On August 28th, the second edition of WordCamp Montreal took place at UQAM’s « Coeur des Sciences ». Last year, at the SAT, we were around 100 people to attend. This year’s attendance easily topped the 200, thanks to the organizers and the sponsors, which were also more generous than the year before, with giveaways of goodies like Adobe software, $1 hosting packs, two iPads and a table full of stickers. The organizers (Shannon « cafenoirdesign » Smith, Jeremy Clarke and Brendan « digibomb » Sera-Shriar) worked hard to  fill the schedule with interesting topics and speakers, keep the attendees interested, fed: St-Viateur bagels with Starbucks coffee in the morning, catered lunch on day one, pizza on day two, and even cupcakes!

There were two talks attendees could choose from at any given time, 21 in all. Here are the ones I attended and bit of a summary for each.

Plugin Development Best Practices and Troubleshooting User Issues

The first talk of Saturday was by Yannick Lefebvre. The first talk of any conference/event is always a bit complicated. Most people aren’t too sure what to expect and the first few talks set the standard and the mood of the audience. Yannick did a decent job at explaining his own trajectory but neglected the fact that people were there to learn about plugin development, not development of his plugins. There were lots of real-life examples and scenarios, which didn’t work for me. There were however some good tips regarding coding standards such as avoiding jQuery conflicts, properly enqueuing JavaScript libraries, prefixing function names, using arrays to store WordPress options and using short open tags. Basically, the talk covered what it advertised, best practices and user issues, but I expected it to be more technical and less example-based. Still, I learned a thing or two.

View presentation slides.

Optimizing WordPress for Search and Social

Second talk of the day, usually at this point people are wired up and ready to be fed some geeky knowledge. NVI’s CT Moore was up next with a bit of a marketing talk. I’m a developer, I have very little interest for shady SEO/SMO techniques – but the other talk was (a sponsored) Microsoft pretending to care about open-source and plugging their IDE somehow thinking that the community would compare them to Automattic because they’ve  implemented a PHP syntax highlighter, so I figured I’d go with this one instead. Surprisingly, it was pretty interesting. Not only was it the only talk of the weekend where the presenter openly didn’t care about swearing (which is always entertaining), but the subject itself and the way it was presented was refreshing. An optimized way to output your WordPress stuff was suggested by Chris to play nice the very annoying duplicate content algorithm from Google using excerpts to render post lists instead of actual content.

View presentation slides.

WordPress & E-commerce: Beyond the Basics

After a (great) lunch, Justin Sainton was talking about the WP-Ecommerce plugin with which he is involved. Ironically, the most interesting part of this talk was not about the plugin itself but more about the insights Justin was sharing on e-commerce such as the top reasons why your online store does not generate decent revenue. For example, according to Justin, the very first reason your visitors don’t convert is because you force registration. Anonymous check-in is key! Also, stores asking for that annoying little 3-digit code (CVV2) from the back of your credit card lose 40% of purchases. Some more tips: have a return policy, make sure your search is visible and returns relevant results, display that your checkout is secure and have a toll-free number your customers can use for inquiries.

View presentation slides.

Unleashing WordPress: Building Web Applications using the WordPress Platform

This talk is a big deception for the 2010 edition of WordCamp. Carl Alexander had a great technical presentation, but was pretty nervous about talking about it in front of 50 people. Having presented nervously at WordCamp last year, I can tell you it is a very stressful thing to do, especially if you’re not an experienced speaker. This guy is a developer. He tried as best as he could, and he succeeded moderately, to explain concepts such as (H)MVC and how to basically turn WordPress into an application platform. Sadly (1) the presentation isn’t online so it’s difficult to remember specific things, especially due to its technical nature and (2) he really didn’t make it worth remembering. I’m pretty sure he wants to forget it too. Hopefully, he’ll present next year or the year after – practice makes perfect.

WordPress as a CMS: Advice for taking it to the next level

I think that, along with CT Moore (mostly for the swearing), Brian Rotsztein has to be my favorite presenter this year. He was relaxed and jet-lagged (just the way we like our presenters) and knew very well what he was talking about. It was one of the talks I was looking forward to since using WordPress as a CMS is something I have to do often. The talk was a great mix of humour, technicalities and marketing-oriented thinking.Brian suggested a bunch of plugins that kept the audience taking notes, I won’t summarize it here because I’d have to talk about pretty much every slide – just use the link below to view it yourself.

View Presentation Slides.

Raise and Measure your blog’s influence with Twitter and Facebook

The last talk of the day was a marketing-oriented presentation by Jerome Paradis. Marketing isn’t really my cup of tea, but Jerome managed to make it interesting. The thing I’ll remember from that talk is what Jerome said about the Facebook « Like » interaction with the Facebook search. Did you know that if you click « Like » on this blog post, it will appear in your feed and if you search for the name of the item you liked (for example searching for « Post-mortem » will bring the « like » you performed on this article) and click it, it will send you directly to the original website (this one)? I didn’t, and I find it pretty cool. There’s plenty more you can learn by clicking the link below.

View Presentation Slides.

And then there was nothing… and by that, I mean we all got free beer at Saint-Sulpice for the night, which is why the next day’s presentation didn’t make it into my system. Besides, I originally thought that Saturday’s presentations were much more interesting than Sunday’s, except for two (Tweaking plugins to be 3.0 Network compatible by Ron Rennick and Twenty-Ten: The Last Team You’ll Ever Need? by Alexandre Simard). My hangover made it so I missed the first one, but I was able to attend Alexandre’s talk…

Twenty-Ten: The Last Team You’ll Ever Need?

This was the last presentation of the day and of the conference, and it was about a subject that every other presenter barely spoke of but mentioned profusely: the new Twenty Ten theme (fun little anecdote: the WordPress developers named the official theme « twenty ten » so that they would feel ashamed for not making a new one in 2011). Alexandre Simard did a fairly good job of explaining the new features and how to exploit them.

View Presentations Slides.

All in all, WordCamp Montreal 2010 can definitely be considered a success. The best part of every WordCamp is to hang out with likeminded individuals from all over the world. Okay, maybe all over America, but we’re getting there. Until next year!