12 Days of Christmas Give-Away

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Update: The contest is now closed. Congratulations to all our winners!

I have been waiting for weeks to let the cat out of the bag on this one. For the next 12 days I’m celebrating growth and knowledge by giving away 12 full-year scholarships to 12 bright and hungry individuals.

I’ll be picking a new winner every day at 12pm ET, so the sooner you enter the better your odds of qualifying.

What can you win?

Each winner will get access to every new session published in 2014. That’s approximately $360 in live, personal training from the smartest and most-talented WordPress experts.

What do you need to do?

Simple, I want to hear about why you (or someone you know) would benefit from a full-year scholarship to WPSessions.com. What do you want to learn? How will you put this knowledge to use? What more can you do with another year of steady and continued growth under your belt? Tell me all this and more in a comment on this post, and if I like your story you get the next 12 months of sessions for free.

This is not a random drawing! I’m looking to hear from real human beings about their experiences, hopes and dreams. Tell me why you (or someone else) should have this scholarship. Be personable! Sell your story!

How to Win:

Only the first two steps are required, the other three are completely optional (but can’t hurt your chances). Make sure you use the same email for Steps 1 and 2, otherwise I won’t be able to verify you followed instructions nor inform you that you’ve won!

  1. [Required] Leave a comment on this post telling me why you (or someone else) would benefit from a full-year scholarship to WPSessions.
  2. [Required] Join the WPS Mailing List using the form below (if you haven’t joined already). I promise it’s not spam, and you can unsubscribe whenever you wish.
  3. Write a tweet about @WPSessions in some capacity. Help tell the world we exist. This is completely optional, but I sure would appreciate it! (Optional)
  4. Follow @WPSessions on twitter. (Optional)
  5. Like WPSessions.com on Facebook. (Optional)

Some suggested tweets:

You can tweet whatever you want about @WPSessions. If you’re out of ideas, though, here are a few you can swipe:

I’m really glad @WPSessions exists, and I’m stoked for the #12daysWPS give-away: https://wpsessions.com/12-days/

Learn from the top #WordPress experts and become one yourself, check out @WPSessions: https://wpsessions.com/12-days/ #12daysWPS

For the next 12 days @WPSessions is giving away a full year of access for FREE to 12 different people: https://wpsessions.com/12-days/ #12daysWPS

Build your #WordPress skills with some help from @WPSessions. Get started with some free lessons: https://wpsessions.com/12-days/ #12daysWPS

This month @WPSessions is giving away $4,000 in scholarships for #WordPress training: https://wpsessions.com/12-days/ #12daysWPS

#12daysWPS Winners

  1. Dec 14 – Gloria Antonelli
  2. Dec 15 – Praveen Selvasekaran
  3. Dec 16 – Patrick McGilvray
  4. Dec 17 – Paul
  5. Dec 18 – Amanda Rush
  6. Dec 19 – Tunbosun Ayinla
  7. Dec 20 – Jennifer Doyon
  8. Dec 21 – Giacomo Neri
  9. Dec 22 – Allen Moore
  10. Dec 23 – Chris Wilson
  11. Dec 24 – Jose Castaneda
  12. Dec 25 – Jan Dekker

Congratulations to everyone who won! It was very difficult to pick just twelve winners from all the entries. Thank you to everyone who entered, I hope to see you engaged in the site throughout the year!

54 replies to “12 Days of Christmas Give-Away”

  2. This is a very exciting time to be a WordPress developer! Things are changing swiftly and WPSessions.com is one of the best ways to keep your skills on the cutting edge. Yay @wpsessions!

  3. Not only have I gotten good information from the sessions, I am given a boost of energy and creativity. I work from home and appreciate this chance to participate and interact in a live group of equally interested WP enthusiasts.

    I don’t attend every session, I pick and choose the ones that fit my interests – and am happy to support this project with my tuition fees. So if my name is drawn, Brian, please extend the offer to the person who comments next 🙂

    • Julie, this was very generous of you. I’m glad to hear you like the sessions and that you want other people to benefit as well 🙂

  4. Continually learning WordPress should be an important part of any designer or developer working in this space. I am a life long learner and sometimes it borders on addiction! I would love to receive one of the #12daysWPS of Christmas subscriptions because it will help me help others who are learning WP best standards. The iteration cycle is so quick you need a source like @WPSession to keep abreast of changes and strategies to make your work lean and mean.

