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Confessions of a WordCamp Virgin

I must admit, I’ve been suffering recently with what is jokingly called “Chronic Conference Fatigue Syndrome”.

You know the feeling, but are probably yet to admit it. The last few conferences I have been to have been a little bit underwhelming. More focus on how much drink is drunk afterwards. Politics. “Big Name” speakers sold as the next big thing from organisers who come in, charge a fortune that is passed onto the ticket for the privilege of selling to an auditorium. Itchy Lanyards.

ALWAYS with the itchy landyards.

So it was with a wee bit of trepidation that I attended WordCamp UK. My first WordPress UK Conference.

In short, it was a bit of strategy that I attended (nay, sponsored!) the conference. More and more of my SEO role at 3 Door Digital has been WordPress based, so I felt it was good to mix with the community a little more. So I attended with Alex & my mate John to the sixth ever WordCamp UK, in the leafy town of Lancaster.

The night before began in the leafy surroundings of the Water Witch, with a few other WordPressy types. It was a blast! WordPress’ trials and tribulations were discussed over a pint or two right over the canal. Genuinely couldn’t think of many better ways to spend a Friday night.

So came to the conference, what of it? Well it was a “hackday” themed affair from my perspective. Not as slick as many other conferences I’ve attended, but full of well meaning and passionate people happy to talk about things. Food was pretty good too.

All in all, many – if not all – of the sessions I attended were enjoyable and had actual bloody takeaways from. Absolutely unheard of from conferences I’ve attended recently. However three talks that I learned the most from were the following:-

Three presentations caught my eye in particular:-

Taking Taxonomies Totally To The Top from Simon Wheatley (@simonwheatley), who’s talk gave some great ideas on how to take taxonomies to the next level, particularly when it comes to bookmarks.

WOW! Plugins 2013 from Kimb Jones (@mkjones), as any presentation with at least one plugin that makes me download there and then in the auditorium is worth a share.

The Base Ingredients for Debugging by Jenny Wong (@miss_jwo) was probably my favourite presentation of the day, largely because it was reassurance. I’m largely self taught in WordPress development, so am kind of finding my own way, so for somebody with a little more experience to stand on stage and say that the debugging methods used are similar to the ones I use is rather reassuring :). Furthermore, I’m now a convert into “Rubber Duck Debugging”!

The day ended with a social, and was quite a friendly and nice affair in one of the campus bars on the site. Unfortunately the bloody Race for Life closing off half of Lancaster’s bus routes prevented me from attending the second day, but I saw enough to re-ignite a fire for conferences.

And it was much less than the price of some conference tickets that exude all of the “qualities” discussed in the opening paragraph.

It was my first WordCamp, but won’t be my last. In fact, a troop of us are heading to WordCamp Europe in Amsterdam in a few weeks. If you actually want to learn about WordPress, I implore you to attend.

Big thanks to Primary Image for the images for this post!

bbPress Free Tickets Now Available

I’ve come back from WordCamp Lancaster and am still recovering, so whilst I write up that event, I’ve got a small bit of news.

This Saturday is my bbPress Book Launch Party (which is looking less and less likely I’ll actually have a book out by then, damn delays), and right now free tickets are available.

It would be great to see you there! Tickets are available until they’re gone.

bbPress Complete – Announcement & Launch Party

Otherwise known as “my big news from April as my April Challenge“.

I have written a book.

A genuine, published, “buy it in Waterstones if you ask for it but can buy it off Amazon no problem” book.

I was approached a few months ago by a publishing firm asking if I wanted pitch for the possible writing of a book. After a bit of research, and a pitch, I was accepted and for the last two months I’ve been scribbling away at a book.

It’s been hard, it’s been tough (writers block is so much worse when you have deadlines), but on or around the 19th of July, bbPress Complete (a provisional title) is expected to launch, all being well.

I haven’t done it alone, so a huge thank you to various people: Cass Brookes, Shane Jones, Alex Moss, John Wilson, Jem Turner, Joost de Valk, Nile Flores, Emily Clark & Adam Croft who have helped me or offered to help me in the process.

During one of those periods of writers block, I went out for a drink with Shane, and we decided that the best way to celebrate the release of the book would be a launch party on or around the launch date. As tonight I finally confirmed the venue for the book launch, I feel it’s a good point to share it with people.

The event will be held in The Nook in Chorlton, and is invite only. There will be free tickets available the week before the event, but for now, to gauge interest, there are only paid tickets, which includes a signed copy of the book (either at the event or as soon as I get the copies), and a free drink. To know how much I love buying drinks for people, that’s worth the price of admission itself.

To buy tickets, or to read more about the event, please visit Eventbrite.

So yeah, it’s been a secret for ages, I’m just delighted to share it. Feel free to ask questions/congratulate/mock me now. All I can say is yes I had a proof reader and no it’s not written in Welsh.

