I have had the pleasure of traveling to San Francisco to attend the 2010 WordCamp SF. It is a conference dedicated to WordPress, Blizzard’s preferred platform to use for both a Content Management System (CMS) and Blogging.
There are WordCamp’s held all around the world, in 2009 there were 48 WordCamps, but San Francisco is historically the largest gathering as it is the headquarters of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress.
The presentation I was looking forward to the most was the “State of the Word” speech by WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg. Matt has a great way of connecting with the audience, sharing a lot of information, and managing to bring in some comedy.
The biggest item on everyone’s mind, including Matt’s, is the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0. There is a lot for developers to look forward to in 3.0.
Some highlight of 3.0 include:
- Menus
- Custom post types
- WPMU Code Merger
- Bulk upgrade of plug-ins (yay!)
Matt was smart and wouldn’t promise any official 3.0 release date since it originally was scheduled for April. I’d be surprised ifwe don’t see a release in May.
The end of the presentation was the one word that summed up WordPress right now, and that word is “Strong”. I’d say this is certainly fitting, just consider these few statistical highlights that were shared:
- 21 Million downloads of WordPress.org (this is the self-hosted version, which Blizzard uses)
- Over 70 Million downloads of plug-ins from the plug-in repository
- 35 Billion (yes BILLION) pageviews served up by WordPress .org and .com
I had an amazing time at the conference and certainly enjoyed talking with fellow “geeks”. The conference made me once again realize just how big the WordPress community is, and how much pride and love there is for this open source product.
So what does this mean for you as a customer of Blizzard!? Well you can rest assured that we have already been testing the 3.0 beta release, and checking for compatibility with our favorite plug-ins. After 3.0 is officially released, in due time, we will be upgrading the WordPress sites of our client’s who have a current maintenance plan.
We will continue to stay up-to-date with our industry through training and by attending core conference. Plans are already in the works to send several staff members to WordCamp Denver in July 2010.
So stay on the look out for news we have from that conference.
It’s great to hear that this platform continues to be developed in the spirit of open source and is evolving as needs arise. Certainly, I have seen many client sites improve greatly, just by our migrating their sites to WordPress. Usability is much better, SERP’s increased, and the ability for clients to edit their own sites gives them to power to update content quickly, thus providing the visitor current information. Can’t wait to see what features the 3.0 release has to offer our web designers / developers for our clients.
Lindy – it’s so great to hear what you and your team are doing for us. Our WordPress blog site, http://seegulfshores.kaiserrealty.com/ has been our key outlet to our guests during this oil crisis in the Gulf. We update daily (often more) and link back to it from our official company site, Facebook and Twitter. Our posts are also showing up strongly in Google Key Word searches. Blizzard – thanks for helping us stay in touch during this critical time.
I am a huge fan of the WordPress platform and it’s just too bad I couldn’t make it to the the 2010 WordCamp in San Francisco. It’s comforting to know that WordPress developers are on top of everything and I can wait for the version 3.0 to be released. The bulk upgrade of plugins would be a tremendous time saver.
@Kathy – Yes I agree knowing there is so much support and ongoing development of the platform is just energizing! Glad to hear you are also seeing such good results.
@Emily – I’m glad to hear that the WordPress blog is servicing you so well with this potential disaster. Being able to quickly explain to a wide audience what the real conditions are like in your area is very valuable. Today I would absolutely rather be on your beach instead of being in snowy Colorado!
Thanks for sharing the news. I am a WordPress fan and it’s great to know that they have WordCamps. Anyway, I live very far from San Fransisco, so I could not have made it to the event. I’d look forward to watching video presentations of this event.