    Besides I have been a very, very good girl this year sharing my knowledge base at WordCamps around the country. Presenting at WordCamps is a great way to share to a global audience. The more informed I am the more I can pass on best practices to others WordPressers.

    In keeping with the spirit of giving, thank you Brian and the WP community for giving back! P.S. I had previously joined the mail list, always checking it twice, finding out who’s naughty or nice! So I’ll be good for WP goodness sake!

  5. Hey WPSessions,

    Ok, I would seriously like this! I’ve been developing for WordPress for a long time now but it seems like the cycle of learning in WordPress is endless. There is so much that they software is capable of as long as you know how to tap into that power. I want the POWER!!!!

  6. This would be an amazing learning opportunity for me! I’ve been a corporate-world network engineer for the past 15 years and recently decided to pursue my DREAM of being a WordPress developer! My goal is simple: to use the power of WordPress to help businesses achieve their goals.

    I have been using WordPress for a few years but I am always learning and growing as a developer. I hope to be able to quit the cubicle job next year and do what I love every day…and get to do it from home! This learning experience will help make this dream a reality for me! Thanks for your thoughtful consideration!

  7. Getting a full-year scholarship to WPSessions will definitely take my WordPress skills (design, development and business) to the next level. This is due to the line-up of speakers for every session that has been delivered so far.

    I know the only way to be better in what you do is to teach others, this way you are contributing to someone WP career and at the same time developing yourself the more. What I will learn from this session will be shared with others via blog posts, podcast and even giving a presentation in a WordCamp based on what I have learnt from WPSessions.

  8. I’m a long-time WordPress enthusiast. It runs on my personal site, I’ve done paid work with it, and I’m prototyping some new site ideas with it as well. I spend time traveling the web to find information on building website and applications with WordPress; unfortunately quality of said information is variable, if I even can find what I’m looking for. Also, as a university student I haven’t serious funds available to access resources such as this. I’m quite interested in the theme bootcamp as I want to learn details in building themes, rather than just piecing bits together or using an existing theme.

    I’d like to continue learning WordPress so that I can not only use it for my own purposes, but to be able to help others harness it for their needs.

  9. This would be great for any WordPress user out there, there is so much information you can learn from you guys. Plus your team is at the top of the list when it comes to know WordPress. I watched your free sessions over and over, learned a great deal of information. You always seem to pick up on something new. Also you guys explain it an easy way for everyone to learn from.

    • I agree! I wonder if its possible or even feasible for me to try and host an international event. It would be really cool, if so!

      • yeah! it seems that nothing is impossible for you in this respect. You have the cream of the cream (english) speakers, why not just expand 😉

        I myself am very happy to understand English quiet well (as lots of developers do) but many WordPress users are just not good enough with English to profit from the massive amount of great blogposts, articles, tutorials, teachings and so on that are available in English.

  11. This giveaway is amazing, thanks for starting it Brian Richards! WPSessions is a truly an amazing idea and it’s really great to watch every session. Lately, I have been trying to learn more and more about WordPress development. But, I still feel like there are some learning gaps that need to be filled for me. WPSessions is a really great way to learn and with every session I watch, I can really learn a lot and absorb the knowledge easily with the opportunity to ask questions as well. A year of free sessions would be amazing and can really help me understand harder concepts better every month.

    Every session, the speaker shares great info, but I can even learn straight from the chat. WordPress is changing all the time and it is great to learn about new things with every session (standards, tips, etc.). I would really like to learn more about contributing code to WordPress Core, developing techniques when building WordPress themes and plugins, and more about creating a WordPress plugin business, so I hope to see these sessions soon.

    Anyways, I think I would benefit greatly from a year of WPSessions and it would be really useful for me on what I would like to do with WordPress development. Thanks!

  12. I want to push myself to the limits by creating focusing on one goal that is to releaseg one WordPress Theme and one WordPress plugin next year that is of value to the community and of course profitable as an extra alternative income.

    I’m hoping WPSession could help me the extra edge 🙂

    Thanks. And have a Merry Christmas too !

  13. I would benefit from a full-year scholarship to WPSessions because I am working on starting up my WordPress business, and I can use all of the help and advice that I can get!

