WordCamp Chicago 2010 Followup
This past weekend I spent my time at WordCamp Chicago. It was an amazing weekend nonetheless and here’s a quick followup from my weekend. First, if you’re not familiar with WordCamps and are a user of WordPress, I highly suggest you go. Its a weekend full of WordPress users, developers, writers, and everything in between. These events reiterate how awesome the WordPress community really is!
Read more and find a WordCamp near you: http://central.wordcamp.org/
The night before, I attended a WordPress Chicago meetup and got the chance to meet a lot of great WordPress users and developers of the community. If you’re in Chicago make sure to check out the meetup group: http://www.meetup.com/mywplife/
(Happen to crash a ritzy lil party at Millennium Park with some new friends afterwords)
As for the conference itself, the quality of the content and the presenters was definitely worthwhile. I was very impressed with the amount of great content I was able to take away. There was two tracks, a developers and a users track, in which I found myself bouncing back and forth too.
There was a lot learned, so thank you to all of the presenters. If you’d like to see the topics shared, check out the slides: http://www.slideshare.net/event/wordcamp-chicago-2010/slideshows
In short here’s a few bullet points from the weekend:
- WordPress 3.0 to be released June 14th
- New affiliate plugin for the WP-ECommerce plugin
- New event ticket plugin for same WP-ECommerce plugin
- SpriteMe.org – Great service to help sprite images on your site for performance
- The WordPress community is extremely friendly and simply awesome
- Widget Logic – Plugin to determine which widgets show on which pages
- Custom Post Types in WP 3.0 is my favorite new feature, WordPress is heading into the CMS direction, finally!
- Update Notifier – Plugin to notify you when plugins and themes need to be updated
- GoDaddy has WordPress designed hosting packages
Ultimately, though, these events are about connecting with people who are just as passionate about what you do. This is my strong reason for going. Think of them as events with speaker breaks. 
And the after parties are where it’s at. If you go to one of these events DO NOT MISS THE AFTER PARTY! WordCamp Chicago had their after party at the Bull&Bear. Again, the night was great, such a stellar group of individuals.
After chatting with a few new friends, we got on this sharing book spree, that it inspired me to put together a little internet book club. Its invitation only, but feel free to email me for an invite code. For now check out the great books we’re sharing here: http://www.pixelminute.com
Lastly, WordCamp Chicago couldn’t have ended any cooler. I watched a very inspiring presentation of Cory Miller (at iThemes) and we all teamed up, raining GoDaddy stress balls on him. I recorded a video of it with my phone but Qik is being stupid with me. Luckily Mike Torbert was able to catch a shot of the mayhem:
UPDATE: My video of the Cory Miller ball rain finally uploaded, fast forward to about 3:55.
If you’re looking for something to do this fall, I’m helping with the organization of WordCamp Detroit this October. Register now at: http://www.wordcampdetroit.com
WordPress fans unite.
Thanks to everyone in Chicago for making it an amazing experience, see you next year!
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by TJ List, Anthony Montalbano, Anthony Montalbano, Anthony Montalbano, WordCamp Detroit and others. WordCamp Detroit said: RT @italianst4: WordCamp Chicago was amazing without question! Wrote up an event followup: http://bit.ly/ckhxIz #wcchicago [...]