A Tale of Two WordCamps
This coming weekend, two WordCamps will be going on simultaneously — yep, it’s WordCamp season again! This weekend will be the first of many this autumn with multiple WordCamps. Tomorrow (not quite the weekend but close enough) is WordCamp Cape Town, and then this weekend, first-time WordCamp Albuquerque coincides with 4-time returning champ WordCamp Portland, a cool juxtaposition of a more established local community with one that is just getting started. If you’re anywhere near the Portland area, you should try to attend. The WordPress Foundation will be sponsoring some special activities around Software Freedom Day, and some members of the core team (me, Nacin, Koop) will be there.
Is there a WordCamp coming up near you? Let’s find out!
Sep 15: WordCamp Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa
Sep 16-18: WordCamp Albuquerque Albuquerque, NM
Sep 17-18: WordCamp Portland Portland, OR
Sep 24: WordCamp Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal
Sep 25: WordCamp Sofia Sofia, Bulgaria
Oct 1: WordCamp Louisville Louisville, Kentucky
Oct 8-9: WordCamp Sevilla Seville, Spain
Oct 15-16: WordCamp Jabalpur Jabalpur, India
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Toronto Toronto, ON
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Gold Coast Gold Coast, Australia
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Philly Philadelphia, PA
Nov 12: WordCamp Caguas Caguas, Puerto Rico
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Kenya Nairobi, Kenya
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Detroit Detroit, MI
Nov 12: WordCamp Richmond Richmond, VA
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark
Dec 17: WordCamp Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV
Feb 3-4 WordCamp Atlanta Atlanta, GA
There are also a number of WordCamps still in the early organizing stage that do not yet have dates set. These include: Ft. Wayne, IN; London, UK; Edmonton, Canada; Baku, Azerbaijan; Oslo, Norway; Sacramento, CA; Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh, PA; Omaha, NE; Orlando, FL; Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; Zagreb, Croatia; Nashville, TN, Washington DC, Baltimore, MD; Bangkok, Thailand; Istanbul, Turkey.
Hope to see you soon at a WordCamp near you!
Vote for WordPress Sessions at SXSW
Each year, members of the web community from around the world submit session proposals to the South by Southwest Interactive conference, an event that played a role in the birth of WordPress. We head to Austin every year, do a BBQ or throw a party, but despite the fact that almost 15% of the web is powered by WordPress, there aren’t many sessions related to WordPress on the schedule. This year, more than 3200 proposals are competing for about 350 slots, and who has time to read through, vote, and comment on 3200 proposals? Out of those 3200+ proposals, only 8 relate to WordPress! I thought it would be handy to post a guide to the WordPressy proposals for SXSWi 2012, so that if you would like to check them out and vote on them it woud be fast and easy. Leaving a comment in addition to your thumbs up/down vote helps the staff and advisory board know which sessions are likely to have an interested audience, so make sure to leave comments on the sessions you think would be cool (remember, they also publish the podcasts afterward). Voting ends in about 24 hours, so if you want to weigh in, now’s the time. Thanks for helping spread the word!
WordPress-specific Sessions
This list is based on searching for “WordPress” in proposal titles, descriptions, and tags. Clicking the proposal title will take you to that page in the SXSW PanelPicker, where you can vote and comment. Names that are linked go to those people’s WordPress.org profiles.
Blog Wars: Movable Type vs. WordPress Revisited
Mark Jaquith – WordPress Lead Developer
Byrne Reese – Endevver
These days people tend to pit us against Drupal rather than Movable Type, but looking back at the early rivalry and learning from the positive and negative aspects of it would be cool as we position ourselves in competition with new platforms. I like seeing Mark present at conferences, he always prepares well and does a good job. Though I’m guessing these guys will be all friendly and collaborative, I might take a nostalgia hit and imagine them in a fistfight just to liven things up. 
Designing WordPress
Jane Wells – WordPress User Experience Lead
Disclosure: This is me! Balancing the desire for truly open and participatory design processes against the often more efficient and consistent results of a more curated design method is something we’ve been working on for the past year or so in WordPress core. I’d use the design process for several recent core features (like the UI refresh and internal linking) to illustrate the issues we’ve faced and the results we’ve achieved.
Open Source Social Networking
John James Jacoby – BuddyPress Lead Developer
J-trip (as John James Jacoby is fondly known by many in the community) is the lead dev for BuddyPress and the new bbPress plugin. He’s proposing a panel discussion among reps from several open source social network platforms. It’s always cool hearing more about BuddyPress, but it would be even cooler to figure out how it fits in with and/or stacks up against other platforms.
Welcome to the Chaos – the Distributed Workplace
Nikolay Bachiyski – WordPress Core Developer, GlotPress Lead Developer
Lori McLeese – Automattic
This one isn’t about WordPress per se, though using WordPress as a communication tool is one of the topics and Automattic is obviously a WordPress-based business. The main reason I think people should vote for this session is because Nikolay, core committing developer for internationalization and lead developer of GlotPress, our translation tool, is an awesome speaker. He is hysterically funny when he presents. I would bet money this presentation will involve a bear.
