WordCamp San Francisco August 12 – 14

The official annual WordPress conference, WordCamp San Francisco, is coming up next week, August 12 -14th! As of today there are still some tickets available (at $50 for the entire 3 days, it’s an incredible bargain) as well as there are some opportunities available to sponsor as well.

Many members from the VIP Team at WordPress.com, Automattic, and the larger WordPress community will be present and speaking, too. We hope to see you there!

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

Upcoming WordCamps

On the WordPress.org News blog, Jane has highlighted some upcoming WordCamps:

Looking for something fun to do during your summer vacation? Why not check out a WordCamp! WordCamps are locally-organized casual conferences of, by, and for WordPress users, developers, and enthusiasts just like you. The focus of a WordCamp is to foster face-to-face connections and collaboration among the local WordPress crowd, but there are usually some out-of-towners there as well.

Click through to see the latest approved WordCamps for this summer, and visit WordCamp Central for all upcoming WordCamps, and information on how to help organize or participate in one.

WordPress at South by Southwest

WordPress is all over the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival this year – from networking parties to a WordPress Genius Bar at the trade show, WordPress has definitely left its mark on the conference.

The WordPress Genius Bar will be at the trade show through Thursday, March 17th. Stop by and say hi, grab some swag or talk to the geniuses about WordPress. But get there early – it’s been packed! (Booth #s 829, 831, 928, and 930)

More details on the WordPress Development site

Photo by Terry Chay

The VIP Services team meets in London

The entire Automattic VIP Services team (minus Lloyd, who thankfully held down the support queue!) spent the past week in London to talk strategy, fraternize, and meet with existing and prospective VIP clients in the area.

We had a VIP meetup one night, and we were pleased by the turnout and the conversations that were flying between the guests, both VIP project owners and developers alike. We continue to expand our VIP Services offerings for both self-hosted and WordPress.com VIPs, and the response has been very, very positive. One thing to us is clear – demand for WordPress is increasing, and our clients are hungry to apply it to all their upcoming projects.

They’re even happier when we tell them, “Yes, WordPress can do that, too!” Here on the Publisher blog, we’ll continue to highlight some of those outside-of-the-blog uses of WordPress (yep, it’s a CMS, too) that are becoming the driving force behind new enterprise adoption of WordPress.

Thanks to everyone who came out for a drink & a chat – and we look forward to another VIP meetup closer to where you are!

If you’d like more information about VIP Services for your WordPress site, be sure to contact us!

MediaPost: “The winner will be WordPress”

Interesting post from Philip Leigh of MediaPost this week, titled “The Implications Of Blogging“:

…Similarly, it’s likely that the future of blogging — and the future spread of knowledge — will reflect the characteristics of whatever blog platform achieves dominance. Increasingly it appears that the winner will be WordPress. It first appeared seven years ago as a successor to software typically used for online diaries. Thus, it was originally text-based, but has since evolved to also encompass audio, video, and animation. It has even become a popular platform for entire websites as well as important components of prominent sites such as The New York Times.

(Emphasis mine).

Philip goes on to state:

In short, WordPress is not merely a blogging tool. It’s a platform that can lead to an explosion of new media properties capable of text, video, audio, music, animation, interactivity, online merchandising, podcasting, and even social networking. Successful innovations will rapidly take root and expand while unsuccessful ones will quickly perish or remain marginal.

[ Read the full article on MediaPost.com ]

WordPress Top Demanded Skill on Elance

Since last year when we wrote about “WordPress in Demand on Elance“, WordPress has surged into the top ten, and now is the sixth most in demand skill on Elance!

Online publishing dominates this list. It’s exciting that the ever evolving WordPress, built on it’s PHP, MySQL, and CSS stack, continues to be the web development platform in demand.

Elance’s 2010 Q2 Online Employment Report also includes a single profile, that of Ron Z Zvagelsky, highlighting his success as a WordPress Expert on Elance.  Represent!

Computer Courage On Why You Should Use WordPress

Great summary over on computercourage.com, on the “Top 10 Reasons To Use WordPress.org For Your Website”:

4. The Visual Editor and CMS are Outstanding

The intuitive, user-friendly backend of WordPress is probably what made it so famous in the first place. I’ll never remember the relief I felt when I first installed WordPress after a few Drupal experiences. I always tell my clients, “if you can do it in Word, you can do it in WordPress.” In fact, with the Paste From Word tool, that statement is more true than you would imagine (this article was written in Word). WordPress is continually improving its CMS, adding features such as threaded comments, galleries, revision histories, trash, custom post types, and more. If you haven’t maintained a WordPress site yet, give it a look.

[ Read the full post computercourage.com ]

Mike Pratt on BuddyPress – Social Networking in a Box

At a recent Dallas Fort Worth WordPress meetup, Mike Pratt gave a presentation on how he’s using WordPress and BuddyPress to build his very own social network:

… there are a ton of excellent needs and reasons to use BuddyPress to take your site and turn it into the community it is begging to become. That’s the killer point: there needs to be a community underlying all of this. Maybe your focused on gardeners in Texas or stamp collectors in Des Moines or people around the world dealing with Cystic Fibrosis – if you have a community in mind then BuddyPress is an amazing tool because you can shape the community according to you/its needs. Take that Facebook (or Ning)!

The slides and the full video from the presentation and more of his thoughts are available at mikepratt.tv

Upcoming WordCamps

Lots of WordCamps coming up, which are great events for publishers to learn more about WordPress and meet the WordPress community:

This weekend, WordCamp Orange County will be held on Saturday April 24th on the UC Irvine campus.

The following weekend, WordCamp San Francisco will be held on Saturday May 1st, 2010 with a developer day on Sunday May 2nd. There will also be a party on Saturday night. If you haven’t registered yet and are interested in attending, please head over to the WordCamp SF site and register now, as these tickets tend to sell out pretty quickly.

The following weekend on May 8th, 2010 there are three amazing WordCamps happening all over the globe: WordCamp Paris, WordCamp Argentina, and WordCamp Chile.

For more information and a full listing of scheduled WordCamps, head over to WordCamp.org .

Celebrating Ada Lovelace Day

Today, March 24, is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. As part of Ada Lovelace Day, we’d like to recognize the contributions of two amazing women who are part of the WordPress community, Jane Wells and Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Jane Wells is a member of the WordPress core development team, with responsibility for user interface design. She has been a tireless advocate on behalf of users since joining the WordPress.org project as a contributor in 2008. Prior to working for Automattic, Jane ran a media research/usability lab in New York and served as director of user experience strategy at Schematic. She has also led the planning for WordCamps in New York and San Francisco, and has mobilized an open source design community in the run up to the release of WordPress 3.0.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson is a designer, business owner, and writer. Her design studio, E.Webscapes, provides design and development solutions for hundreds of bloggers and web site owners around the world, while her web hosting business, Blogs About Hosting, provides knowledgeable hosting for bloggers, with an emphasis on WordPress. Lisa is also the author of two editions of WordPress for Dummies, and the newly released BuddyPress for Dummies.

Thank you Jane and Lisa for all of your contributions to the WordPress community, and happy Ada Lovelace Day to you both.