When I first showed up on Saturday, they weren’t even ready to check people in yet. I tend to be quite prompt, so I was there a few minutes before eight, and they were still alphabetizing name tags. Luckily there was a nice little place to sit, with power for my laptop and free wi-fi (unsecured to be exact…). The plan was to tweet about the experience as @wpinformer, which is the Twitter account for WordPress Informer where you’ll be able to read more detailed posts about each speaker I listened to. once they were ready I checked in, and just a few minutes later I was passing the check in tables and overheard them turning away walk-ins because they were already overbooked. I don’t know what the actual totals were, but I’m guessing there were about 800 people in attendance.

I ended up attending the welcome by Matt Mullenweg, “Cooking With BuddyPress” by Andy Peatling, “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” by Matt Cutts, State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg, “Your Business Web” by Dave Gray of XPlane, “Customizing Themes and Plugins” by Ann Oyama, “Even Faster WordPress Themes” by Steve Souders, “FAILs, LOLs and User-Generated Content” by Scott Porad, “Lessons from Mozilla” by John Lilly, and the Goodbye by Matt Mullenweg. The fact that there were two tracks means that I missed a lot, but I was able to see pretty much everything I wanted to.

The tracks were upstairs and downstairs, with the main room being upstairs. The welcome by Matt Mullenweg was extremely quick and generic. It served as a kind of kickoff, but I honestly could have skipped it and just started downstairs at the first speaker.

The first real presentation I saw was “Cooking With BuddyPress” by Andy Peatling. You can read Why BuddyPress to get more detail about what I thought, but overall it was a really great session. Andy obviously knows what he’s talking about (he is the lead developer of BuddyPress), but he’s also good as conveying that knowledge to his audience. It was nice to hear a little of the history of the project (421 days to version 1.0) and some of the plans for the future (such as better BBPress installation), but the best thing was getting a quick overview of how BuddyPress worked, what it did, and how it could be extended and customized.

Next I went back upstairs to listen to “Straight from Google: What You Need to Know” by Matt Cutts. Matt is the head of Google’s Anti-webspam department. His job is to find those spam sites that plague the internet, and make sure that Google doesn’t offer you links to those kinds of sites in your search results. Since he spends so much time dealing with Google’s algorithms, he’s extremely current on best practices in Search Engine Optimization. The biggest thing to take away from this talk was that Matt said that WordPress is a “great choice” for SEO because it solves “80-90% of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).” That’s really saying something coming from one of the true experts out there.

After that, everyone came upstairs for “State of the Word” by Matt Mullenweg, whoch actually continued with a question and answer session after lunch. We got a lot of the normal history, WordPress was a fork of B2 and was later officially recognized by the B2 creator as the “official” continuation of B2, etc. There were a couple interesting WordPress facts such as that plugins were introduced in WordPress 1.2 and themes were introduced in WordPress 1.5. He also gave his summary of GPL Freedom to use software for any purpose, freedom to modify software, and freedom to redistribute. Then he talked about the fact that WordPress.org would be featuring themes that had paid support available, which he sees as perfectly in line with the essence of the GPL (and I agree). Alex King was brought up to talk a little about Crowd Favorite which now has eight full time staff in Denver and WordPress development and support is their primary revenue stream.

After the Q & A with Matt, I went downstairs to listen to “Growing Your Business Web” by Dave Gray of XPlane. Dave started by saying his slides sucked and wouldn’t be available for download, but I disagree. As a matter of fact, I loved “the internet according to Dave Gray” which spread pretty quickly across Twitter (so I’m not the only one). The whole talk was great, but was unfortunately cut short because he was going over his allotted time. It would have been nice to let him go a few more minutes, but I understand that they needed to keep things going.

Next up was “Customizing Themes and Plugins” by Ann Oyama, again downstairs. Ann was extremely nervous, and it showed. I was fine with that, I get nervous too. It seems like she knew most of the material, and I credited her nervousness with the bits that she seemed to leave out, skip over, or jumble up. Unfortunately, some of the information she gave was simply wrong. For example, functions.php and plugins are not really “the same thing.” They are loaded at different times, so they can do different things. For example, plugins are loaded before pluggable.php and can therefore override about 43 functions (depending on the version of WordPress) that functions.php cannot. Plugins can also modify settings before the global $wp_query is set up, which can be extremely handy. There are more differences as well, but that’s not really the point. Nervousness aside, there was some misinformation and while many of the people in the room will never need to know the differences (and some of the people there already knew), it’s still pretty unfortunate.

After Ann, things really picked up. Next was “Even Faster WordPress Themes” by Steve Souders, who wrote “High Performance Web Sites” and “Even Faster Web Sites” (both must reads in my opinion). Steve has spent time optimizing web performance for companies like Yahoo and Google, and he really knows his stuff. A lot of it was repeat info from his books, but it was definitely extremely useful information.

