At WordCamp Birmingham 2009

I’m in Birmingham, AL this morning for their 2nd WordCamp. Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress/Automattic, will be the keynote speaker at lunch. Last year they had about 65 attendees. This year it’s up to 180 so far. We already had to change rooms for the Track 2 sessions due to the crowd. Awesome!

I just finished a session on “Jumping Into Plugin Programming” by Dougal Campbell. Nice, easy overview of what/why/how with lots of links to resources and references.

[Update] 10:45am In session 2, “WordPress and Your Brand”, Sara Cannon demonstrated a method of editing single.php to utilize single-n.php custom templates. (See my Trapezio post for another method). She also went over using WP-sIFR for typography.

[Update] 11:30am In session 3 with Jeremy Flint speaking on “SEO + Analytics”. He says while building a WP site, he keeps the Privacy “allow search engines” disabled so they don’t spider dev pages. Uses SEO All In One plugin (I love this one). Mentioned Google Analyticator plugin that does advanced link tracking, hides admin visits and much more.

[Update] 12:00pm Time for lunch! And “WordPress Townhall Meeting” by Matt.

[Update] 1:40pm Lunch by Dreamland BBQ was great. Matt did a Q&A session. Some things most notable to me are:

• 2.9 will include an image editor API
• 2.9 or 3.0 will include better and more automatic updates of WP and plugins
• they just completed a good MS Word cleanup tool

[Update] 2:40pm Session 4 “Beyond the Blog: Setting up a Dynamic Site with WordPress” with Mitch Canter. He demonstrated using page templates for different page types, WP_Query() to pull in content from various pages/posts, and the Flutter plugin for custom write panels (cool).

[Update] 3:30pm Session 5 with Tammy Hart is on “Plugins to Die For”. cforms is a very robust forms plugin (I use this on a couple of sites, too). MapPress is a cool plugin to add Google Maps functionality including on the fly directions into your pages.

[Update] 4:40pm Session 6 with Brett Bumeter is on “Design a Theme in Minutes” using the Artisteer software.