This was my first WordCamp or any community seminar ever.  This site is on WordPress and the whole day was spent on the current and future of WordPress. I took a lot from the presentations and networked with some cool people.

Matt Mullenweg (That’s my photo op with him above–me on the left) opened the day with status of WordPress. He went over the cool new features that will be in version 2.7 due out in November. Here are a few highlights from his comments:

• Stats: Top plugin used is Akismet
  • About 35% of installs are still using PHP 4.x. When more are using PHP 5 (more than 90% of installs) then they will port it to PHP5.
  • 11 million downloads of Wordpress in 2008
  • 230 Million pageviews on wordpress.com sites in 2008
  • 5 billion spam comments caught by akismet this year–about 99.935% success.
  • Over 100,000 iphone apps installs so far
• BuddyPress.org is an upcoming service used in conjunction with WordPress MU. It allows you to easily build an social networking community. Something I think we will definately look into over at uPlej.
• Future releases include: tighter security, automatic WP upgrades, more media integration, wordpress as a central location for all your social media a la friendfeed, easier integration with other apps like buddypress
• Too much other things to mention. The future of WordPress sure is incredible.

Richard Miller followed with ideas about using WordPress as a CMS. He went through several examples of how he has used WordPress as a CMS. Seems like most people use half pages, half posts with using it as a CMS. Not a how-to I was hoping it would be, but good info.

Cameron Moll covered design and usability tips. He showed several examples and left us with this great cheatsheet - http://cameronmoll.com/downloads/Web_Accessibility_Checklist.pdf

Podcasting using WordPress by Thom Allen

Ash Buckles talked about SEO for your blog

• Create a Strategy–goals, audience, revise often
• SEO–Title and meta data, internal links, sitemaps, Call-to-Action on each page
• Permalinks–prefers /post-title.html url structure
• Content–target your audience, use good keyword density, post about solving a problem, think link bait, learn good copywriting skills, write between 300-700 words on topic
• SEM–Gain incoming links, control anchor text, use comments, partner with bloggers, guest blog when possible, add your blog to feed services, use social media
• Things to avoid–sitewide blogrolls, duplicate content, lack of purpose, lack of call-to-action, laziness

Alex King comments on creating WordPress plugins. He released WP plugin Dev tools at http://www.crowdfavorite.com/wordpress and new free wordpress theme and a new backup service call Backupmoxie

Want a more detailed account of the WordPress future–Check out  WordPress and Beyond