I spent the last weekend in Manchester at WordCamp UK and had a wonderful time! I went with my colleague Markus from Ponsi Interactive, who has now been officially initiated to the wonderful world of WordPress. The sessions over the two-day “informal gathering” included general stuff about using WordPress in different contexts, but also really interesting ones discussing more advanced topics such as BuddyPress theme & plugin development and testing strategies for WordPress.

Meeting the stars

Summarising all the discussions I had during the weekend would be pretty hard, so I’m not going to try. Many non-profits in the UK are finding WordPress well-suited for their purposes, and I had lunch on Sunday with some of the many designers and developers working in that sector. It was interesting to hear their stories, having also done some sites for non-profits in Finland. Probably the biggest thing for me though was the chance to have a chat with some of the WordPress key figures, notably Nikolay Bachiysky (core committer involved in localization, and developer of GlotPress, the invaluable translation tool for non-english-natives) and WordPress UX and community person Jane Wells. There’s something really cool about meeting two people who on one hand, have made it easy to distribute the very laborious job of translating the WP interface, and on the other hand had a huge influence on transforming the admin interface into the sleek thing it is today.

WordCamp Finland?

Jane gave us some good tips on organising a WordCamp in Finland, which might still be some way off. The community in Finland is still making baby steps, but we’ll get there someday. A good point made was to start small with regular meetups, and then perhaps start to build up a group who might be interested in organising and, above all, attending a bigger event. I’m pretty sure though that there are plenty of interested parties, we just have to dig them out of their holes. To Finns reading this: do join the Finnish WordPress forums … (In Finnish: suomalaiset seuratkaa WordPress foorumeita)

Thank you Manchester!

Manchester was a great place for the event, and we got to see some night life too. Big thanks to the organisers and everyone else I had a chance to talk to, maybe will come back next year!