The first meetup was very successful of the new year. Sun Microsystems came though for us and helped us out with some great space. Large room and three smaller room for other things. The main presentation hall held 113 people. We had close to the 78 people that RSVP to the event. Not sure of the real count, but we found out later the directions we had posted up brought people to the wrong location. (Fixed now..)

The format went well.

• Introduction by Steve
• WordPress 3.0 — What you got to know.
• AutoFocus Theme by Allan Cole
• Breakout Sessions

I did run the Genius bar solving some problems, but it was more of a a collaborating Genius bar. We helped out one lady that was trying to do something and we figured out a solution that can be implemented. After my first group of 8 people another two groups of 10 came in a we talked about different development and ideas for their sites. We thought on how to tackle those problems either with a plugin with a widget to upgrading core code itself.

One problem someone had was when they delete an image in the post using TinyMCE extra divs including the ‘caption’ shortcode remains because of the way media images are “wrapped” around. He asked for a solution to this problem, but as far as I can tell there is none because this code input comes from the core itself (wp-admin/media.php) and processed my TinyMCE.

Steve ran the beginners group where about 20 people of the 70+ people were new to WordPress. It must have been odd for them to hear about WordPress 3.0 when I was presenting and they didn’t even know what WordPress can do a lot of things they were asking because they heard my presentation first. Oh well. We learned something new for the next meeup!

It went really well. I am going to try to make it to the next one if February, however my vacation time is right around then so I might not be able to do so. No pictures other then me stopping to get food in Grand Central Train Station. Just got word that a short video was done and lots of pictures. I’ll post up the via once I get it.

My presentation will be up tomorrow sometime. I rehashes mostly what is on the web, but when I was talking it was more in depth than just going over the slides.