Sydney WordCamp Day 2

Today was great. I had a fantastic time and my speech went really well. I got a cool WordCamp t-Shirt and met many great people. I just love this stuff. So……

Jane Wells kicked off with The Road to 2.7. Not only did I enjoy listening to Jane speak but WordPress 2.7 looks freaking awesome. Jane just remember… “IGNORE THE VOCAL MINORITY” (Kudos Jeff Waugh!!).

Of course I already knew that because we regularly test WP e-Commerce on the 2.7 builds and we’re totally digging it.

Sam Bauers showed us Prolouge Projects which is essentially an extension of the Prologue Theme. Imagine a situation where you have a company like Automattic working on multiple projects at the same time i.e. bbPress, Wordpress, BuddyPress and so on. Rather then having lots of different and separate Prolouge sites for each individual project Prolouge Projects lets you bring them altogether in the one site through a nice widget interface and category system. We plan to collaborate with Sam on this one and setup something for WP e-Commerce project… I think it has the potential to be a really great support tool. This baby if it does not render the need for a forum moot then it will certainly compliment it.

More will be revealed.

David Wolf talked on WordPress as a Media CMS and showed us some impressive looking video sites. I suspect Video will be Web 3.0 you just wait and see. I’m really looking forward to talking to David about this space.

Dan Milward did his presentation WordPress and the Bling and had a good time.

Matt Mullenweg did his Keynote Presentation where he talked about WordPress history and the Future of WordPress. Matt has a great sense of humor – I really enjoyed his presentation. You really should have been there.

Karel Segers introduced us to his business The Story Department. Karel is a good guy and knows people I know in WGTN – small world.

Neerav Bhatt talked about The Best $5 I Ever Spent and some of his WordPress adventures and accolades. Neerav took WordPress by the reigns and made a business out of it for himself.

Jason Kemp (fellow Kiwi WordPress fanatic) presented on Better Business using WordPress. Jason had many interesting points on how to present WordPress as a solution to clients and I’m looking forward to picking his brain over the years to come.

Jeff Waugh is an Open Source fanatic here in Australia, we know the same people in Wellington. Okay I don’t actually “know” them but I know of them.. I’m talking about the Catalyst people who are Open Source programmers.  Jeff was fun and is doing some stuff in WordPress MU and I really hope we get to collaborate more with him.

Dinner. A group of about 20 happy campers ate out and we all had a great evening and meal – it is always a pleasure to mix with like-minded people. We ate Pumpkin Pie for Thanksgiving.