Deploying WordPress: From Zero to Ninja
Grant Norwood – Michael & Susan Dell Foundation
When Mark Jaquith says a presentation on security and deployment is on his short list, I’m impressed. (He said it in the comments on the proposal.)
Beyond the Theme – Using WordPress as an API
David Tufts – kickpress.org
Obviously a hot topic in the community right now, seems like a no-brainer to choose.
Local Government Online: WordPress Beats Drupal
Jase Wilson – Luminopolis
There was a presentation at WordCamp San Francisco this month on moving a news site from Drupal to WordPress. More and more the question comes up of which tool is best for various situations and requirements. And obviously getting government to use more open source software would be a cost-saver in these tough economic times.
WordPress website built live in 45 minutes
Glenn Todd – Dvize Creative
Live walkthroughs are always fun, and help prove to the uninitiated how easy WordPress can be.
So: go vote on these session proposals and help spread the WordPress love. If you know of any WordPress-related proposals that didn’t come up in my search, let me know in a comment and I’ll update this post. Thanks, and maybe we’ll see you in Austin in March!
State of the Word
This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress.
We also conducted our first ever user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from all over the world:
We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. (If each site took only 3 hours to make, that’s $29.5M of work at the average hourly rate.)
I talk about this data, and much more, in my State of the Word address which you can watch here:
We know there’s more good stuff hidden in there and we’re open sourcing and releasing the raw information behind it. If you’re a researcher and would like to dig into the anonymized survey data yourself, you can grab it here. (Careful, it’s a 9MB CSV.)
There has never been a better time to be part of the WordPress community, and I want to thank each and every one of you for making it such a wonderful place to be. Now it’s time to get back to work, there’s still 85.3% of the web that needs help.
WordCamp SF Livestream!
The annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco, starts in fewer than 8 hours. The sold out event — three full days of programming for bloggers, developers, theme designers, and professional WordPress users — will be shared with more than 1,000 ticket holders from near and far. If you are one of the many people who wanted to come but couldn’t swing the time off or travel expenses, you should check out the livestream tickets that are for sale. You can even get a conference t-shirt to commemorate your “virtual” participation.
Speakers include members of the WordPress core development team, leaders of WordPress-based businesses, hobbyists, and everything in between. Take a look at the schedules for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and if you see something that sounds interesting (how could you not?), buy a livestream ticket. The stream will start at 16:00 UTC on Friday, August 12.
Viewing Parties
Celebrate your own local WordPress community by calling together some friends and having a livestream viewing party. In the case of regular WordPress meetup groups, if you do a viewing party we will have a process after #WCSF is over whereby attendees will be eligible to buy conference shirts if their meetup group organizer confirms viewing party attendance.
Videos from all the recorded sessions will be posted for free on WordPress.tv within a couple of weeks, but watching the livestream allows you to support WordCamp while providing instant gratification. And let’s face it: the best part is that you’ll know what the heck people are talking about on Twitter using the hashtag #wcsf.
Best WordCamp Speakers?
As we complete speaker selection for the annual WordPress conference (a.k.a. WordCamp San Francisco), it’s clear that even though there were more than 200 speaker applications, many great WordCamp speakers did not apply. No fear! We will seek them out to make sure that WordCamp SF has a fantastic lineup, including people who didn’t apply (too shy? who knows?) but have wowed local crowds at previous WordCamps.
This is about as basic a survey as there is. Tell us the three best WordCamp presentations you saw in the past year or so. For each, give the presenters name, the topic (exact title not necessary) and which WordCamp it was at (important).
Example:
1. Joe Shmoe, Using the Loop, WordCamp Sheboygan 2011
2. Jane Doe, Top 5 WordPress Plugins, WordCamp La Mancha 2010
3. Lee Smith, Your First Core Patch, WordCamp Atlantis 2011
That’s it. We don’t need your name or any info at all, just your three top speaker votes. We’ll take a look at the people with the most votes, and consider them for WCSF if they’re not already in the application pool. Thanks for your help in making this year’s conference better and more WordPressy than ever.
WordPress 3.2.1
After more than a million downloads of WordPress 3.2, we’re now releasing WordPress 3.2.1 into the wild. This maintenance release fixes a server incompatibility related to JSON that’s unfortunately affected some of you, as well as a few other fixes in the new dashboard design and the Twenty Eleven theme. If you’ve already updated to 3.2, then this update will be even faster than usual, thanks to the new feature in 3.2 that only updates files that have been changed, rather than replacing all the files in your installation.
For a full list of fixes, view the changelog the list of tickets. Our release haiku:
JSON, the admin
A little bit tidier
Edge cases covered
Download 3.2.1 or update now from the Dashboard → Updates menu in your site’s admin area.
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