[UPDATED: Winners announced] WordPress and Joomla conferences in February – free tickets!

Gerald Crawford

Feb 08, 2012

I would really love to attend.

Tina

Feb 08, 2012

Heya Gerald! Thanks for your interest :) Just specify which of the three events you'd like to attend and we'll have you on our candidates list. We'll get in touch for further details shortly after. Thanks! Tina

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Michael Davis

Feb 09, 2012

I would like to attend the Phoenix event.

Tina

Feb 13, 2012

Michael, sent you an email with registration details. Thanks!

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Michael Davis

Feb 26, 2012

Today was the day. I jumped into WordPress with both feet. I have only installed and made minor modifications to WordPress once and that was just a few days ago. Just after I installed it to play around with it I got notice that siteground was sponsoring a WordCamp right down the street from me. What an opportunity! So, today was a full day of classes for me to absorb and filter through. There were so many choices. Since I have extensive experience in Joomla, so I decided to get as much information unique to WordPress as I could, balancing that with other subjects I wanted to know more about. At 9:30am I attended a class that was an overview of HTML 5 and CSS 3. I found a lot of things that were interesting, like transitions. I will be studying the information I received here and through the links they gave us for a long time. At 10:30 I attended a class on WordPress Themes. I learned some of the differences between themes in WordPress as opposed to what I am used to in Joomla. For one thing I was introduced to the concept of Child Themes. It seems in WordPress a Theme can be applied to any part of a WordPress installation. I guess the general comparison would be applying styling to a Joomla module. At 11:30 I learned about WordPress plugins. Generally these would be the extensions in Joomla. Joomla has modules and plugins, but the WordPress plugins are more like the modules in Joomla. It was difficult to get anyone to confirm my comparisons since I found very few people at WordCamp that knew anything about Joomla, or even knew about Joomla. 12:15 – Free Lunch! I made my first contacts with others in my area that I can collaborate with in future projects. 1:15 took me to a class on promoting your site with SEO and SEM as well as other methods. I was glad to find that my knowledge in this area was pretty right on. 2:15 was a class to help designers with the creative thinking process. I learned a few things I could use to help me be more creative and heard some methods I already use. It was good information, especially for those “creative block” times. 3:15 was how to create engaging content for marketers. This was a class in how to draw people in to actually reading and interacting with a website. It gave me some things to think about when writing copy for a website. At 4:15 I attended my last class for the day. It was an overview about eCommerce and what is necessary to be able to take payments on a website. We covered SSL Certificates, payment gateways and much more. So now my head is spinning. I’ll need some time to visit all the links I got and assimilate all the information. But tomorrow is another day at WordCamp. Tomorrow is a half day as there is a WordCamp for kids during the first half day. So I will start at 1:30 and go to 4:00. I’ll tell you about these classes tomorrow.

Tina

Feb 27, 2012

Thanks for the great overview, Michael and for taking the time to share with us! Glad to hear that you've learned so many new and useful things on WordPress. I've just reviewed all posts on Twitter about the event and it seems it's been a total blast! Awaiting your comments about the other day too! If you have pics, do not hesitate to share with us too!

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Michael Davis

Feb 27, 2012

Sunday at WordCamp was not so good. It was at another location a couple blocks from Saturday's venue. I had taken some time to decide on the classes I wanted to attend based on the schedule that was posted on the official website. When I arrived, a few minutes before the scheduled first class, I found a packed room where I could only find one seat. It was obvious that the meeting had been going on for awhile. When that class was over I showed my printed schedule to the presenter. He just offhadedly said that the schedule had been changed and pointed to a whiteboard where the new schedule was printed. I noticed that according to it the next class was to have started 15 minutes earlier. I also noticed that my printed schedule did not match much on that board. I waited for the next scheduled class. Then a guy got up and told everyone to go to a computer and vote on the next topic. Then he announced that there were various rooms where different topics were going to be discussed. I chose to go to the room where SEO was to be discussed. I was waiting for an instructer to arrive as the small room filled. It only held about 10 people. I found this was not a class, but a discussion group. When it comes to SEO any group of 10 people will have 10 opinions on what are good practices. This quickly became boring to listen to various "experts" try to lead the conversation. I returned to the main room. I found the group had thined out to less than half than it had been. There was no one speaking and everyone was just milling around. I decided I had better things to do and went home to work on a client's website. Overall, in the two days, I learned some good information as I mention above in my other post, but little of that as specific to WordPress. What I did learn about WordPress will help me when I use it here and there when a client specifies it, but overall I saw no good reason to switch from using Joomla. I was courious to get first hand information on WordPress as so many who use it say it is so much better than Joomla. But now that I dove into the WotdPress pond and interacted with the WordPress fish, I get the distinct impresssion that many WordPress devotees make comparisons to Joomla without actually ever using it. I can see how they can be myoptic about WordPress as it IS a feature-rich platform and you can create nice webstes with it, but it is NOT superior to Joomla. Neither is Joomla superior to WordPress. They are both tools to create websites. I think they both have their applications and I will use them accordingly. Thank you, Siteground for giving me the chance to see what the fuss about WordPress is about.

Tina

Feb 29, 2012

Thanks again, Michael! Critical and constructive feedback is always great and your insights are super useful for us, especially when we're not able to attend the event. I think your feedback is worthy for the organizers themselves and I will send it over to them too to make sure the next WordCamp is better! Cheers!

Michael Davis

Mar 01, 2012

Thank you again, Tina, for the ticket. One more comment I have is that the debate over WordPress vs Joomla seems to be like that of PC vs Mac, where it is almost religious. Many people on either side of the debate promote their beliefs about their platform being superior without even considering there could be something better about the other platform that could be useful in some applications. Many I spoke to at WordCamp boasted about how great WordPress is. When I asked how it compaired to Joomla in this or that feature I was asked many times "what's Joomla?" I have seen some nice features in WordPress, especially in the area of client's ability to interact with it, and better documentation. So I may have a use for it sometimes now that I understand it better.

Tamer

Mar 20, 2012

How I am happy with this great achievement and a step by step forward siteground .with my wishes