WordCamp Boulder 2010 - Afternoon

Lunch complete I head back to the Boulder Theater, but as I reach 14th & Pearl I realize that I'm more interested in the next session at Atlas Purveyors, so I continue down Pearl to arrive there before the session starts. The place is packed with a mixture of WordCamp folks and civilians, and I'm lucky to not only find a seat, but one that's near a power strip, allowing me to charge up my netbook.

The discussion on “WordPress as a CMS” centered around how using it makes things easier for the users, if not easier on the developers. It was more a guided discussion than a talk, and so a good number of plugins were brought up and discussed as various ideas come up. For e-commerce the “Shopp” and “wp_ecommerce” plugins came up, The nine-spot theme was mentioned, the “backup Buddy”, wp-backup, and “iDrive” plugins all came up to deal with backups and migrations. I suspect the discussion would be been more useful for me if I'd been more familiar with Wordpress, but it was still interesting to listen to. As with the previous session here, it was SRO, with people standing several rows deep by the door to listen in.

For the last session of the day I decided to return to the Boulder Theater, even though there were reports of failure with it's internet. There, I was happy to listen to Jane Wells discuss the new features of WordPress 3.0. Jane is apparently one of the core developers of WordPress, and her time is donated by Automattic to the WordPress project. She showed off some really interesting functionality, including how easy it is to change the associated image of the blog, either globally or by post, as well as how Menus can be set up and dragged about. Wordpress definitely has a leg up on Drupal on an ease of use basis! She also discussed about how certain areas only seemed to have a WordPress community when a WordCamp was being held, and not the rest of the year, and one of her responsibilities is to help with that.

Once her discussion was over, it was time for the relaxing and drinks, which meant I talked a little to a couple of people and then made my way out the door, as whether Drupal or WordPress, I'm still not a very social person in bar-like environments.

So, what did I learn? I found out that WordPress has a very active and passionate base of users and developers who want to do cool things on the web. They seemed to be as interested in how they use the web as in what tools and extensions they use, and they're starting on expanding what WordPress is and how it's used. It sounded like their developer support and plugin 'economy' isn't as structured or well-developed as Drupal's is, but that they're moving towards that. I think I'd like to sit down and work with WordPress soon and see what else I can learn of it... well, once I'm caught up on my Drupal responsibilities, especially with 7.0 coming soon!