Wordcamp Australia 2008
This past weekend I was very pleased to be at the first second* Wordcamp in Australia. There were about 60 people present over a 2 day period to share WordPress related ideas and project experiences in the local area.
Among other delights, I was very pleased to hear that WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg was an arts major in college and could even remember a bit of TS Eliot.
There is a line (bottom right footer) on the WordPress.org site which says “code is poetry” . Now I understand where some of that influence comes from and why the photo essays work so well.
For the Wordcamp Australia photo essay from Matt check out this collection loaded up a few hours ago.
As some of you know – I’m very enthusiastic about using WordPress as a web framework and platform which includes blogging but goes further as well.
For me – intentions are very important and it was great to feel part of a group who have generally managed to combine altruistic intentions with some very practical and savvy online skills.
New Zealander Dan Milward of Instinct was a keynote presenter and sponsor for the event. Pics of Dan Wp-Ecommerce is huge ( 60,000+ sites) and is a product extension that I am actively working with on a number of sites. It was also real privilege for me to share a few ideas from the NZ side of the Tasman.
There is even a bit of a plan to organise a WordPress NZ event so please use the contact form to let me know if you are in/near NZ and would be interested in that idea.
Matt has managed to combine a huge amount of experience and street smarts in his 24 years on this planet.
He is a genuinely nice guy and deserves all the kudos he gets. Matt also mentioned that the wordcamp idea of having small grassroots style meet-ups to help link local WordPress users and practitioners was a deliberate intention. This is another reason why I Iove WordPress. Think global – act local.
Alignment or needs, directions and intentions are all much more sustainable and better for us. I have tried to articulate some of these ideas in an Ethos page.
I was particularly interested in presentations by Karel Segers and David Wolf on film & video related projects. At times the conference veered between technical topics and back towards the blogging side including journalism considerations.
The sessions took place in a performance venue called The Red Box and co-organiser Sam Bauers managed to arrange a acrobatic performance from some of the regular Red Box users just after lunch.
Anthony Cole and Sam Bauers did an excellent job in organising the conference and on also making it all very accessible as well.
I have already been using WordPress version 2.7 for some weeks (along with 30,000 other beta testers.) We found out a bit more about the 2.7 version which looks like it may come out before Christmas. It is a major user interface upgrade and presenter Jane Wells gave us some insights in to the development process.
Jane also mentioned her involvement at the WordPress in Education camps which is a special interest of mine. I’m especially interested in the best ways to enable ‘Private’ blogging so students and teachers, get to practice and experiment online in a safe space (such as a group blog password protected with access to the class.)
Earlier this year we used WordPress as the core system to promote the LittledayOut which was a community fund-raising for a local school. Since then we have been working on a number of back room projects to find the best ways to enable schools and other education facilities using some of those ideas and the WordPress MU framework. See also the full MU site.
I was particularly interested in the BuddyPress project which is something like what you might imagine facebook or myspace would look like if those systems had some taste*. It makes huge sense to leverage social networking on a more “clean look” basic for the more than 12m or so websites based on WordPress.
(* Sidenote – Myspace and Facebook work well enough its just that they look very messy as the temptation to overload the pages with widgets and moving objects is too great for many of the site-owners. So love that anyone can have a go – I just prefer the less is more approach.)
I remember using gravatars (portable icons) in the early days when they crashed all the time due to huge growth. Now as part of the Automattic / WordPress family add personality to millions of sites. BuddyPress will add an extra dimension like a super gravatar.
There are still many ideas to keep processing. Thanks again to the wordcamp team.
Other Wordcamp Info / Its early days but expect there will be a fair number of posts from other attendees. here is a selection of the first few I found.
(*Update: Looks like there was an earlier Wordcamp in Melbourne in 2007.)
Dan Milward from Instinct was a key presenter and wrote many notes as well.
- Jason from Finding Simple was there
- Alan Harris was also at Wordcamp
- Neerav Bhatt was at Wordcamp Australia
- Kristarella at wordcamp
- Run a wordcamp?
Related
- Automattic people
- Matt Mullenweg on Wikipedia
- 25 Most Influential on the web list – Matt is listed next to Rupert Murdoch!
- 50 most Important people online also features Matt.
Hi Jason,
Thanks for your very informative bit at Wordcamp. I learnt a lot from your talk especially relating how to address client/Business needs through using WordPress. Hope to see you back next year…
Thanks Gary, A pleasure to be there. I wanted to convey an approach that might help with the planning rather than a prescriptive formula. I assume everyone would adapt to their roles and needs but always hard to remember all the keys when you're on the spot.
Hi Jase,
Great meeting with you, though too briefly. I enjoyed the event thoroughly and am looking forward to seeing you next year, at this side of the Tasman again or else at the other side of your island!
Cheers,
Karel
Thanks Karel – I'm excited about film & video online and appreciate how much art goes into the edit & production process so really good to know there are people like you out there.
