On Saturday, I attended my very first WordCamp! My coworker Estella has been before and strongly recommended it, so our boss graciously paid for our registration costs and so that we could go and learn more about all things WordPress. WordPress is currently the most popular blog software in use, but it is more than just blogging software — it is an open source content management system powered by PHP and MySQL. It’s very powerful, highly customizable, and has a rich plugin architecture that allow for users and developers alike to extend its functionality far beyond the features native to the base install. I am relatively new to WordPress, only having worked with it for two and a half years, but I’ve increasingly become a fan and the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am and the more I love it. We run a lot of our clients’ blogs on WordPress at our company, and I’ve begun to use a lot WordPress as the CMS for many of my own freelance clients as well because it makes it so easy for them to update and add content on their own. I’m hoping to revamp my portfolio site within the coming year, and I am already set on running it with WordPress. WordPress sites are everywhere — in fact, 8.5% of websites on the Internet today are powered by WordPress (including a handful of notable government sites!). This blog that you are reading right now is run on WordPress!

Anyway, I can go on and on for hours singing the praises of WordPress, but I will save you the geeky lovefest and focus on the conference:

Wordcamp during lunch break

WordCamp San Francisco 2010 was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF. WordCamps are held all over the country and the world and there are more and more every year as they are informal and community-organized — they can be put together anywhere, as long as there are enough WordPress enthusiasts to make it happen. But the San Francisco WordCamp is the flagship, since it is organized every year under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg. Hundreds of WordPress users, developers, designers and enthusiasts descended upon San Francisco yesterday to hear from a great lineup of speakers at sessions that run throughout the day. Each of the sessions I chose to sit through were very interesting and informative, but the highlight was definitely the “The State of the Word” keynote delivered by Matt Mullenweg, in which he highlighted some amazing new features that are going to be made available with WordPress 3.0, to be released soon. Some notable changes are that WordPress will merge with WordPress MU, custom menu functionalities, the ability to create custom content types, and the new default theme (the first in 5 years!), pithily named Twenty Ten.

(CC) Eva Blue

(CC) Eva Blue

Matt is an amazing speaker, and it was truly an honor to get to hear him speak. All the sessions were great, but it would have been worth paying for and going to WordCamp just to hear Matt’s keynote. It blows my mind (and kind of depresses me at the same time) that this brilliant genius is a year younger than me and is behind such a force behind this open source empire, and that his efforts have done so much for the web world. If you ever have an opportunity to hear Matt speak, he is so smart, natural, witty, personable and just seems like an all-around nice guy (not to mention he’s pretty cute!). The guy is incredibly solid and such an inspiration to all developers.

Here’s an interview with Matt on Tekzilla from last June in which he discusses some of the history and vision of WordPress. (Please note that there have been a few updates to WordPress since.)

Here’s a video from yesterday, in which he discusses the platform’s future.

A huge thanks to Estella for recommending that we attend WordCamp, and to her and Brent for driving me over to the conference! I had a great time and definitely look forward to attending future WordCamps.