the meetups’ topics
❖ Let’s install a WordPress
❖ Writing
❖ Let’s get people and help them
❖ Building themes
❖ Learn the basic of plugins
❖ Reading resources together

90. https://make.wordpress.org
A lot more. - please go and explore.

91. Resources

92. Official sites and documents

93. Official sites and documents
❖ WordPress.org
❖ make.WordPress.org
❖ WordPress.org/support
❖ codex.WordPress.org
❖ developer.WordPress.org
❖ Slack (you can see the actual process how the
community is working)

94. Blogs, medias, podcasts and
communities

95. http://wptavern.com
WP Tavern News in the community.

96. https://poststatus.com/category/draft/
Post Status Draft
Their English pronunciation
are relatively easy to get the
meaning, compared to other
podcasts.

97. https://www.facebook.com/groups/advancedwp/
Facebook group
“Advanced WordPress”
You can see questions
WordPress business,
freelancers and plugin authors
ask.

98. Me
❖ @shinichiN
❖ ShinichiN on WordPress.org

99. See you in the community!