Oomph’s packing up our laptops and flip-flops and heading to Chatham, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod for our first company retreat May 20 – 23. The entire team will be in attendance at the Oomph Beach House where—in between games of wiffle ball, kayak trips and cocktails—we will be collaborating on new company initiatives, building cool new widgets and modules and generally celebrating our greatest resource, our people.

To make the most of this time, all Oomph operations, including maintenance, will follow an emergency-only protocol between Monday, May 20, and Thursday, May 23. In the case of an emergency, please contact us by email at emergency@oomphinc.com and an Oomph team member will respond to your urgent need as soon as possible.

Don’t worry, we won’t be completely incommunicado. You can follow our inaugural adventure on Facebook at www.facebook.com/oomphinc and Twitter @oomphinc. In fact, we encourage you to check in with us and ask us what we’re up to by posting or tweeting your questions using the hashtag #oomphretreat. We’ll be happy to respond with a personal post or picture postcard. Want to know what’s stocked in the beach house fridge, or see a Chatham sunrise? Just ask.

After the retreat, we look forward to returning at full capacity with fresh enthusiasm—and a slight suntan.

photo credit: twoblueday via photopin cc

The Hamilton, MA, native spent her college years at Flagler College, a private liberal arts school where the student dormitories are housed in what was once a luxury hotel in St. Augustine, FL.  Amid Tiffany stained-glass windows and Spanish architecture—and just a stone’s throw from the beach—Lizzy studied graphic design. But she always knew she would return to Boston, where she hoped to become part of the city’s buzzing innovation district.

“Oomph has given me the opportunity to flex my design skills and to experience the creative process as a team,” Lizzy says. “I’ve particularly loved working on new designs for the Oomph brand so I’m glad I have the chance to see that project through to the big reveal.”

In her free time, she enjoys traveling and using her design skills to create and craft unique pieces of jewelry.

In your best Boston accent please join us in welcoming our new Oomph Wharf regular, Lizzy Hartley!

What’s possible in 48 hours? Just about anything, as proven by this year’s New England GiveCamp volunteers who completed 24 projects for local non-profit organizations in just two days. Silver Sponsor Oomph was well represented with five developers in attendance—Jim Reevior, Steven Word, Ian Del Giudice, Vu Huynh and Alex Vallejo—who all worked tirelessly to produce three of the projects that came out of the weekend.

The guys are back this week with a new zest for coding because GiveCamp challenges participants to think fast and work even faster for a great cause.

GiveCamp Co-Chair Kelley Muir and her son took some time over the weekend to ask volunteers, “What’s the best part of GiveCamp?” Time and again the response was: “It’s astonishing what gets done.” By the close of the weekend volunteers achieve the impossible, and they walk away feeling transformed.

“Every year I am amazed by the generosity and passion displayed by the development and design community at New England GiveCamp. Each team worked long hours putting in their best efforts, and accomplished extraordinary feats,” Muir says. “ It’s one of my favorite times of year.”

This year was Alex Vallejo’s first GiveCamp and he’s already decided he’ll be back next year. Alex and Vu Huynh worked together on an all-new website for Seacoast Educational Endowment Dover, which is now live with a modern theme and streamlined navigation.

“It was awesome,” Alex says. “At GiveCamp you’re working with a brand new team under a tight deadline, but despite all this everyone wants to create something really cool—it’s a challenge.”

GiveCamp posted the incredible video above (courtesy of volunteer Ryan Sutton) that condenses the whirlwind weekend into just three minutes. In it, you can see the dedication and passion at work. We’d like to thank New England GiveCamp for giving us an opportunity to be involved in the event, and we look forward to participating again next year.

Bradley joins our Boston-based site operations team as a web developer. We had the opportunity to work alongside Bradley at Boston WordPress Hack Day back in March. What we discovered is that he’s not only a skilled and passionate developer, but he also embodies the entrepreneurial Oomph spirit.

You see, Bradley became interested in web development when he launched a blog based on personal interests (in this case pop culture). He wanted his site to be polished, feature impressive functionality and reflect the quality content being put into it. To do that, he needed to become a developer—and so he did. Bradley’s journey started eight years ago and now web development is his career.

Bradley is a graduate of Bentley University where he earned his degree in computer information systems. He says he loves “how rapidly the web is evolving.” Like many in the profession, it’s this dynamic aspect of development that keeps him challenged and interested.

An active member of the WordPress community, Bradley is a familiar face at local meetups. In his free time he says he can be found reading science fiction novels or Marvel comics, watching movies or writing about pop culture.

We’re excited to have Bradley on the team. Please join us in welcoming him to Oomph!

Assignments are in for New England GiveCamp 2013! If you’re wondering where our Oomph volunteers will be devoting their time, here’s the reveal:

Jim Reevior will serve as lead project manager on the redesign of The Needham Community Farm’s website, working alongside Steven Word. Vu Huynh and Alex Vallejo will be working together on a project for Seacoast Educational Endowment Dover for 21st Century Learning. And, Ian Del Giudice will be contributing his time to Generation Citizen.

