WordCamp Montréal

Lots of attendees were hoping to get access to the slides from the presentations they saw so they could better understand their notes and remember what they’ve learned.

I tried to corral all the speakers and get them to upload their slides to Slideshare so that people could easily look through them. Most of the speakers put them up or sent them to me. Here’s the list:

• Jane Wells – The Future of WordPress
• Jeremy Clarke – Caching and Optimization for WordPress: Keeping your site fast and stable.
• Jeremy Clarke – WordPress Theming for Epic n00bs: Intro to Template Tags, Themes and PHP
• Sarven Capadisli – Making Laconica and WordPress work together
• CT Moore – WP-MU 101: How to Install and Avoid Common Mistakes
• Brad Williams – WordPress Security
• Stephane Jolicoeur & Audrey-Rose Savard – An Easier Way to Embed Video in Your Blog
• George ONeill – Using WordPress As An Integral Part Of A Social Media Marketing Strategy
• Alexandre Simard – Ecommerce on the cheap with WordPress
• Erin Blaskie – Lifestreaming: The New
  Future of Blogging?

[Extras added after this post was published]

• Mario Asselin – WordCamp sans la ligne de vie
• Brendan Sera-Sriar – FlashPress – Bridging Two Worlds
• Jerome Paradis and Kim Vallee – The Perfect Migration to WordPress: Why and How

You can also find their slides on the schedule page by clicking the ‘view presentation slides’ link below the talk name.

Hopefully the other speakers will send their slides soon. We should have videos of most of the talks up on WordPress.tv soon, but it might take a while as its a slow process to prepare them.

[Guest post by CT Moore to elaborate on his talk, Thanks!]

Photo of CT giving his talk by eva blue

My presentation at this past weekend’s Wordcamp was called WP-MU 101: How to Install & Avoid Common Mistakes. One of the things I made clear at the outset was that I am NOT a developer or web designer, so the session was going to be very much of a beginner’s level one.

Being a very beginner’s level affair, the Q&A part brought up some some questions that I just wasn’t equipped to answer. After all, I’m a newbie to WP-MU, and was really just intending to share my experience with other newbies so that they don’t make the same silly mistakes that I did.

So what I started doing was crowd-sourcing the Q&A session. The crowd seemed pretty receptive; quite a few attendees stepped in to answer questions, and even I learned quite a few things.

Insofar as WP-MU is ideal for running multiple blogs through one platform, some of the things that more advanced WP-MU users in the audience shared with everyone were:

1. WP-MU will support blogs in different languages; all you need to do is install the qTranslate plugin.
2. Multiple domains can be managed through a single installation of WP-MU: first, you create a new blog through WP-MU (such as blog.domain.com); second, your point your new domain (example.com) at the same server root where WP-MU is installed; then, you go to the general blog setting for the blog you created (blog.domain.com) and change the URL in the general settings to the additional domain (example.com) you want to manage through WP-MU.
3. Admin users can force plugins on blogs.

And some of the features of WP-MU that I was already aware of, but are worth recapping for anyone trying to determine whether the platform is right for them:

1. WP-MU can support blogs in either sub-domains (blog.example.com) or sub-directories (example.com/blog), but not both; and you make the choice during installation.
2. if you choose to have blogs in a sub-domain, you will need a Wildcard DNS Entry.
3. your database must be MySQL 5.0.
4. a single database is used for all the blogs under WP-MU.
5. single users can contribute to several blogs.
6. single users can be assigned different permissions on different blogs.
7. each blog can have its own theme / blogs can share themes.
8. there is no WYSIWYG for editing the home.php file (which is responsible for the content of the index page for the domain WP-MU is installed on); if you want to edit this file, you will need some coding skills and FTP access to the file itself.

In a nutshell, my presentation was intended to help others learn from my mistakes (i.e. not reading the installation instruction) and give the audience an understanding of (1) when to use WPMU, (2) common installation mistakes, (3) choosing between a directory vs subdomain, and (4) basic WP-MU configuration after you install it.

In any case, here’s the PowerPoint from my session. It’s not nearly as rich as the discussion that ensued (the audience was so awesome), so if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment and I’ll try to help you out as best I can.

We are thrilled to announce that we will be opening WordCamp Montréal with a special Question and Answers session with Matt Mullenweg, the founder/evil genius behind WordPress, and we want to know what questions you want to hear answered.

Please post your WordPress question (about the past, present or future of WordPress) in the comments on this post. We will put together a list of the best of them (with some help from the peeps at Automattic) for this special session. Thanks for your help!

Jane Wells too?

In relatedly excellent news, Jane Wells, another Automattic employee and one of the key minds behind the WP 2.7 usability overhaul and community engagement process will also be at WordCamp Montréal. She’ll be presenting about where WP has come since 2.7 and where its headed in the near future.

We’re flattered to have these two celebrity guests at our event, thanks guys!