Thanks Neerav, I have been using Intense Debate for few weeks now. Mainly I wanted the nested comments feature but it has a series of others options which are a little more complex than I'd like. I also tried the reply by email (Outlook) and it added codemarks everywhere which I had to log into the Intense Debate client to clean up.
There is 1 or 2 way syncing between the site and the comments system and getting those settings exactly right seems to take more testing. It is also not entirely clear what the 5 options settings do – however I see you are also trying this out.
Thanks for the link Jason. PS It looks like you're using Intense Debate, have you used it long and how easy to use has it been?
Jason, What is your recommendation for Intense Debate? Who is it right for, who is it wrong for? Does it require a developer to work to its full potential? Would love to hear more about BuddyPress also if you had any more pearls of wisdom to share!
Intense Debate (ID) has been available again on WordPress for about 3 weeks only with a couple of updates in that time. Nested or threaded comments will help discussions to stay a bit more focussed in my view because the replies can be more specific and separate from other comment streams.
You should also also expect more comments if its easier to follow the various discussions. I'd wait for 2 weeks (or more) to see how WordPress 2.7 comment threading works as not all themes will support that feature.
Reply to comments by email will appeal to some / but depending on your email system might also need some tweaking. The ID providers are working on improvements and best to watch their site for any key changes. Some of the plugin configuration instructions for ID are based on JavaScript and depending on your browser might not be as obvious as most plugins do not use JavaScript at that level.
Because the 2.7 upgrade is happening over the next few weeks it is probably good to see how that goes and to do some tests to see if ID would add benefits. If comment threading is a key feature then you may not need it.
Best thing for buddypress is to watch that website http://buddypress.org/ and see how that goes.
Jason, interesting comments on ID, I’ve been considering it for quite a while, some interesting advantages but quite a few disadvantages too, in particular the lack of a direct link to my commenters’ own blogs, an important incentive for their continued participation.
A very difficult decision. I’m interested in BuddyPress too, it’s really coming along now that they’ve integrated forums into the groups.
Incidentally, nice blog, the only thing I don’t like is the SnapShots integration, extremely annoying and it actually interferes with the ID links pop-up, sometimes covering it.
Thanks Donnacha,
I agree with your view that people who comment should get a direct link rather than sending all traffic via ID. On balance if I can find a way to sync these comments back to the main blog I will probably deactivate ID for a while. I'm trying the reply by email function here*. That could be the real killer feature if it works well.
What is happening now is that comments are not being synced back to WordPress and so don't show in the sidebar. Gravatars don't show correctly either. I have tried all the settings and my main browser is Firefox which doesn't even show the JavaScript instructions – although I can see them in Opera or Safari.
Even when I can see the instructions that doesn't help with syncing back. These may all be my settings but after 3 weeks the added complexity is a bit much. I know there are new comment moderation features under 2.7 but with the ID override on I feel like I'm missing some of that.
I've had snapshots since before wp.com got them and if I temporarily switch off ID then that issue goes away. I also had a look at Disqus as well but prefer ID because of the Automattic linkages and I hope they can offer a few more options since the idea is very good.
Now if only I could see a version 2.7 blog where the threaded comments worked as that is still a mystery feature. I also look after more than 30 other WordPress sites and still have 20 upgrades to go but haven't seen the 2.7 version native comment threading yet.
I spend plenty of time testing so that I can recommend new functions when the plugins get to a more useful stage. I'm also newly using Prologue http://wordpress.org/extend/themes/prologue for a group project and that looks to be good now with BuddyPress very much on the hot list for next year.
* Note – Reply by email doesn't work for my old Outlook client so I've had to come and edit this on screen which is very slow and not very practical.
After more testing re threaded comments in different themes it looks like many of them will need to be modified. Mainly the comments.php file for most themes.
Please also check under Settings, Discussion and see if the Enable threaded (nested) comments setting has been activated.
After much testing and even an upgrade or two of the Intense Debate plugin I decided to deactivate it until I can see how the next few versions go.
One of the issues that I disliked was that half of the comments on this post got lost and scrambled in timezone differences. They never registered in the recent comments function of this blog but showed up when using enhanced views only.
It is not so simple to import comments back into WordPress so had to work out how to get them back “inside this blog” which has now been completed.
Have also been watching the update process for quite a few themes. In summary changes to the comments.php file are needed for many
See http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/11/30/wordpress-27-theme-enhancements-ii/ and the follow up piece for detailed notes by Sarah.
At this point it looks better and easier if the individual theme is updated and then the new features are activated rather than sending traffic on an un needed round the world trip.
Its been covered earlier but displacing the existing gravatars used by visitors in favour of ID links only really helps ID and that makes it much less attractive to individual site owners.
Still worth keeping and eye on http://blog.intensedebate.com/ for the latest progress.