When Theme & Plugin Developers Work Together – Everyone Wins

So a blog post that has been doing the rounds in the WordPress Community has been “Do not buy WordPress themes that bundle premium plugins” by Coen Jacobs from WooThemes. In it it is a exasperation of the arms race experienced by many plugin developers when dealing with some theme developers, who are happy to include premium plugins in their theme.

As introduced in the post, one of the issues of including plugin functionality in themes is that you increase the load time and – in the desperate attempt to be all things to all men – you actually end up bloating your site with features you cannot replicate or don’t need. For example, you may notice this blog running slightly faster over the last few days. This is largely due to removing one plugin that was a legacy from the previous design, who’s functionality is no longer needed. Imagine if that was buried deep within a theme? It would take me as an experienced coder a while to remove the code, and a less experienced individual would probably just be stuck with the functionality.

It has gotten so bad now that at 3 Door Digital we now try to avoid buying themes, as wrestling with them to get them working takes longer than say using Underscores or Peadig to design from scratch.

The Premium issue is a problem, and is something that it took me a while to figure out a solution with WP Email Capture as with WordPress, all derivative code needs to be GPL compatible (which, in my case, it is). It’s something I’ve dealt with a couple of times as theme developers bundled the premium versions of my plugins with their theme, promising extra functionality. When you buy a premium plugin, you don’t just buy the plugin code, you also usually buy access to support and updates, which people can remove should they desire (Gravity Forms – for example – is a GPL plugin but has a solid TOS. I’m speaking with somebody now to get a similar for WP Email Capture). Whilst GPL developers generally are quite a helpful bunch, if you stop them feeding their kids (or in my case, my Pie & Pringle addiction) then – if you knowingly buy a theme with premium plugins attached – you should be able to understand that they may not be so willing to help if things go wrong.

Unfortunately, customers are often caught in the middle of this, and suffer the headache when they are stuck between a plugin developer who has no record of the premium customer, and a theme developer who doesn’t have a clue what they’ve packaged with their theme. The worst case scenario has been for me when a customer used a cracked version of a premium theme (that injected footer links) that was bundled with a cracked version of my premium plugin (that emailed every signup that ever signed up to a dodgy email address). This hack broke when the plugin owner tried to remove the footer links. Of course, both the theme developer and myself were unable to support it, and in the end we gave a copy of our plugin and theme, unhacked, for free.

I should add that I do have great working relationships with some top notch theme designers. Jake Caputo of Design Crumbs has been absolutely crucial in making my plugins more friendly to designers (you should check out his themes by the way), and my top affiliate has just topped three figures in commission last month alone (on top of his theme sales), so it can be rewarding working when plugin and theme designers work together.

So please do it! It’s been a negative rant, but if it means that more theme designers and plugin developers working on ways of complementing their products, rather than stepping on each others toes, then the community and customers will all benefit.

WordPress 10th Anniversary Celebrations in Manchester

So on Monday I attended the WordPress 10th Anniversary Celebrations Manchester, held in The Odder Bar. I believe it is the first time I have attended an event more than just the Manchester WordPress community as held at MWUG, as there were a lot of unfamiliar faces. Nevertheless, I roped in Shane to come along with me.

The night began with an interview with Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, on how the software was formed and how it grew. It was an interesting talk, particularly in how WordPress could further grow (Mike stressed he had a keen eye in the development of WordPress accessibility), so it was good to hear how WordPress grew early on in its development. I could imagine that the interview he gave would be less codey than the one he will give at Sascon. Not sure many of the delegates will know what Gopher is. Still check it out if you are there, it will be fascinating!

After a large helping of food, the next event was a quiz. But not just any quiz, oh no, a WordPress quiz! I must admit I usually go to quizzes being quite a useful member, but beyond correcting a question (as I heard of the Ella Fitzgerald release, and it was in the 2.X development cycle), I was nigh on useless and my team carried me. There were some elements of controversy, namely the “write the minimum code used to power a WordPress hook”, but overall, our team, ‘hilariously’ titled “TurdPress”, won. Hooray! Thanks to Interconnect IT for the prize of The Auditor & Human Made for the free year of WP Remote.

After it was mingling time, and this was where I realised how big the WordPress community was. Everybody there was fascinating. Also in the team thrown together was a Magician & a Hypnotist: James Anthony, who did this amazing trick.

The time came to cut the cake (that used the proper WordPress logo), and we were given a parting gift of true Mancunian style: a WordPress Pint Glass.

All in all, I had an amazing night! Loved every minute and I do need to get myself to more WordPress events. To Matt Mullenweg, Mike Little & any other WordPress contributor, big or small: thank you.

Here is to the next 10 years!