I attended WordCamp San Francisco once again this year, the annual geek lovefest for all things WordPress, and here’s a summary of highlights.
Matt Mullenweg taking questions at WordCamp SF 2010 courtesy of BloggingPro
First the keynote speech by WordPress co-founder, Matt Mullenweg, State of the Word.
WordPress 3.0 will have the following:
- New default theme Twenty Ten, with dropdown menus, custom post headers/images, custom backgrounds à la Twitter
- Custom Post types, making it easier to do what we’ve been doing for years using custom fields; this takes custom taxonomies to a new level and allows for Event-type posts, Press Release-type posts, each with their customized fields in the admin edit view.
- Custom Menus where users can define links in navigation menus in any way they please; this seems like the most important advanced in terms of WordPress as a CMS.
Matt mentioned some numbers too:
- 74% of WP installations are being used as CMSs.
- Core contributors went from 4 to 9.
- 1,400 users on Trac, the bug tracking software, double from 2009.
- 21m downloads of WP (10m in 2009).
- 35 billion page views for wordpress.com and wordpress.org.
- 8.5% of sites crawled by a Drupal-backed study were running WP.
The future:
- Making using WP more fun.
- Enhancing security, especially plugins via core (vetted) plugins.
- Improving publishing via mobile devices.
- WordPress.org being redesigned and to move to BuddyPress.
As you can see, the State of the Word is good.
even the "small" dowstairs hall was packed this year
Other highlights included:
- Joseph Scott on writing secure plugins. A must see talk which I will link to when it is posted on WordPress. tv. In the meantime, here’s a video about WordPress security, and a useful guide.
- Mitcho Erlewine on abstracting your code. Another must-see talk I will post (also Mitcho convinced me we should be making our plugins publicly available – more on that later).
- Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU/Linux OS. Richard explained the difference between Free software and Open Source software. As it says on the GNU.org site, it is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of “free speech” instead of “free beer”. From now on I will make a point not to confuse Open Source for Free Software.
All in all it was an excellent conference, and great value at $50. I truly appreciate Matt’s continued efforts to make the world a better place through software as opposed to trying to make as much money as possible.
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Hi P,
This is excellent news. I am sure you loved the WP sessions there and things are going to be very good for WP development in near future.