A Saturday ago I decided to nerd out at the Reno-Tahoe Word Camp. Twelve Horses was a sponsor, so this also motivated me. The day was composed of different speakers talking about aspects of WordPress. WP is our CMS of choice for blogs, but the functionality doesn’t stop there, and there was a lot to learn.
The camp was held at UNR in my old stomping grounds, the journalism school. I was even able to catch up with an old professor while I was there, and he even stole my coffee away from me.
There were lots to learn about WordCamp, which kicked the day off with one of the original developers, Matt Mullenweg, speaking about what’s new with WordPress. Two cool things that are gaining momentum are BuddyPress, which is built off of WPMU. This allows a site to provide blogs for their visitors, but BuddyPress allows you to add all the social media plug-ins. It becomes more of a social network than a simple blog. The other thing he was excited to discuss was P2, which is focused more on a conversation than a blog. Instead of writing a 400 word post, people drop one liners (similar to twitter), and people respond back and forth. We’ll see where that goes.
The day went on and I listened to some really interesting speakers. After Matt spoke, people could go into two different tracks: one for developers and another for business people. I found myself in the developers track learning how to create themes and plug-ins.
The other half of the topics weren’t focused on the code. Some of the other seminars covered focusing soley on one topic to show expertise, another showed the advantages of using WP as a CMS for websites, and another 60 minutes was spent on a guy who used WP to keep sane in his house arrest.
WordPress is a very robust CMS, and this day taught me the advantages and disadvantages of using it. It’s a very powerful tool. Check out the links below. These cover some great basics for customizing WordPress to work for you: