Replay: Workshop @ District 62, Plus a Bonus Lesson

Thanks to District 62 for allowing me to present a workshop on the Toastmost.org club website hosting service and the underlying software. This was a quick tour through the advantages of WordPress, how to work with the WordPress editor, and how to create and modify your agenda using my extensions for Toastmasters. I’ve been invited back to present a more advanced website and agenda administration session on October 25.

Workshop @ District 62

The full replay is embedded above, but you can also click any of the links below to skip to the topics I’ve highlighted.

Examples of WordPress for Toastmasters websites and site layouts
Creating and editing content in the WordPress editor
Creating a site hosted at Toastmost.org
The setup wizard (choosing initial options)
Working with the interactive agenda
Using the Organize tool to modify the agenda
Q&A begins (about the last 20 minutes, covers topics like going back to see previous agendas and member role history)

I recommend that viewers also look at the video course I created, which is broken up into series of lessons on different aspects of the platform. However, the advantage of these live demo sessions is that they provide participants with the opportunity to ask questions.

Their questions, in turn, help me understand what I need to explain better — and often lead to improvements in the software itself. An example from this workshop was the woman who asked how a club that alternates between two meeting schedules should set up its agenda. See the section below.

Bonus lesson: How to modify your meeting schedule

During the Q&A for the workshop at District 62, one of the participants asked how she could set support two different meeting schedules for a club that alternates between evening and noon schedules to accommodate the schedules of different members. I suggested establishing two different meeting templates, one for the evening meetings and the other for the noon meetings.

Having come across a similar request once before, I decided I should produce a tutorial covering all the ways you can alter your meeting schedule from changing the start and end times for a single meeting, to changing the template for all your upcoming events, to handling this split schedule scenario.

In the process of producing the video tutorial, I made some changes to the way the RSVPMaker event scheduling system works to make the process easier to explain — and which ought to make it easier to accomplish!