This is a guest blog post written by Joachim Kudish, author of the blog, http://jkudish.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter.
WordCamp Montreal 2010 was held on (August 28th and 29th) in Downtown Montreal (at the UQAM Coeur des Sciences venue). The two-day conference was a success with over 300 attendees. The venue was divided into two rooms, one serving more beginner topics (such as A beginner’s guide to WordPress) and the other more advanced ones (such as Tweaking plugins to be 3.0 Network-Compatible).
Attendees were well treated with T-Shirts, the usual selection of stickers, breakfast and lunch (during both days), a special cupcake appearance and a great after-party. One could tell that the event was a success by the amount of tweets on the #wcmtl hashtag on twitter. The infamous Rennick family drove down all the way from New-Brunswick for the event. Both Ron and Andrea gave amazing talks, all whilst volunteering at the registration desk and providing cupcake security. Andrea’s talk was particularly enjoyed by the crowd who let away lots of laughs.
All of the presentations can be found here (most have slides up on slideshare), and you should check out the awesome photos of the event on flickr. I also hear that videos of the event are scheduled to pop up soon!
WordCamp Montreal was organized by Jeremy Clark, Brendan Sera-Shriar and Shannon Smith and was the 2nd WordCamp for Montreal (first one was in 2009).
During the event, an important decision was made for the Montreal WordPress community. WordPress meetups will be held on a bi-monthly basis, where WordPress users can get together to chat about their favorite piece of software.
Before they had a WordCamp to call their own. Hard to believe that considering Houston is the birth place for at least half of WordPress that it’s only now that a WordCamp was created in the area. Culturemap.com has a great writeup of the event including a few quotes from Matt himself. If you’re lucky, you might spot the VaultPress spelling error which gives it a Transformers vibe.
Mullenweg floated in and out of sessions, visiting with anyone with a question, concern or an idea. It’s apparent that the ease of use comes directly from Mullenweg’s ability to listen to users whether you are building a complicated system or just want to have a recreational blog. This is one available, famous guy. “WordPress is not just software, but a community,” Mullenweg wrote in the forward of WordPress for Dummies. The day proved that to be true.
If you attended WordCamp Houston, let me know within the comments what you learned.
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we discussed a number of topics including the headlines of the week such as the release of BuddyPress 1.2.5.2, an A/B testing plugin in the works, WordPress milestones, and the hot story of the week, The Capital P Dangit Filter. I was joined on the show by Dremeda who heads up the awesome site Sucuri.net. Near the end of this episode, I made the announcement that I’ll be taking a summer vacation from producing the show. When I get back, I hope to have some new stuff to play around with and a renewed sense of energy to do the show. It’s not disappearing or anything, just going on a small hiatus. However, I will occasionally upload an interview or two as well as material I obtain from conferences I attend before the end of the year so you shouldn’t unsubscribe from the podcast feed.
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I always enjoy attending WordCamps that are close to home. On October 9th and 10th, 2010 WordCamp Detroit will be in full effect and I’d like to be there. Attending WordCamps is pretty expensive if you don’t live in the local area and attend a few of them each year. That’s why I am beginning to ask for sponsorships. Benefits include me wearing your company branded schwag, having all content generated from the event branded with your company name. This includes text, video and audio content. If you send me a shirt or a stack of business cards to hand out and give away, I’ll do that as well.
WPTavern.com has an international audience, just like the WordPress software with an average of 60,70K pageviews per month. When I attended WordCamp Raleigh, I came back with one special podcast along with 8 videos. These videos are embeddable which means brand exposure will most likely not be limited to only being seen on WPTavern. The sponsorship money will cover travel, hotel room, and ticket to the event. Since Detroit is pretty close for me, I’m planning on driving.
I am asking for $350.00 in sponsorship money, preferably from only one company. If interested, please get in touch with me via my contact form.
It’s been a long time since I had the chance to talk with Nathan Rice face to face. The last opportunity I had was at WordCamp Dallas in 2008 which was my first WordCamp that I attended. Since that time, Nathan has worked for iThemes, ModThemes, and now resides at StudioPress where he ended up having a strong hand in developing the Genesis Theme. In this interview, I ask him how things are going with his employment at StudioPress. I also have him explain the strengths behind the Genesis theme framework. Last but not least, Nathan describes the features he is most excited for regarding WordPress 3.0
In this special interview with Jane Wells from WordCamp Raleigh, we discuss the prospects of WordPress 3.0. We also have a good discussion revolving the new menu system, including the question I’ve had since Beta 1 and that is, why bother going with Woo Nav if at the end of the day, there is little of Woo Nav to be seen or used? We also talked about the recent promotion assigned to John O’ Nolan who will be Jane’s assistant managing the UI group for WordPress.
The lesson I learned here is to not do an interview with someone against a bright background because as you can see, you end up not seeing the person. In this case, we now can’t debate whether Jane’s hair is Red or Violet. Perhaps we’ll take HairOfJanes word for it.
Patrick O’ Keefe who is known as iFroggy on Twitter and the author of the book Managing Online Forums presented at WordCamp Raleigh this past weekend. In his presentation, Patrick talks about how to extend your community beyond the blog as well as bringing community from various outposts spread across the web back to your blog. It was a great presentation filled with pointers for those looking to start or build upon their existing community. With Patrick’s permission, I was able to record the presentation and use it as a special episode of WordPress Weekly. Thanks again Patrick.
WordCamp Chicago is a little over a week away and I won’t be able to attend this years event. Things just didn’t work out according to plan and so I’m trying to sell my ticket. Unfortunately, refunds can not be given due to the way the ticketing system works. So if you still need a ticket to WordCamp Chicago, please get in touch with me so we can hammer out the details. Basically, someone will need to Paypal me the amount for the ticket and then I will transfer the ticket in EventBrite into your name. The price of the ticket is $30.00.
In this interview with Dave Moyer conducted at WordCamp Raleigh we talk about what it is that Dave does, what Bitwire Media is all about, his session about brand reliability, Lorelle Van Fossen and a couple of other topics. By the way, I attended Daves session today at WordCamp Raleigh and the man is a good talker and keeps it real. Thanks for the interview Dave.
I had the opportunity to put Matts gift to work while attending WordCamp Raleigh. I have over 45 minutes worth of video to upload, one interview at a time. In this interview, I spoke with Jonathan Davis. In it, we talked about what is new with the Shopp plugin, what to expect once WordPress 3.0 comes out and other e-commerce related topics.
I encourage you to watch the video at full screen.
This is a guest blog post written by Joachim Kudish, author of the blog, http://jkudish.com/. You can also follow him on Twitter.
WordCamp Montreal 2010 was held on (August 28th and 29th) in Downtown Montreal (at the UQAM Coeur des Sciences venue). The two-day conference was a success with over 300 attendees. The venue was divided into two rooms, one serving more beginner topics (such as A beginner’s guide to WordPress) and the other more advanced ones (such as Tweaking plugins to be 3.0 Network-Compatible).
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we discussed a number of topics including the headlines of the week such as the release of BuddyPress 1.2.5.2, an A/B testing plugin in the works, WordPress milestones, and the hot story of the week, The Capital P Dangit Filter. I was joined on the show by 