  15. I would benefit from WPSessions by learning advanced topics that can help me build better plugins, themes and websites. Beginners topics are already covered elsewhere but we definitely need expert guidance on advanced topics. Unit testing, performance optimisation and similar advanced topics are great for any professional developer who want to deliver top quality web products built on top of WordPress..

    or… here’s my fat-free diagrammatic and more succinct answer 🙂
    WP Sessions → better WP professional → better WP themes, plugins, sites → better internet → better world

  16. Hey there! I run a small wordpress blogshop here in Malaysia where it’s sometimes hard to find help on WordPress because everything is expensive. Getting the shop customised could go up to RM 30k. That’s why we buy off the shelf themes and have yet to customise it.

    With the #12daysWPS giveaway, I hope to be able to win in order to do the following
    1) Better my personal skills in order to customise the site and increase it’s performance
    2) Give back to the Malaysian WordPress community via TEDxKL and Meetup.com meetings across the nation of Malaysia
    3) Give back to the WordPress community by developing great plugins of my own, which could fill in the gaps I feel in the general WordPress plugins and also on WooCommerce extensions.

    I fully agree with what most of the comments above have mentioned and thus wouldn’t be repeating them =) Indeed WPSessions is a great and brilliant idea =) Thanks for giving back to the community

  17. I have been following WPSessions ever since it became public after the first WordSesh. I would love a year’s scholarship, because I’m always striving to learn new things about WordPress, and I am also teaching a class for the Cisco Academy for the Vision Impaired on WordPress and would love to be able to pass on the most up-to-date information about WordPress along with the knowledge that brings to my students, which will hopefully help them to be able to find gainful employment and will also help them when it comes to building their own websites.

  19. I consider myself a newbie to WordPress and I’ve watched the WPSessions for Theme Development.
    I am a big fan of surrounding myself with people who boost my weaknesses and enhance my strengths. Attending the Theme Dev sessions was humbling to me as I found out just how little I know about WP.

    I’d love to win a years subscription to continually boost myself and learning – to one day call myself a super awesome WP Developer!

  20. Hello, i use WordPress since 2005 on .org and then self-hosted. I started with a personal blog in Italian and English and then become my professional identity that allowed me to find jobs and to create a network. So, i love WordPress and now i have less time to study and update about WordPress world.

    I use WordPress for some small business and charity. The next website will be for free for a no profit association, a FabLab that i co-create in my hometown and i want to learn new technique by using Wpsessions. 🙂

  21. Hi

    Getting Straight to the point, I have been a big follower of WP Sessions and really love the format. I develop for clients from the non profit sector like education, sustainability or Democracy. It is WordPress that has truly helped me help the customers by achieving a Rapid application development workflow and fulfill their organizational goals/purpose. I believe getting a year of access would really help me do the following :

    1.Serve the various non profits in a better way .
    2.Broaden my own knowledge of WordPress
    3.Help me contribute and grow the WordPress Community in India

    But I really hope that I am worthy of this Privilege.

    Praveen
    Bangalore India.

  22. I want to learn more. Simple as that. I have always loved learning new things. I especially love sharing that newly learned knowledge. For the last year or so I have wanted to contribute more and more to the community and have done so by doing some theme reviews and helping in the support forums.

    I would love to contribute more and more to the core project and this would be one way helping me help the community.

  23. I am a “next” type of guy, always wanting to know whats next, to be on the edge of WordPress, iOS etc. And to be that guy I need to study, to learn, but sitting down at night with 3 little girls, it’s hard to focus after a long day.

    This would be a blessing for sure on how to become a better coder.

  25. 2 1/2 years ago, I “retired” from youth ministry and became a stay-at-home dad. Soon after, the amazing folks at WPGR (WordPress Grand Rapids) helped get me started developing in WordPress. Since then, I have started a small WordPress design / development company (with a former Student from youth ministry!). After several clients, and with some inspiration from some projects we heard about at WPGR, we started developing a mulit-site product to help youth pastors with their web presence. As new-ish developers, we have quite the learning curve to pull this off! A free year of WPSessioins would definitely help us help youth ministries on the web. Along the way, (and this gets to happen either way) we get to give back to the amazing WordPress community that helped us get this far.

  27. I am new the WordPress party but I’m am hooked! I’ve haven’t been this excited about something-tech in a long time. I am a real estate broker that wants to get WordPress down and build a really kick butt back end system for my small business. I want to show new agents (when I get them 🙂 ) how beautiful and functional their sites can be while showing a consistent brand and fresh content. The sky is the limit! Your sessions would help me in my “sponge” mode while I am soaking up WP info.

