As one might surmise by the badge above, I attended WordCamp Boston this year. It was held right down the street at Boston University. I had only found out that a WordCamp was being held in Boston about a week and a half beforehand. When I saw where it would be, I leaped at the opportunity. Registration was only US$40, which is incredibly reasonable for a technical conference.
Read on to hear more about some of the panels I attended.
The best session overall was the double session with two of the WordPress core developers. It wasn’t technical at all, but it was just a great forum on where WordPress is currently and where they would like it to be somewhere down the road. They were also taking questions and looking for feedback. I asked if there were any plans on improving the migration and management of WordPress w/ Multisite and I got a very interesting answer. Apparently they had a one button upgrade process ready to go, but the more they looked at Multisite and saw what people were doing with it and what problems they were encountering, they decided to make the upgrade more difficult as a barrier to entry. If you could upgrade to Multisite then you at least had enough knowledge to be able to troubleshoot some of the issues that may arise from the upgrade. I could not disagree with him, as the management of Multisite is still pretty klunky and not as intuitive as it really needs to be. It did make me consider writing a plugin to migrate a WordPress site to a Multisite though.
The best technical panel that I attended was wholly owned by K. Adam White and his talk on Stepping into Custom Post Types. I had only recently realized that pages, posts, revisions and attachments were all stored they same way just with different custom post types. Sitting in on this panel made me realize just how much you could do by creating your own custom post types. It was a fantastic presentation with great real world examples. It was a shock to most when K. Adam said that this was the first time he had given this presentation. I’ve already adapted custom post types into two different plugin projects that I am working on, one of which is with Ben from DeadpoolBugle.com.
I went to three different marketing and SEO sessions in a row Saturday afternoon. While they had some fantastic information that was really relevant and useful, part of me felt like I had watched a very similar panel three times in a row. In retrospect, I would have liked to have attended the session on CSS3 instead of one of these marketing sessions.
I handed out many business cards and met quite a few, very nice people doing some very interesting things with their little space on the internet. It makes me hopeful that I can have an impact on the industry somewhere along the way. I’ll definitely be attending WordCamp Boston next year. Maybe one of these years I’ll even run a session.
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