Following Steve was “FAILs, LOLs and User-Generated Content” by Scott Porad. He went over some of the highs and lows of having users generate your content for you. Steve Porad is the CTO at Pet Holdings, Inc. (aka lolcats) and I think everyone will agree that they’ve definitely succeeded at user generated content. They also run completely on WordPress.com, which really says something for WordPress.com.

For the last full session of the day I listened to “Lessons from Mozilla” by John Lilly. I loved his style of talking. He was a little ADD, running a lot of tangents…which reminded me of…well…me. He offered no “magic” key to succeeding as an open source project, which I respect because I don’t think one exists. However, he did give a good picture of what it’s like at the top of the food chain, with no one to copy or follow. It had been a long day, and I was tired, so I slacked off on tweeting as well as notes. I wish I hadn’t.

The day ended with the Goodbye by Matt Mullenweg. It was nearly as quick as the welcome, but by the end of the day it didn’t seem so bad. The big announcement? Don’t forget about the sixth anniversary party at the Automattic lounge. The party was nice, but let’s face it…we geeks aren’t all that outgoing. It seemed pretty dead by about 10pm when I left. So what was the best part of the conference? Definitely the developer day on Sunday, which I promise to write about soon.

Related Posts:

• Why BuddyPress
• Speaking at WordCamp San Francisco 2011
• Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1

First, why should you use BuddyPress rather than building on an existing service? Andy pointed out that BuddyPress allows you to BYOTOS (Bring Your Own Terms Of Service), which means you’re not vulnerable to the whims of the terms of service of some other site, which could change at the least opportune time. Additionally, BuddyPress is built on WordPress, which gives you the stability that has come with years of development. It’s also open source and better yet GPL, which means that in the absolute worst case scenario you could fork the project and continue to use it. Lastly, BuddyPress piggybacks itself on the WordPress community which is huge and helpful.

Once I saw why it was useful, I wondered where it should be used. It seems to me that it’s really for niche networks. Do you have a sports team that wants to share with each other and maybe fans as well? Use BuddyPress. Are you involved with a school? Use BuddyPress to allow all your students and staff to interact easily. Any small to medium sized group of people with shared interests would be a great place to use BuddyPress.

So enough about where and why, what’s it like? Installation is simple, but not exactly “one click simple”. You can install the plugin itself using the plugin browser in WordPress admin, but then you need to copy some theme files to their correct place. If you know how to use an FTP client, installation will be easy. Additionally it can work with BBPress Forums, but the install is currently somewhat complex. Andy assured us that in the future the BBPress install will improve.

However, the install didn’t worry me. What I really wanted to know as a developer is how BuddyPress was to extend and customize. The answer is, if you’ve been working with WordPress it’s extremely simple. It uses the same methods (actions and filters) as WordPress for extensibility. As a matter of fact, many existing WordPress plugins and widgets work on BuddyPress with no modification at all.

Theming also follows the same basic practices as any other WordPress theme but uses two themes in parallel (a WordPRess theme and a BuddyPress theme for profiles). Template files themselves are neatly ordered into directories to make them easy to find, and BuddyPress uses all clean URLs by default (which map almost exactly to the file you need to edit). Buddy Press themes use “The Loop” as you’re used to seeing in WordPress theme, but they use them for more than just posts. You can list users, groups, friends, comments, and much more! It even includes simple pagination functions to allow you to easily break content into pages.

While I was excited yet skeptical at the beginning, after watching Andy’s presentation I’m just looking forward to a good excuse to do a project using BuddyPress. It looks powerful, flexible, and simple. If you’re interested in seeing Andy’s presentation, I’m told that it should be up on WordPress.tv in the near future.

Related Posts:

• WordCamp San Francisco 2009
• Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009

“What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”¹

Combined with WordPress themes and publishing ease, the addition of full social network functionality to the platform with the release of BuddyPress 1.0 is a slam dunk / home run for Automattic, bloggers, traditional WordPress users, and social network developers. Look to see this on even more websites than WordPress in the future, and to pull a lot of development away from Drupal, which still lacks a unified offering that builds a social network as simply and easily as BuddyPress.

References & Links:
BuddyPress: http://buddypress.org/
BuddyPress demo site: http://testbp.org/
Sample demo profile page: http://testbp.org/members/galen/

Sites that have been built with BuddyPress:
WannaNetwork – Online Real Estate Community: http://wannanetwork.com/
Flokka – Women in Business: http://flokka.com/
GrungePress – Online Music Community: http://grungepress.com/

Related Posts:

• Why BuddyPress
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009

1. http://wordpress.org/development/2009/04/make-friends-with-buddypress/