  28. Hi!
    I’ve been learning php, advanced css, python and django in the last 6 months, and having the opportunity to learn more about WordPress (a platform I’ve been using for years) would mean getting more tools in my toolbox . See, I’m no professional WP developer (and I won’t be), but I certainly would be putting those newly acquired skills to good use by developing custom plugins/themes and fine-tuning my wp installs.

  29. Working on a startup and building the platform on the top of WordPress. Would learn many new things and approaches from other WP developers 🙂

  30. Hei Brian,

    thanks for offering such giveaway and the challenge within post. I like the way you do good / contribute while spreading the word about the WPSESSIONS product :).

    Now it is time to talk about me and my motivation. You ask me why I would appreciate to win the opportunity to enjoy and learn from the WPSESSIONS expertise the next 12 month?

    Lately I had to decide about my future and with what I want to continue in my professional life. The task was to identify the skills and the knowledge which I want to work on and improve especially. After finishing my university degree in Digital Media it was definite for me that I stay in the online field, but as you know: The web, it´s underlaying technologies and whole market is huge, which means “doing everything” is not possible if you aim for high quality output…

    After reading the book “The Year Without Pants” (Scott Berkun) I was curious to experience the WordPress ecosystem and the Automattic culture, and I just started out with some small but confident steps:
    * I built and released my first WordPress Plugin for the public (http://wordpress.org/plugins/advent-calender/)
    * I did my first core contribution with got released with WordPress 3.8 (http://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/26813)

    All these things happening with this „open source (but also somehow commercially backed) spirit“
    feel very great to me, that is why I definitely want to continue with my WordPress journey. As I origin more from the front-end side (and love it) I will step into this part of WordPress soon: I want to learn and contribute especially to the ongoing user interface shift, which means the increasing involvement of JavaScript technically and simplification / easier usage on user side.

    And there is one more thing: I want to become an Automattican in 2014!

    Best,
    Paul (temporary from Finland)

    • You should definitely hone your skills and apply to become an Automattician. They thrive on people with your determination and positive spirit. Hopefully the sessions hosted here will help you to that end 🙂

  31. “The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.”
    I’ve been working with WP for a few years: it all started as a DIY project and slowly it became the core of my owned business. I would like to take it to the next level because I know there are so many things I could with the right tools and mindset.
    I want 2014 to be “the year that changed it all”.

    Happy holidays from Italy.

  33. I’m not a wordpress developer yet but I’ve certainly been experimenting. I’ve made some crappy themes and messed around under the hood when things have gone wrong with plugin conflicts and database errors. However, I have been blogging for a while and run a community where I assist other bloggers in particular new bloggers. There are a few common problems that keep coming up that I’d love to be able to create wordpress related products that could help them to solve them, the only problem is I don’t have the know how.
    I hope that winning these session will help me to be be able to move from idea to product to benefit not just my community but also other bloggers.

    Plus I love learning more.

  34. The importance of ongoing education can not be stressed enough. Just when you think you know what you are doing, you have really only scratched the surface. With the WordPress community constantly growing and changing, keeping up is quite a challenge. WPSessions addresses that challenge, with a constant educational source, that is feeding your mind on a regular basis. Helping you to stay at the top of your professional game, and maintain your position as a professional. I have been struggling with the transition to WordPress, as I come from the more traditional side of site building. I can learn to be an effective WordPress developer to better serve my clients with value added service. By learning the ins and outs, I will be more confident with my recommendations and choices, and thereby provide a more comfortable experience for my clients. I can only imagine the type of impact, that a year of ongoing training will have. The growth potential with this type of knowledge will be unlimited. Steady and continued growth is the key to a successful future. I have stopped and started doing web stuff because of the frustration of self directed education. I see WPSessions and WordPress as the platform that will propel me into the future that I will stay with.

  35. I am considering expanding my range of skills and opportunities for income diversification. I have also had an interest in WordPress when I first discovered it back in 2006, but have never had the desire to explore it more than using it as a blogging platform.

    I think that the opportunity to learn from WPSessions comes at a time in my life when I would benefit from broadening my set of skills away from my full time employment as an engineer, and enhance my skills in one of my passions, that being WordPress.

  36. Hi there!

    My name is Jennifer, and I am the Information Technology/Teen Librarian at The Brookfield Library in Brookfield, Connecticut. In the summer of 2012, I decided that my library needed a better alternative to Dreamweaver for our website, so I taught myself to use WordPress. We launched our new site in October 2012, and have received very positive results overall. Patrons are happy that they can easily find information on our services, events, and holdings. I am very happy that I can easily update our website from anywhere with an internet connection.

