While most people used this last Saturday to sleep in, I took the opportunity to wake up at 6am, and make a trip to Reno. After several of my favorite albums and a few thousand feet elevation climb, I arrived at the Reno-Tahoe Wordcamp. For those who don’t know, Wordcamp is a place for web designers, developers, and other techies to talk about WordPress, the popular Content Management System. A fun time was had by all, and here a few of the highlights.
Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress gave the keynote titled “4 Things You Should Get Hip To”. They included the recently acquired WP.com, P2 – a mashup of twitter and instant messaging, WordPress.tv – a collection of videos for everything WordPress, and BuddyPress – a suite of plugins dubbed the “funny uncle” of WordPress. His presentation was entertaining, and he is everything you would expect form a silicon-valley start up wizard: laid-back, slightly awkward, and razor sharp.
Next up were presentations on using custom WordPress fields, and creating WordPress plugins. Although neither was new to me, I was able to glean a few useful tricks I plan to use soon. Who knew there was a function to check for redundant Javascript files before adding your own? For any who don’t know, that’s just slick.
Next up was… Lunch. The boxed lunch with a pesto chicken sandwich was surprisingly good. Mmmmmm.
Following lunch was a superb presentation given by Joseph Scott on performance and optimization. It basically went through every step of the web server chain, including Apache, PHP, MySQL, and WordPress, giving ways to easily speed up each one. What struck me was how simple and ridiculously effective all of his tips were. Two of which: PHP caching, and Apache page compression took me less than an hour to implement, and sped up my web server by double!
Next up was an intro to creating themes given by Chelsea Otakan. Following her presentation was thoughts on using WordPress as a CMS given by Ed Adkins. Ed’s presentation was a crowd-pleaser, and kept the audience in stitches with a combination of creative slides, tongue-in-cheek opinions, inappropriate sample websites, and reflections on special clients.
Last up was a slideshow from Glen Weatherson titled “WordPress and House Arrest”. It turns out good web software can keep you sane when stuck inside a 1 bedroom studio apartment for 5 months. His webcam videos stemming from boredom kept us alternating between laughing hysterically, and cringing from pain.
All in all, it certainly was worth the 5 hours of driving, and I can’t wait to do it next month in San Francisco!
Yay! Glad you were able to make it. Next month’s should be fun as well :]
I was just looking into using WP as a CMS, figured it would be much lighter weight and simpler for clients to utilize, as long as it didn’t need to be too complicated.