All 25 teams will gather tonight at the N.E.R.D. Center where they’ll kick-off a 48-hour coding-for-charity extravaganza. Co-organizer Jim O’Neil tells us there are 130 volunteers this year—many of whom will camp out at the center overnight.

By Sunday evening, each of the participating organizations will have shiny new enhancements in design and technology that will directly advance their individual causes.  The Oomph team will be tweeting live from the event throughout the weekend @oomphinc, and next week we’ll be back on the blog with a recap. #negc2013

A few weeks ago, I was tasked with converting a good amount of embedded video from one host platform to another for one of our clients. I wrote two Command Line Interface scripts in the process: one to identify and categorize the 1,200 instances of video code, and another to make the conversions. I did it using regular expressions. Here’s the why and how:

While you could use the WordPress function get_shortcode_regex(), this action will return an array of all the regular expressions in your post content. That means you would still need to conditionally check for your target shortcode within that array and, if found, determine the appropriate array index and operate on that match.

A quicker route to extract a specific shortcode in post content would be to directly use a regular expression:

[php toolbar="true"]
$your_shortcodes = preg_match_all( ‘#\[your-shortcode-here\s*.*?\]#s’, $content, $matches );
[/php]

This will find all instances of your self-closing shortcode and return an array of them. Just one line of code will save you time, and you can loop through your posts and make the necessary changes.

As for our shortcode story, the conversion script ran seamlessly—and all the videos lived happily ever after on their new host platform.

Oomph is proud to sponsor New England GiveCamp 2013, happening this weekend, April 26 – 28, at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge where our team will join forces with more than 100 other coders, designers and database pros in a weekend-long quest to code for charity. Between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon, GiveCamp volunteers will help 25 local non-profit organizations build and revise websites, create graphics and tackle other technical needs these organizations might not otherwise have the funding to achieve.

GiveCamp was born in 2008 when Chris Koenig a Developer Evangelist for Microsoft organized 80 Dallas volunteers to assist 18 local organizations there—with great success. New England GiveCamp followed suit in 2009, and our Jim Reevior has volunteered every year since.

Last year, Jim’s GiveCamp team worked with Turn Back Time, a Paxton, Mass., organization that gives children with special needs, like ADD and ADHD, access to the therapeutic benefits of nature. By the end of the weekend, the team had implemented an all-new WordPress theme, complete with custom elements, for the Turn Back Time website. The site was live by Sunday night and is still going strong today.

Assignments for this year’s New England GiveCamp are being decided right now. Check back for more GiveCamp stories as the Oomph team helps code it forward.

Last year, Boston PHP celebrated its 10-year anniversary. At 3,200 members strong, this is a professional organization that grows each year not only size but in service to its members. In addition to regular meetups and workshops, the group offers its own education track through a program called PHP Percolate. They also host an annual PHP Job Fair that attracts a 200+ crowd of the finest in the industry.

In fact, it’s where we met Jim Reevior who now heads up our Site Operations team. Jim is one of the reasons we’re excited to attend this year’s Boston PHP Job Fair, happening tonight at the Microsoft N.E.R.D. Center in Cambridge from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m.

We’re seeking a PHP and mySQL Developer with a rock star resume and the leadership skills to match. Look for our signature red Oomph table cloth tonight and let’s talk enterprise-level engineering.

For more details on Oomph careers, drop us a line at join@oomphinc.com.

Today, in honor of Tax Day, we’re posting a shout-out to Intuit and TurboTax to thank them for all the helpful things they do to make this day as easy as possible for their millions of users across the country—that includes the handy information they provide on their Tax Break blog. Assisting them in their content initiatives and web development needs has been anything but taxing for us.

The WordPress Zone Manager plugin—alias The Zoninator—helps site admins curate content by allowing them to create content “zones” anywhere on their website. Content is then assigned to designated zones and ordered based on criteria configured on the backend. Oomph’s Vu Huynh has been working to optimize the power of Zone Manager for our clients, and we sat down with him to talk about what’s possible with The Zoninator.

What are some of the key benefits of the Zone Manager plugin?

Zone Manager provides an easy-to-use administrator interface to queue posts in any order without any programming knowledge. This is particularly useful when a certain post order cannot be easily made through a query. Zones can be quickly added, edited and deleted through the admin interface.

How have you been using Zone Manager?

I’ve been using Zone Manager as a means to “feature” posts on a homepage and a homepage-placed sidebar. Administrators can have a specific post remain on the homepage even if the post would normally be archived because of its publish date. Zones are sometimes used as an alternative to stickies when you want to have a featured post remain on the homepage despite its place in the chronological order.

What else is possible with Zone Manager?

Any content type can be placed into zones, not just posts and pages. So anything that queues content into a list can use Zoninator as an interface to do so, such as a custom gallery.