Good Times at WordCamp OC

Good Times at WordCamp OC

April 25th, 2010

The WordPress community is notorious for being totally cool and supportive of any and all who use WordPress and are looking to improve their skills as well as the reach of the online efforts. This past weekend’s WordCamp in Orange County (California, not New Jersey with all due respect…) most certainly embodied that spirit with 145 friendly and impassioned fellow WordPressers participating in the event.

In addition to the great instruction, included in the dirt-cheap price of $40 was a t-shirt and an awesome Hawaiian BBQ catered lunch.

The event consisted of seminars broken into 2 tracks taking place simultaneously in 2 separate classrooms. One track of seminars was geared towards the more entry-level WordPress users while the other more advanced set of seminars was geared more towards the developers.

I personally split my time between the 2 different tracks, since some of the entry level sessions seemed too interesting to pass up, such as “WordPress for Marketing” and “WordPress as a CMS.”

Some of the really cool things I learned:

(CAUTION: Geek-speak ahead):

• Upgrading WordPress MU 2.9.2 to WordPress 3.0 (which makes WordPress MU obsolete as it natively contains all of MU’s multi-site functionality) is not a super-easy process unless you’re a developer
• WordPress is no longer referring to WordPress sites as “blogs” but rather as “sites.” This makes sense as WordPress is truly coming into its own as a full-fledged CMS and not just a blogging tool.
• For integrating a forum into a WordPress site, vBulletin seems like the most hassle-free way to go.
• vBulletin can allow your WordPress site to function as a paid membership site
• If you edit a pre-made plugin and want to make sure that your changes are never overwritten by a plugin update, you can find out how to do that here: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/excluding-your-plugin-or-theme-from-update-checks/
• Theme frameworks such as Hybrid and Thesis save you time by offering TONS of different page templates that you would otherwise have to integrate yourself as well as adding individual classes to just about everything in the DOM, but the fact that there’s a good amount of PHP involved in making even simple tweaks can slow you down if you’re new to PHP. So those are the factors to weigh when considering going the framework route. (Always been on the fence whether frameworks save or add extra time)
• I was reminded how cool the PageMash plugin is (I got away from it for a while)
• Google Analytics provides a “heat map” showing what portion of your site visitors are clicking where on your homepage
• MailChimp can automatically create a newsletter for you based on your blog’s RSS feed (good if you’re feeling to lazy to create an original newsletter)

I also wanted to give big thanks to the organizers of the event Brandon Dove & Jeffrey Zinn of Orange County-based hosting and web services company, Pixel Jar. They, along with a small army of volunteers really put a lot of work into making this event as successful as it was.

For WordPress users and developer of all levels of experience, these events a certainly not-to-be-missed.

Website for the event: http://www.ocwordcamp.com

Website for upcoming the Los Angeles WordCamp: http://la.wordcamp.org

To find out when WordCamp comes to your neck of the woods: http://central.wordcamp.org

Category : Blog & WordPress