WordPress – 8 Years in the making

Wow! Another year has passed and it is now eight years since my fateful comment on Matt’s blog that kicked off this whole WordPress thing!

WordPress is now a mature CMS platform driving 13% of the web! It is used for an astonishing array of very different web sites around the world, from the humblest one person blog to award-winning education sites, celebrity sites, newspapers, and even world leaders!

WordPress is supporting a whole industry of WordPress experts, including me: I’m now in my third year as an independent WordPress specialist.

I believe that WordPress has achieved this massive success in no small way because of the fantastic community around it, the keen-eyed vision of Matt Mullenweg, and the awesome power of the GNU GPL open source license.

With version 3.1 just around the corner, I predict it will be another great year for WordPress.

WordCamp slides featured on Slideshare

The slides from my presentation at WordCamp UK in Manchester over the weekend are now on SlideShare. I presented on the fantastic I’m a Scientist Get me Out of Here project website I have built for Gallomanor this year.

It’s best to read the notes in the “Notes on slide x” tab so that everything makes sense! I also link to some of the plugins I used at the end.

Amazingly, the presentation features on the SlideShare home page today along with a couple of other presentations from WordCamp UK! See the “featured” section in the right hand column. Woo Hoo!

I have still to finish my write-up of the weekend, but will hopefully get that done ‘real soon’.

WordCamp UK A Few Places Left

For those of you thinking you may have missed out on this coming weekend’s WordPress fun at WordCamp UK in Manchester, think again!

As the tickets did not completely sell out, we are making the last few available on the door, as we did last year.

You must email me (mike at my domain ) to reserve a ticket, and then turn up on Saturday morning with your £30 cash.

To recap, WordCamp UK is this weekend, July 17th and 18th, at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which is in Manchester city centre, a few minutes walk from the main Piccadilly train Station.

There are four simultaneous tracks : General & user, Specialist & developer, Miscellaneous & spontaneous and a ‘Genius Bar’ (a range of WordPress experts available to advice attendees on a one-to-one basis).

I look forward to seeing you there.

WordCamp UK, Manchester July 17-18 2010

The third annual WordCamp UK is taking place later this month in Manchester, which is just up the road from me.

Tickets are on sale now just £30. That’s £30 for two full days of meeting fellow WordPress users, publishers, designers, and developers.

The unconference is being held on the weekend of July 17th and 18th at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School which is in Manchester city centre and just a few minutes walk from the main Piccadilly train Station.

There are four simultaneous tracks this year: General & user, Specialist & developer, Miscellaneous & spontaneous and a ‘Genius Bar’ (a range of WordPress experts available to advice attendees on a one-to-one basis).

I’ll be there, of course, and will be presenting on Sunday. I’ll probably hang around the Genius bar at times too. It will be a great weekend, if you are a WordPress user, developer, or designer, or are just considering using WordPress, you should come along.

I look forward to seeing you there.

Seven Years Since WordPress 0.7

It was seven years ago today that WordPress was first released . Just a few months after it’s inception.

Now WordPress is a grown up CMS capable of much more than just blogging, but I noticed that one of the key points of that release still holds true.

New Administration Interface — We’ve made it as simple as possible, and no more.

I’m eagerly looking forward to the 3.0 release, that is just around the corner.

WordPress Started Seven Years Ago

Another year has passed for WordPress, and for me my first year as an independent WordPress developer whose sole income comes from WordPress.

It was seven years ago that I made the the comment on Matt’s blog that started the whole thing off.

These days WordPress celebrates its birthday on May 27th, the anniversary of the first WordPress release.

I’m really looking forward to the future WordPress, especially the new merged with mu version.

Update: I accidentally left this post in draft mode, so I guess it didn’t appear at the right time.

Site Down – My fault

Apparently this blog was down for two days, and I didn’t notice. 🙁

The problem came courtesy of a tracking a trunk checkout of a plugin. A change got checked in which broke some functionality I was using, and when I updated I picked up the change and didn’t check my site.

I really should know better. My only excuse: I have been out of the office for a couple of days and busy working for clients.