Allison is a freelance web developer and designer from the New York area. She’s been making stuff with WordPress since 2005 and loves finding new ways to customize it for nonprofits and small businesses. She also blogs about independent travel and minimalistpacking, and podcasts about TV shows and fandom.

Follow @allilevine on Twitter.

Allison will be giving a talk titled “Custom Post Types, Fields, and Meta Boxes to Do the Impossible with WordPress“.

What is your favorite improvement to WordPress this past year?

I think in the past year WordPress has really become a platform that enables, rather than restricts, ideas, from distraction-free writing to the new Press This to complex query ordering.

Why did you decide to speak at WordCamp Montreal?

I met some amazing women at another local conference who encouraged me to give my first talk at WordCamp Montreal. I also love sharing what I’ve learned while working with WordPress.

What is your talk going to be about?

I’m going to be talking about how I use WordPress’ custom building blocks (post types, meta boxes, fields, templates, etc.) to solve real-world problems.

What is the one thing you want people to walk away with from your talk?

You can create, chop up, put back together, and display pretty much any type of content in a transformative way with WordPress.

Who in the WordPress community inspires you? Who do you follow?

@zoonini, @KarvelDigital, @davidperel, @noeltock, @jenmylo, @alisothegeek, @boone, @helenhousandi, @laras126, @calliaweb to name a few.

What new feature would you like to see in the future?

I’d like to see WordPress leverage not only its developer and support communities but also the huge network of content experts that it has brought together. WordPress has the potential to be our handbook to everything, based on actual knowledge and contribution rather than a proprietary search engine formula.