The WordCamp Report

We got out the word fairly late that listeners of The WordPress Podcast were invited to a meetup near the North end of the Embarcadero Friday. Aaron, Mark and myself shared a cab from their hotel and sat around for a few minutes drinking our soft drinks and eating lunch when Aaron asked me who had committed to showing up.

No sooner had I mentioned Lorelle’s name than a pair of hands attempted to cover my glasses from behind. I wheeled around to find a red-haired woman who then clued me in that she was Lorelle and proceeded to hug everyone there.

The four of us moved to a more spacious area and proceeded to chat about long flights, the problems of hailing a cab, bad hotel WiFi, blog monitization, elevator pitches and how much Aaron hates to give them, and we were discussing the failure of the current advertising paradigm to deal with syndication and how scrapers and other ways of “losing control” of our content might not actually be a bad thing, when nearly the entire Automattic crew walks in en masse.

Joining the meetup were: Matt Mullenweg, Alex Shiels, Ryan Boren, Mark Riley, Matt Thomas, Joseph Scott, Nikolay Bachiyski, Andy Skelton, Lloyd Budd, and Donncha O Caoimh.

Matt proceeded to take charge of the meetup (which I had no problem with) and we first went around the large circle of chairs we made introducing ourselves and telling something about ourselves (like our blogs/podcasts, who we work for, etc.) While we were part-way through, John Dvorak, Kris Smith, Mike Adams, Tom Gerson and Andrew Grumet (both from PodShow), Brian Layman and Adam Bloom.

A very good natured group, there were a few moments of humor during the introductions. John Dvorak introduced himself to the group by saying, “Hi, I’m John and I’m an alcoholic,” to which Aaron Brazell piped up, “We’re here for you, John!” The next up was Lorelle, who introduced herself simply as, “Lorelle! The Lorelle!”

Next up, Matt asked each of us what our favorite plug-ins were, and I won’t bore you with the results, but spam-prevention plug-ins rated higher than anything else.

Last, Matt asked what we didn’t like about WordPress, which was brilliant because it ended up being an excellent feedback mechanism for the very coders who’ll take those suggestions and gripes and turn them into something wonderful.

• Lorelle requested inline comments, and everyone agreed that sounded like a great idea to improve workflow.
• Matt wanted to provide an author-only threaded comments to distinguish the blog author’s comments from the readers. He also wanted to improve the moderation procedures.
• Aaron wanted better RSS parsing.
• Mark Riley wants to improve the page load time by simplifying the code and images.
• Alex wants to somehow improve the coding practices and encourage better documentation.
• I asked for unique feeds, which would help tremendously with metrics, particularly with podcasting, but the consensus was this is too unique for inclusion in the core.
• Andy complained that the “Codex is dead” and the need to “take back the IRC channel,” which prompted a discussion of the merits of possibly establishing a channel for off-topic discussions and techniques to gently guide new users to where they can find help.
• Brian would like better page organization.

Also discussed:

• Future versions of WordPress may include Sandbox as well as Kubrick and Classic.
• We’d like to encourage people to alter their CSS designs more.
• Also encourage the planning of WordCamps all over the world.
• The possibility of an easy-to-use templating system.
• The need for some way to gently guide new users through a learning curve instead of just moving from problem to problem.
• A future integration of bbPress and WordPress that doesn’t duplicate functions codenamed “BackPress”.

All in all, if was a lot of fun, meeting the minds behind WordPress and having equal measures of fun and geekspeak.

Update: Patrick tells me I should add a comment I made when we were comparing MySpace to WordPress.com, “WordPress.com is MySpace without the pedophiles.”

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