Wordcamp Philippines 2008: Aftermath

I actually had one of him smiling, but then it was way underexposed and beyond salvation, even with Photoshop.

Really, really tired, but Wordcamp Philippines 2008 was freakin’ awesome. No really.

Quick rundown of notes and things before I take a nap:

Some statistics:

24th – where the Philippines is ranked among countries that use WordPress
24th – where WordPress.com is ranked among most popular sites (coincidence?)

Over 166% – WordPress’s growth from last year
Over 11.15 million – Downloads this year
3.6 million – WordPress.org blogs
6.54 billion – Pageviews
4.96 – Average plugins per blog

7.63 million – WordPress users

And some neat news: WordPress 2.7 is due this November.

What to expect? Well…

• Navbar is now at the left of the screen
• Drag-and-drop is now available for the entire Dashboard
• Dynamic navigation in the Navbar
• In-Dashboard plugin navigation and installation, with update notices
• In-Dashboard theme navigation and installation
• Sticky posts are enabled
• “Write” page: Both columns are drag-and-drop-able
• “Write” page: Interface is customizable (you can remove some things you’ll never use)
• and more.

On Buddypress:
Buddypress is a WordPress-compatible social network thing – sort of like, quote-unquote, “Facebook in a box.”
The site can sync with a blog and its plugins and you can do all sorts of other stuff with it, like sharing pictures, video, and so on

Ah, gotta love open forums.

Some Q&A with Matt: (disclaimer, I paraphrase a lot)

Will WordPress.com have free access for adding javascript and such?
-There are possible security risks, so no.
Caching for WordPress.com (without plugins)?
-There is a built-in fuction, but output-based plugins for this sort of thing are better at it.
Threaded comments? Other comment options?
-These will probably show up in 2.7 – things like replying in the admin panel, threaded comments and discussion, etc.
Will WordPress servers switch to nginx?
-They’ll move to it soon, but it’ll need some tweaking.
Do you (Matt) still code?
-Yes, but mostly Core WordPress stuff around the end of coding. He codes less now.
Will WordPress.com users have a chance to use Google Adsense?
–Possibly.
What does “Unlucky in cards” mean? (refer to ma.tt)
-There’s an old saying – “Lucky in cards, unlucky in love.” If you reverse it, then it’d go “Unlucky in cards, lucky in love.”
Can you (Matt) make a downloadable pdf of sorts for beginners who want a starting point for more advanced WP coding, because the WP codex is pretty tough to use if you don’t know what you’re doing.

By the way, Matt is a really popular guy here. I mean, really popular.

-The WP codex is indeed not very beginner-friendly, so the first priority is to clean it up and fix out-of-date stuff. How-to tutorials will also be added sometime. After all that, they may make an offline version, though seeing as WP needs you to be online, well.
Good books on WordPress?
-Wordpress for Dummies is good. (Unfortunately, I couldn’t note down the other stuff)
Do you have a full-time job, or do you work solely on WP? Do you profit from it?
-Automattic, a virtual company, is the company that does the coding for WP. Most of its time is devoted to coding for it, though Automattic does not actually “own” WP. WordPress is also funded by 4 things:

• Upgrades on WP.com blogs (the ones you buy – ie: enabling CSS, more space, etc.)
• Ads
• VIP Program – payment from other large organizations that use it (ie: CIA, CNN, and so on)
• Akismet – free for personal use, but there is a commercial licensing fee.

Will the ability to upload pictures from mobile phones be added?
-There are two options: use the iPhone app (which is obscenely expensive here, so that’s not much of an option). The other is that they [WP devteam] are developing a sort of “e-mail gateway” – send an e-mail of pictures or whatever through a mobile phone and it will be uploaded to the blog.
Job opportunities for Filipinos? A Filipino-language version of WP?
-Community translations help make multi-language versions of WP possible (so there’ll eventually be a Filipino version out sometime). And for jobs, one only need to refer to automattic.com/jobs. Seeing as it’s a virtual company, they don’t discriminate other races, genders, etc.

And that was pretty much it. Some of the more incoherent stuff in my notes still needs deciphering.
After that, I left along with everyone else and then played a bit of IIDX (intermittently passing 9th Dan orz) and a bit of DDR too. Afterwards, I went off and bought another fountain pen – an unknown model of Inoxcrom. Someone please shoot me.

And… that’s it. I’m beat. Good freakin’ night.

PS: I met up with usagijen and her friend hazy. Jen… actually looked the way I expected her to look like >_>
PPS: I have a picture of me and Matt, but because I’m not exactly the most photogenic of people, I would prefer not to post it until people start sending death threats. Then I’ll think about thinking about it.
PPPS: This article on ZDNet about the previous San Francisco Wordcamp has a lot more details on Buddypress and other neat stuff compared to my paltry little HP giveaway notebook, so go there and take a damn good look if you’re interested.