    After working on my library’s site for many months, I became very enthusiastic about WordPress and the potential it has for other libraries and non-profit organizations. This led me to begin to offer the skills I had learned to others, for a small fee. In the past year, I have developed (am in the process of developing) several sites for other libraries and non-profits in Connecticut. I love WordPress for these sites, because it gives the organizations the power to update their sites easily, without worrying about FTP or editing extensive HTML.

    While I have learned a great deal about WordPress from online tutorials and good ol’ trial and error, I am certain that my library’s website would benefit from the knowledge gained from these sessions. As is the case with so many non-profit organizations, we have a very limited budget for training purposes.

    Thanks so much for your consideration, and Merry Christmas!

    Jennifer

    • Jennifer, way to go on seizing the opportunity to build something great! I’m excited to hear about the ways in which you’re expanding your knowledge and increasing your ability to benefit many.

      I did notice, though, that you missed step 2 of the contest (joining the mailing list). You might want to do that 🙂

      • Hi, Brian!

        Many thanks! I did join the mailing list, but with an email address other than what I listed on my original comment. Maybe that’s why you didn’t ‘see’ me. 🙂

        Jennifer

  37. I have always believed in the power of WordPress and to see now how web developers opt to use it than other website builders is just awesome! But in my case, I have to prove in the company I am working for that WordPress is the best and practical choice in creating pages for their business website and how convenient it will be as for content management. An outsource developer had us stuck and lack imagination during progress of building company’s website which made them decline the contract and trash all what was started in the wp account. Now with wpsessions, I know I could use the learning to rebuild and revamp the existing template. Just needed a little kick here to let my creative juice flow. Thanks wp!

  38. I want to learn more and help spread the knowledge I learn to the stay at home mothers that I work with in my rural community. I help mothers learn new skills to be able to start virtual careers at home. This would be a great way for me to learn addtional skills and give back to them in a huge way. Thank you for the consideration!

  39. I like to improve the knowledge and use of WP. With my site I hope to help disadvantaged people in the chinese countryside to improve their lifes. In general it is a site with “A Face”. I was there, worked with them and am motivated to help them because I know the process they are in. I lived and worked 5 years in China and have done the WFTO certification process myself.

  42. I seriously considered buying the WPSessions black friday sale. I opted out in favor of…well..xmas gifts but I’m thinking I would have been better served by going in on the wpsessions deal.

  43. Hi There
    Getting a full-year scholarship to WPSessions Will Let Me Learn wordpress essencials and How To create Plugin and wordpress theme and much more which hopefully will make me money to help me and other asylum seeker

  44. Its always fun when having the opportunity to learn something new. Especially when it relates to detailed knowledge of WordPress, one of the web platform that is quite popular today . WPSESSIONS very kind enough to give us this opportunity. Of course I hope to win so i could feel these experience.:)

  45. I’m a self-learner who has been playing around with WordPress for 5 years now, 3 years in my own WordPress focused business and 1 year being an employer of a small team of WordPress juniors.

    Getting my hands on some focused study materials as these, available on WPSessions, will finally throw me into learning the WordPress (a.k.a. the right) way of doing things, opposed to constant trial and errors. Furthermore, I’ll be able to help on a later stage all my colleagues and friends in getting better with WordPress!

    Merry Christmas, everybody!

  46. I’m a WordPress newbie. I just joined my bro on his progress to establish a company. In our quest to finding a framework/CMS to integrate into our workflow, I accidently stumbled across WordPress. At first I thought WordPress was some simple blogging tool, I’m so glad I was mistaken!!!

    After some reading about WordPress internals, we jumped the gun and started developing our first WordPress project on a medium-scale stock system. Glad we did the right choice! Just one month on WordPress I’m declaring myself a WP Junky. I opened a twitter account so I can follow 20+ WordPress people. Now in the process of porting WordPress hook system into my own PHP workflow, and using Composer to integrate WordPress into our rapid development workflow. All of this in just one plus month!!! Eat, drink, sleep WordPress…

    Currently, my brain is annoying me to open a blog dedicated to WordPress formulas in the perspective of programming and software development. I’m surprised to find the amount of help from the WP community, and wish to be a part of that community. Having one year scholarship to juicy WordPress content will be a big boost to my arsenal, and also a boost for me share knowledge to the WordPress community. What’s next for me? Releasing quality plugins and contributing to WordPress development! Happy Christmas and countdown to New Year!

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