WordCamp SF 2011: 22/100 US-Owned Domains Run WP (and it shows!)
Over the last few days, I’ve been at WordCamp SF 2011. It’s the annual WordPress conference, with talks geared to all types of WordPress users: developers, designers, copy writers, bloggers, and large-scale users. If you ever get the chance to go, I highly recommend it!
Some of the highlights:
- A talk by John James Jacobi, lead BuddyPress developer, about BuddyPress 1.5. The second beta is out, and it seems like it’s close to release. 1.5 looks to be a huge update, I’m really looking forward to trying it out. And I got to talk directly with John about some BuddyPress questions I had, which was totally cool!
- Discussion on scaling WordPress for large-scale installs. Discussions included object caching through WP, memcached and the Batcache plugin, and an Apache alternative, nginx, that looks promising. Apparently WordPress.com is using nginx to host its 50 million blogs.
- Awesome CSS3 demo by Estelle Weyl, and another CSS demo, demoing the use of the pseudo elements :before and :after by Chris Coyier, of WuFoo.
- A discussion on responsive web design by Sara Cannon - talking about scaling CSS so that it’s viewable in all different devices.
I’d been to WordCamp Raleigh earlier this spring (which was pretty darn cool itself), but this annual/worldwide conference really blew me out of the water. I met so many awesome people here, and it just reiterated to me how awesome, ginormous, talented and amazingly killer cool the worldwide WordPress community is.
Oh, and if the conference wasn’t cool enough already: the conference t-shirts had XKCD on them. 