{"id":1049,"date":"2015-10-06T09:20:56","date_gmt":"2015-10-06T13:20:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/2015.hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/?p=1049"},"modified":"2015-10-06T09:20:56","modified_gmt":"2015-10-06T13:20:56","slug":"speaker-interview-cameron-barrett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/speaker-interview-cameron-barrett\/","title":{"rendered":"Speaker Interview: Cameron Barrett"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim: What’s your WordPress “origin” story?<\/p>\n


\n I was an early MovableType user and before that I was hand-rolling HTML archives for my pioneering blog called CamWorld (circa late 1990s). Around 2003-2004 I started working in Drupal and built some fairly large community-driven sites.<\/p>\n

At the Open Source Convention in Portland in July 2004, I met a young Matt Muellenweg, who had just launched WordPress. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but remember how eager, honest and smart he was.<\/p>\n

Several years passed and I noticed that a lot of the blogs I read and follow were moving to WordPress, so I started taking another look and saw how good of a platform it was, not just for blogs but as a robust CMS.<\/p>\n

I stopped doing Drupal development work around 2011 and moved almost all of my professional work, clients and web sites to WordPress and haven’t looked back.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

Tim: Whats your top 3 WordPress plugins? Why?<\/p>\n

    \n<\/p>\n
  1. TablePress – Because I can hook up all kinds of CSV files to it and let my clients update their tabular data without needing a lot of hand-holding.<\/li>\n
  2. MailPoet – Because it’s very easy to build newsletters where the content is driven by WordPress posts. Very valuable from a content creation cost and marketing perspective.<\/li>\n
  3. Visualizer: Charts & Graphs: Very good plugin that converts CSV files into charts and graphs. This is amazing for a client that doesn’t want to pay for the custom development needed to draw charts and graphs from a custom database table in WordPress. Simply pair this with TablePress and some source CSV files and you have a very inexpensive, yet powerful, tool.<\/li>\n

    <\/strong><\/ol>\n

    Tim: Whats your most proud achievement around WordPress?<\/p>\n


    \nI migrated NJ’s largest public school district (40,000 students) to WordPress and am saving hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars over the course of five years.<\/p>\n

    I am leading the charge for embracing \u201cWordPress in Schools\u201d and my goal is to eventually have all 14,000+ public school districts in this country using WordPress in some way through a services-based company called SchoolPress.
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Tim: What do you want our readers to know about you?<\/p>\n


    \nI hail from Northern Michigan, but grew up internationally, and currently live in Northern NJ with my family. I love to go biking, hiking and travel. About 15 years ago I came very close to starting an adventure travel company in Siberia but the funding fell through and the local Russian mafia advised me against it.
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Tim: Define yourself with one word.<\/p>\n


    \nScooby Doo’s “Huh?
    \n<\/strong><\/p>\n

    Cameron is going to share his insights on using WordPress for Schools<\/a> . <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Tim: What’s your WordPress “origin” story? I was an early MovableType user and before that I was hand-rolling HTML archives for my pioneering blog called CamWorld (circa late 1990s). Around 2003-2004 I started working in Drupal and built some fairly large community-driven sites. At the Open Source Convention in Portland in July 2004, I met … Continue reading Speaker Interview: Cameron Barrett<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8399010,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[259194],"tags":[172421,286,594738],"class_list":["post-1049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-speaker-interviews","tag-cameron-barrett","tag-education","tag-schools"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4VWW2-gV","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8399010"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1050,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1049\/revisions\/1050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hamptonroads.wordcamp.org\/2015\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}