The Meeting Agenda for the 2011 Portland WordCamp

The team from JAM Media Group attended Portland Word Camp 2011 over the weekend at the Elliot Center in downtown Portland. We, along with several hundred fellow WordPress users enjoyed great food, beer, and whiffies along with talks by WordPress experts and enthusiasts, including several employees from Automattic, the founders of WordPress.

The even was an “unconference” which means that only a few of the presentations are formally scheduled. The rest are set up at the start of the event by the attendees. The 2-day conference had a lot of great information and opportunities to meet other WordPress users. Some of my more interesting/helpful take-a-ways were:

1.) Eat Your Own Dogfood – simply put, this means to use your own products and services. Scott Berkun (@berkun) from  Automattic spoke at the opening of WordCamp and introduced this concept. Even though many developers general avoid blogging, the team at WordPress make a point to blog on their own platform. This helps them identify with user issues and improve the platform and has led to several recent improvements of the interface. This philosophy applies to any business really, eat your own dogfood.

2.) Helpful plugins - one of the best things about an “unconference” is that there are impromptu groups that form throughout the event. I ended up in one of those groups where they were talking about some of the best plugins for WordPress which include:

• WP Optimize is a database cleanup and optimization tool that is used to help clean up unnecessary files on your blog.
• WP Twin easily clones your database, the downside however is that it is $97.
• WPML.org Language Plugin allows you to run multilingual websites, $29 or $79, depending on the install.
• Search Everything increases your search ability and also looks at your tags which are not included in most searches
• Jetpack is a WordPress plugin that supercharges your self-hosted WordPress site with the awesome cloud power of WordPress.com.

3.) If you have traffic ambitions for your blog, the secret is that good regular content will lead to slow steady growth. This is solid advice that top bloggers will tell you but it is very accurate. Most people set up blogs but don’t add nearly enough good content on a regular basis. It’s what will take your blog from a mere hobby to something more.

4.) Blog Topic – so what do you blog about? If you have any shortage of ideas, WordPress has a blog that is run by Scott Berkun called The Daily Post. The Daily Post will give you a daily topic or question that you can use as a blog post topic, or perhaps to spur new ideas for your own topics. Another site that does the same thing is Plinky.

5.) Remember you’re not alone, if you’re struggling with WordPress, or one of its features, chances are that others have had the same challenge. Remember to do a Google search for solutions, ask other WordPress users, or submit a request directly to WordPress. This is a very open community whose members are willing to share their knowledge and experience. Chances are, if you are having an issue, someone else in the community has had the same issue and there are solutions out there.

There are some great free resources for WordPress out there including:

• WordPress.tv – a place for video tutorials on WordPress
• WordPress Codex – the online manual for WordPress and a living repository for WordPress information and documentation.