The intrepid SCIP trainers travelled to wildest South Wales last week (18 & 19 July) for the annual WordCamp UK.

WordCamp 09 was a get together of WordPress users, developers, designers, geeks and tech heads. A number of workshops were held across the weekend.  These included sessions on SEO, a workshop from Google about how their search engine works with WordPress and a talk from the designer/developer of Stephen Fry’s new WordPress site. There were inspiring talks from Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the co-founders of WordPress.

We also got our hands dirty (or rather our brains stretched!) on a techie session or two on plug-ins.

As well as the formal sessions there were lots of interesting conversations over coffee and lunch, and in the evenings over a fine pint of Brain’s bitter – the local brew.

Most of the content of WordCamp was related to the .org version of WordPress.  However, it was still very useful to understand more about what’s possible when you’re ready to move on from .com.

It was amazing to realise how widespread the uptake of WordPress is now.  Most of the world’s newspaper sites have WordPress subsites feeding them now.  The new Number 10 website is a WordPress.org site and more and more sites are being used across the NHS.

We will make sure that all the bits and pieces of information, and the tips and tricks, are integrated into our training sessions and also feed into the SCIP web surgeries.  Looking forward to next year already! Iechyd da!!