Last weekend I attended my first WordCamp. It’s like band camp, except for WordPress enthusiasts like me.
WordCamp Orlando was held at the UCF Rosen School of Hospitality Management. I actually happened to be staying with my family at the Hard Rock Hotel a few miles down the road before hitting the parks and holiday parade at Universal, so the timing couldn’t have been any better.
WordCamp tickets were only $20 and included a t-shirt, lunch, open bar reception, and other goodies. Some of the sponsors had pretty amazing giveaways for attendees. (I’m looking at you, WP Engine.)
My ticket was actually comped by my hosting company, ZippyKid, who was also a sponsor. Thanks again guys!
So, because of family obligations in the afternoon, I was only able to partake in the morning sessions. There were two tracks, a “publisher” track and a “developer” track. I chose to sit in on the publisher sessions and the three sessions I got to see did not disappoint.
The first session was called “Designing your brand through user experience”. Dan Maccarone provided some good insight into the topic and showed several real life examples of how design could both help, and potentially hurt your brand.
The next session was “UCF’s use of WordPress as a CMS”. This session was great because I get the question a lot from clients about “Why should I choose WordPress over other website platforms?”. Matthew Vaccaro and Justin Sisley gave a great presentation on how they researched the various platforms available and why they ultimately chose to build UCF Medical School’s new website using WordPress. The slides from this presentation are embedded below and are well worth a look.
The final session of my time at WordCamp Orlando was titled “WordPress in the Newsroom”. In this presentation Ibrahim Madha talked about how Salon.com uses WordPress. It was great to see how a really big website like Salon.com had modified the dashboard and editor to meet their unique publishing needs. Ibrahim hinted that some of the plugins the Salon.com team had built in-house might be released to the public in the near future, which would be awesome to see.
I wish I had been able to stay for more sessions but the presentations I was able to watch made me even more excited about WordPress as a platform. Not to mention the fact that being among 100+ other WordPress junkies makes you realize what a great community WordPress has created.
I’m looking forward to my next WordCamp in the near future!
Writer.