WordPress and Web Development Communities Get Together to Help Non-Profits at Website Weekend LA

This past weekend, people from the web development and WordPress communities gathered in Los Angeles to attend Website Weekend LA. Organized by Alex Vasquez and Natalie MacLees, in association with the Los Angeles chapter of Girl Develop It, attendees helped non-profit organizations with their sites.

.@alexjvasquez and @nataliemac wrapping up a great weekend of talented web folk donating their time to help non-profits. #gdiwwla #connect16 pic.twitter.com/GhQhFq07by

— Rachel Cherry (@bamadesigner) October 24, 2016

Roy Sivan, Senior WordPress Developers at Disney, attended the event and published a recap on The WP Crowd website. According to Sivan, each organization was assigned a lead developer, 2-3 junior developers, a project manager, and a user experience designer. Sivan’s team worked on Thero.org, a non-profit in San Diego, CA, that provides mental health resources.

Sivan’s team revamped the site’s search functionality making it similar to Zillow. When visitors search the site, they are taken to a map page that has markers displaying the facility’s location. The markers also link to their profile on the site. The team also performed optimizations to speed up the site and reworked the donation page to improve its flow.

Although the event was geared towards non-profits, Sivan says the teams benefited by sharing knowledge with each other, “I talked to many lead developers through the weekend, and some non-lead,” Sivan said.

“While the non-profits were the main focus for the weekend, we were clearly all there to help them, many developers got a good tutorial or two in advanced coding especially on a team. Ryan on our team helped Kelly setup DesktopServer, and we both taught them how to use GIT for versioning, SASS and finally gulp for processing.

“I even got a chance to bestow some AngularJS knowledge since the map and search results sidebar on the map were an AngularJS application powered by custom routes and endpoints of the WordPress REST API.”

Sivan says he was astonished by the amount of people in the community that came together to volunteer their time and skills to help non-profit organizations and that he’s looking forward to attending the event again next year.