This past weekend, three of the team from WPBeginner (Syed, Muhammad, and Amanda) took a trip to our fifth WordCamp attended by the WPBeginner team. The trip, sponsored by the great people at BuySellAds, took the three of us on a ten hour drive to Raleigh, North Carolina. The first night Muhammad and Syed attended the unofficial meet-up in downtown North Carolina, where they got a preview of the awesome attendees from near and far.
Bright and early Saturday, we arrived at the conference hotel for check in and met the organizers of the event, Craig Tuller (@craigtuller), Michael Torbert (@michaeltorbert), and Steve Mortiboy (@wpsmort). We split up to attend sessions and met great North Carolina natives like Wayne Sutton (@waynesutton), and Patrick O’Keefe (@ifroggy). We sat in on the first live SitePoint Podcast with Stephen Segraves (@ssegraves), Brad Williams (@williamsba), and Patrick O’Keefe and won some great prizes from SitePoint, BuddyPress from Dummies, and other commercial plugins/themes. After SitePoint’s broadcast, Syed gave a speech on integrating WordPress and Facebook. Shortly after it was time for dinner and the afterparty.
Syed’s Presentation
At dinner the three of us sat down with Jane Wells (@janeforshort), Automattic’s self proclaimed cat herder, and Dave Moyer (@davemoyer) of BitWire Media. As the night progressed, we met up with some great WordCampers. We ducked out just as the band began to play and experienced firsthand the North Carolina rains.
The next morning we were treated to the yummy cloud cookies from the folks at Rack Space Cloud while we watched Syed participate in the first session of the day, a developer’s Q&A panel with Dave Moyer, Brad Williams, and Nathan Rice (@nathanrice). Shortly after we were treated to a panel on the sustainability of open source platforms, moderated by Lisa Sabin-Wilson (@LisaSabinWilson). Finally, the lovely Jane Wells delivered a Q&A style State of the Word. Jane discussed the future of WordCamps, including potential GPL speaker requirements and WordPress learning tools sponsored by the WordPress Foundation. There are some exciting advancements coming to the WordPress world.
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Now that we are back in Florida, we are looking forward to our next WordCamp. We would like to thank the organizers, the sponsors, and the town of Raleigh for treating us to a fantastic Wordcamp!
More about our Trip’s Sponsors:
BuySellAds is a huge marketplace to buy/sell advertising spots on your site. Over 750 successful bloggers use them to power their online ad sales. WPBeginner is also using BSA to maintain our ads. It is also a great place for advertisers. Over 1,000 quality advertisers use BSA to target the audiences that are right for their brand. If you are interested, apply to be in their marketplace now.
