Were you at WordCampUK?

Last weekend Louis from ID attended WordCampUK, an "informal annual gathering of WordPress publishers, designers and developers based in the United Kingdom, held at a different location around the country each year". The event was a fantastic mixture of geeks, lead developers, plugin authors, theme designers and complete beginners to the WordPress platform. Louis has been using WordPress as a blogging platform for over 5 years, but in recent years WP has turned into something that Louis and ID use for full websites, not just blogs.

The event was held at the Metropolitan Business School in Manchester over the weekend 17th-18th July.

Saturday started off with a talk by Michael Kimb Jones 'How WordPress Themes Changed the World' (slides) which was a great insight into the very profitable arena of theme development for WordPress. Some of his own sites were featured which highlighted the very versatile nature of the latest WordPress platform.

Also on Saturday 'Wonderflux' was revealed. This is a framework which "bridges the gap between developer and designer enabling the creation of powerful WordPress themes & functionality" A great session by Jonnya gave us the basics of framework possibilities. Louis came out of this session feeling excited, particularly how versatile this framework could make his and our existing WordPress sites.

The quality of the content from all the speakers on both Saturday & Sunday was fantastic and catered for all WordPress users from beginners to hardcore fanatics. It wasn't just all talk though, there were several 'tracks' and activities to choose from as well as some superb Q/A sessions and some 'Site Doctor' arenas.

If you wanted to go but couldn't, there is good news! A lot of the slides from the speakers presentations are now available online, and the whole weekend was captured on video by the lovely folks at Orange Coconut this footage will soon be available on wordpress.tv.

Overall Louis got a tremendous amount out of WordCampUK 2010. He met some great approachable people who we're sure we'll be working with in the future on upcoming Wordpress projects. WordPress has now evolved! If you think WordPress is just for blogs, think again! ID think you will be surprised which sites you visit everyday are actually running on WordPress!

Many thanks to all who helped organise WordCampUK 2010 it was a truly great weekend!