Dougal Campbell's geek ramblings

Today was the first ever WordPress Community Summit (hopefully, the first of many) — a by-invitation event bringing together a diversity of voices from the WordPress community, with the approximately 100 attendees nominated and selected by the community itself. The event had an unconference format.

In the morning, we proposed topics for discussion (about half or more of the attendees championed topics). We then found areas where topics overlapped, and combined similar ones, so that we ended up with about 35-40 separate topics. These were then spread out through the day, broken into four 45 minute time slots (two morning sessions, two afternoon sessions), with about 8-10 simultaneous discussions per session. The day rounded out with a general Q&A session and an all-inclusive discussion, led by Matt Mullenweg, which challenged us all to think really hard about the changes occurring in the web landscape, which WordPress must keep up with in order to remain relevant.

Discussions I participated in were

• Theme review team, led by Chip Bennett
• WordPress Codex, led by Andrea Rennick (which included my proposed topic on Best Practices documentation)
• Pain-points of switching themes, led by Michael Fields
• “JavaScript with Koop”, led by Daryl Koopersmith

There were many other topics discussed, and I wish I could have cloned myself and listened in on many more. There were discussions on security, community participation by commercial development shops, internationalization and translation, automatic updates, licensing, and tons of other things.

Right now, my brain is still aswirl with ideas and things I want to work on. I just need to find the time. Over the next few days and weeks, we will be seeing the details and action item results of all this, and I hope that you all will be able to enjoy the fruits of these discussions very soon.

There’s so much more I’d like to say, but it’s late, I’m tired, and I’m still absorbing everything…