I attended the very first WordPress conference in Glasgow yesterday – WordUp Glasgow, arranged by Taryn Wallis and Martin Young of WPScotland.
The all-day event was held in the IET Teacher Building in St Enoch Square right in the centre of Glasgow and was a great venue – particularly the well-appointed lecture theatre with power sockets at every seat and good AV facilities. The staff were extremely helpful, and the sandwich lunch was tasty and plentiful.
The sessions have been well described by Kimb Jones and Heather Burns. So here is my take on the day.
WordPress for a Family History Archive
The slides from my talk on family history are available. I’ll try to blog about some of the key plugins as that generated quite a lot of interest.
Hand Drawing WordPress – Jim Convey
Jim showed his flair as an artist as well as a WordPress designer, and showed how art can be used to give a different, more personal touch to a website. He also gave a great tour of some sites with very interesting art-driven user interfaces.
EU Cookie Law – Heather Burns
Heather’s talk was a really interesting walk through the EU Cookie Regulations that will come into effect in the UK on 25 May, only 110 days time. She gave the clearest explanation that I’ve heard on what the regulations are and how they will affect website owners (and us as site designers). Some WordPress cookies are exempt as they’re “strictly necessary for the provision of a service explicitly requested by the user” (for example the dashboard login cookies), but others (such as comment cookies that remember the user’s identity for a year) are included in the legislation.
This is a poorly thought out set of regulations, and the feeling in the room is that most people will ignore them. Heather compared the legislation to the fact that Buchanan Galleries use mobile phones to track footfall of individuals visiting the shopping centre!
The Government Digital Service are also considering how to implement these regs, and have blogged on how the new single government domain will handle the problem. The best example in real life is South Ayrshire Council, and definitely not the ICO!
Site Doctors: improve the WPScotland websites – Taryn & Martin
This started off as a discussion on how to improve the web presence of WPScotland, but turned into a really useful debate about how to foster a community of WordPress users, designers and developers in Scotland. Around half of the people at WordUp Glasgow had not been to any WPScotland event before, and we need to listen to them to improve the community.
It was during this session that we discovered that WordCamp Edinburgh UK has been given the go-ahead by WordCamp Central!
The Emperor’s New Clothes – Kevinjohn Gallagher
Kevinjohn tackled the issue that besets any technology community – the fact that we hype new things and don’t always take a balanced view that includes our end users. I particularly liked these ones:
- Responsive Design is Irresponsible
- Free is too Expensive
- Open Source in the Enterprise is like a Mail Order Bride
Some of these issues are really pertinent in UK Government IT at the moment, and I would hope that Kevinjohn’s messages could get an airing within the IT Profession.
How WordPress WON! – Kimb Jones
Kimb gave us a good walk through eight reasons why WordPress dominates the CMS market at the moment:
- Open source
- Saturation
- Ecosystem
- Credibility
- Themes
- Plugins
- Automattic
- Community
Show Us How You Did That
I’ll blog separately about Show Us How You Did That, as I thought it worked really successfully this time.
Summary
Overall, I thought the WordUp Glasgow event went really well, and I was pleased that so many new people turned up. Once again, Taryn and Martin did a great job to co-ordinate the event, and we have great support from both local WordPress experts and travelling supporters like Kimb.
As always at WordPress events, there is a truly friendly atmosphere with no commercial back-biting that often goes on at conferences. It was a real pleasure to spend a day with so many interesting people.
See you all in Edinburgh in July?