#WCFAY High Points

This past weekend Keith Crawford and I headed to Fayetteville w/ our wives to attend Wordcamp Fayetteville. We were also meeting several friends from Central Arkansas at the conference like Brent Passmore, Daniel Spillers, Aaron Baker, Tonya Smith, Shelley Keith, and a few others (I probably left someone out, sorry). 

When we got into town Friday night we went to the informal tweetup and met Christopher Spencer, Tammy Hart, Nash Vegas aka Mitch Canter, and Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner.com.  We had an awesome time at the Friday night tweetup and met a lot of cool NW Arkansas people.  I finally got to meet Colin Condray of Blue Zoo as well, he and I have communicated back and forth for a long time via social media and it was nice to finally put a face w/ the name. 

Saturday morning Keith and I showed up early for the Wordcamp and met up w/ one of my team members, Marcus Creasy, who was in town to checkout the blogger track for wordpress at the conference but we talked him into hanging w/ us and doing the developer track, which was a little more technical than the blogger track.  The first session we attended was Mitch Canter, I have posted the video from this session for those that might have missed it, Mitch spoke about how you can take WordPress and do anything you want with it through the use of plugins.  Some of the things he touched on that I found particularly interesting was e-commerce and podcasting.  Two things that we get requests for all of the time.  Mitch also talked about Flutter, which is an alternative to Podscms that doesn’t involve creating new tables in your database.  At the end of the session Mitch also went through his list of tools / plugins that he likes to use on most of his wordpress projects.  I mentioned to him after the session that I thought our toolboxes were almost identical, out of however many hundreds of thousands of plugins are out there for wordpress, that’s pretty ironic.

Another session that Keith and I really enjoyed was a small presentation by Tammy Hart on how to sell WordPress.  There was a lot of good feedback in this session from various people in the crowd.  Daniel Spillers brought up an interesting question that pertained as to how you can legally sell wordpress based on the terms of use.  I found that discussion to be pretty interesting as well as the way that Tammy works with her clients.  There was a lot of dialogue in this session as well.

Probably the most mind boggling session of the day was Michael Van Winkle’s on PODSCMS. I knew a little about PODSCMS from having installed it and played with it on my sandbox a few times, and a while back Nick Brewer did a presentation at Central Arkansas Refresh on PODS and I have been quite impressed.  Michael’s presentation was one of the few that was primarily all developers / coders so he was able to get pretty detailed w/ his info and I have to say, several times Keith and I looked at each other and shook our heads.  Deep Info! I left the presentation pretty inspired to spend more time in PODS on my sandbox to test it’s boundaries.  Michael’s presentation is on slideshare here…

In closing I would like to mention that at #WCFAY I finally saw a practical application for Google Wave  that extended the software further than making lunch plans.  Keith had the idea to live blog the sessions so I joined in.  Before we knew it, we had about 10 or so other people join in on the conversation w/ us via Wave.  I have to admit, it was pretty cool.  You can see the embedded wave here…

I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention some new friends from Springfield, MO that decided to give me a new nickname this weekend. 🙂 So hello to @sugarcube and @jenny8675309!