On Saturday I had another fairly decent experience at this year’s WordCamp, which took place in Boulder.  I was a little disappointed in the lack of knowledge gained from last year’s WordCamp, and the same is true again for this year.  The one session that I looked forward to the most, was definitely the most informational and in my opinion the best of the entire day.  This was titled Caching in WordPress and was presented by Chris Scott and Sean O’Shaughnessy from Voce Communications.  The information presented by these two easily beat out all other presenters at the conference combined.  The only other session that was even close was WordPress Development by Alex King and Shawn Parker of Crowd Favorite, which featured on the fly sidebar widget development from a crowd suggested list of features.

I pretty much stuck to the more technical sessions the entire day.  I thought that the SEO Techniques session was pretty much common knowledge, or at least stuff that I was already fairly aware of.  However the room was packed for this session, so I guess others may not be as knowledgeable.  If nothing else, the session was very entertaining.  The DIY Usability Testing session was also entertaining.  Steve Martin from Clever Cubed was the presenter and though the crowd was a little smaller than earlier presentations, the information provided was focused and intelligent.  I don’t think it applies to my work very much, but there were a small number of people in attendance that were very interested in the subject.

Finally I sat in on Jane Wells’ presentation on What’s Next for WordPress.  She is the user experience lead for WordPress and is very knowledgeable on all things WordPress.  Though she didn’t talk much about what’s actually next for WordPress, she did highlight new features from the recently released version 3.0 as well as answer question after question from the audience.  Before the presentation I wasn’t aware of the new menu functionality in this release of WordPress and that is something that I definitely plan to utilize in the future.  Otherwise, her presentation was good and she helped many in the crowd with all kinds of varying problems.

With all of that said, it is really hard to beat the cheap price of admission ($45) that included a $10 gift certificate to local venues for lunch as well as a nice t-shirt.  After these tickets were sold out, the organizers announced $25 tickets that didn’t include lunch or a shirt, and I wish they would have offered that from the beginning.  I don’t really need anymore t-shirts in my closet.