The forth year of the UK national WordCamp conference proved to be the best so far, with a great mix of presentations and breakout sessions. It’s always interesting and inspiring to mingle with so many different types of WordPress developers, designers, authors and entrepreneurs.
I’ve presented at every WordCamp since 2008, but before the conference this year I worried if I had set the bar a-little too high with ‘Build a custom theme in one hour’ or as I sub-titled it ‘Suicide by live code demo’ (much to the amusement of Microsoft’s UBelly!) As it turned out I did run out of time, but it was a-lot of fun demonstrating some CSS, CMS structure and of-course the Wonderflux theme framework. The Ribbon theme that was built is now available for download, or you can view the online demo.
WordPress Research and development
Each year I return from WordCamp with huge list of R&D – and usually only make it through half… so here’s the top half that I really do actually need to work through!
- Paul Gibbs revealing some very substantial changes to the BuddyPress theme system and overall structure in the next version arriving ‘before Christmas’.
- WordPress security awareness needs to increase in the community. A-lot of discussion on file monitoring/protection – with a good looking plugin from fellow delegate Scott Cariss called WordPress File Monitor Plus. Security always starts at home – remember the most important thing is getting your server setup locked down – Kieran O’Shea demoed a pretty scary hack!
- Great session from Kimb Jones on plugins – CMS Tree Page View, CollabPress, Easy Table Creator and Front End Editor worth further investigation!
- Uploaded document revisions plugin provides a level of revision management on attachments.
- Great work in the WordHack session on creating the Very Simple Post Images plugin from David Tonge and David Laing. Interesting custom CMS image insertion and management.
- HumanMade have a great looking image resizing/optimisation plugin called WPThumb based on PHPThumb.
- schema.org provides a solid reference of relevant ‘schemas’ for tagging content.
- Seems like backlinks and content are still the solid foundations of SEO, but there were some stout warnings about Black Hat SEO tactics from Nick Garner! Some good SEO resources include Sphinn, SEOmoz, Magestic SEO and of-course Google Webmaster Tools.
I was also on the ‘Site Doctors’ panel – an open forum and group discussion where very brave delegates shout-up with site issues. Every year this generates a fantastic debate between the audience and panel – and this year was no exception! With seasoned pro’s Nick Garner (SEO), Lee Willis (coding and plugins) and Kieran O’Shea (security and plugins) on-board the panel were certainly kept on their toes. Gold stars go to Lee and Kieran after they both stepped in at the last minute.
One of the best sessions that I participated in was the ‘show and tell’ session, where some of us did a short presentation on something they’d achieved in WordPress. There was some good discussion around deployment/working process and I shared a some very neat CMS custom post type admin modification;)
Thanks
A massive thanks has to go out to all the sponsors – without which the event would cost ten times as much to attend and only be half as much fun! The swag stash included cool t-shirts from WonderThemes, UBelly and of course the conference t-shirt designed again by Jonathan Harris, who worked tirelessly to do all the creative design and print artwork for the event. He also did the creative design on the WordCampUK Portsmouth 2011 conference site, which I coded and built on Wonderflux. StinkyInk provided some very good quality notebooks and CatN for a very swanky metal USB stick, nice! Finally, lets not forget Human Made – nice bunch of guys and bought us lots of drinks;)
Be sure to check out the WordPress events happening around the rest of the UK and if you are in the Midlands you may be interested to know that I’m setting up a Birmingham/Midlands WordPress user group, which will meet every month in Birmingham. A number of very nice people have already offered to help me out on this, so look out for more information soon.