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Archive for September, 2009

Thank You Wordcamp Birmingham

Monday, September 28th, 2009

Once in a while people come together under a common banner to share, learn, and build new relationships. I came to #wcbhm09 for all of the above, and must say I did not leave disappointed. In fact, the only negative experience I had was not getting to come to the Sunday sessions due to, bleh, walking pneumonia. Regardless, here are my favorite tidbits of #wcbhm09.

The first session I attended was “Jumping into WordPress Plugin Programming” led by Dougal Campbell, one of the first to work on the wordpress platform. The room was packed, to the point there were folks sitting on the floor for lack of chairs, nevertheless, the cheerful group listened attentively to Dougal talk about the vast back end/plugin architecture offered to developers. I came to this session with a basic understanding of plugin/dev; I left the session feeling like I had SO much more to learn. Wordpress didn’t just create a robust application, they created a platform that allows developers to make it even more so. Since we were limited on time, Dougal was only able to scratch the surface on the topic, but it was enough of a scratch to pique my interest and push me in the right direction. The next session I attended was Essential SEO and Analytics for WordPress, led by Jeremy Flint.

Flint’s session was divided in two parts, one for SEO tools/plugins to assist the developer in site optimization. The second part was about analytics tools/plugins that make tracing and measuring your site’s success a breeze. I came into the session thinking all I needed to do was add my Google tracking code to the bottom of the page, I mean it can’t get much better than that right? Wrong! Jeremy pointed us to a plugin called Google Analyticator.

Short Description:
Google Analyticator adds the necessary JavaScript code to enable Google Analytics logging on any WordPress blog. This eliminates the need to edit your template code to begin logging. Google Analyticator also includes several widgets for displaying Analytics data in the admin and on your blog.

As you can see this takes it one step further allowing you to compartmentalize information within the wp-admin. Jeremy also showed us several SEO tips and tricks that I had previously built into the template. It turns out there are tools/plugins out there to handle SEO for you so you can focus on great design. Now it was time for lunch and our first keynote led by, Matt Mullenweg, @photomatt.

Matt as some may know is the man behind wordpress as we know it. Rather than spending his keynote telling us about how wonderful his product is, he actually spent the time speaking to the audience, answering questions, and just being awesome. I was/am so impressed with the keynote approach. While Matt spoke we had Dreamland BBQ, thanks Andre @acnatta and the rest of the organizers, the food was wonderful, wait everything was wonderful, okay maybe not the wifi but that is another story. Now for the most informative session I attended, Mitch Canter / @studionashvegas ‘s session on “Beyond the Blog: Setting up a Full Dynamic site with WordPress”

Mitch opened my eyes to several tools that make wordpress so much better. One of my favorite tools we discussed was flutter. Mitch was introduced to flutter by @tammyhart another AMAZING theme developer. Flutter takes content creation to a new level by allowing you to enter different sections of content in custom fields. You can then create new page templates within your theme to display the content however you want. Prior you had a typical wysiwyg editor and you had to fit all the formatting in to that box. With flutter a new world of content creation and styling overtakes the placid seas of WP. Mitch also spoke of using wp-query in your page templates which enables you to push several different pages of content onto the same WP page template. This session alone was worth the price of admission.

The rest of the day, or until the final keynote, I spent time networking, meeting tweeps, and just having some great conversations. I think my favorite part of wcbhm09 was the offline interaction. I am so encouraged by the people I got the chance to meet, the community spirit that made up the conference was phenomenal.

The last keynote was given by @mideastyouth there is no way I could possibly give her justice merely appending my thoughts to this post, therefore, I’m going to write about what an amazing session it was later on.

Saturday night a few of us went to dinner, where we continued in thought provoking conversation. If you don’t know John Garrett then you need to. follow him here: @garrett98, @reversechurch, and @microfit. I need to give a big sh0ut-out to @microfit for covering the cost of @mideastyouth’s travel, truly an awesome company with a heart of gold. After dinner I met up with some other attendees where to my surprise I got to meet and hangout with @photomatt, he is completely down to earth, extremely smart, and a pleasure to spend time with.