On the weekend of July 21st-22nd, I attended WordCamp Sydney, a gathering of over 200 likeminded people to discuss all things WordPress. This series of posts is an attempt to provide a brief summary of some of what I learned there. The slide sets for all the presentations are available on Slideshare.
Brad started off with the state of WordPress today, presenting some pretty impressive statistics:
- There are currently 54 million WordPress sites.
- 15% of website worldwide are running WordPress
- 22% of new websites in the US are using WordPress
- 48% of the top 100 blogs are using WordPress
WordPress began as a blogging platform and has now grown into a fully fledged Content Management System (CMS). Brad sees WordPress moving to the next level to become a framework used for many kind of new applications, such as games, social networks, or wikis.
Another interesting development he mentioned is the idea of offering WordPress as a service, citing a fairly new service of WordPress for restaurant websites provided by Happy Tables. (Damn, they’ve beaten me to it – looks like a promising, much needed service, judging by the plethora of really awful restaurant websites that seem to abound. I’ll be taking a closer look at this to see what they’re up to.)
Training is another of the biggest growth areas in WordPress. With so many people from all walks of life managing WordPress websites, there’s a need for quality training resources to help them along the way.
Other ideas that Brad floated as future developments included ways of assuring quality:
- An ‘app store’ type model for WordPress plugins
- An accreditation system along the lines of Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) accreditation.
You can check out the slides from Brad’s presentation on Slideshare.
See also my other WordCamp Sydney notes..