In today’s episode, we’re going to talk about why I enjoy WordCamps right here on Your Website Engineer podcast, episode number 300.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the 300th episode of Your Website Engineer podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. Today we’re going to be talking about why I enjoy WordCamps. It’s mainly because this past weekend, I was at WordCamp Columbus, and it was one of the – kind of where all things got started, but let’s go ahead and just dive right into the announcements and then we’ll talk a little bit about why I enjoy going to WordCamps and spending time with people in the WordPress community.

The first thing that I want to share with you is there’s really no WordPress news this week. We upgraded to version 4.6 a few weeks ago and we’re just kind of getting into this new season, the WordPress 4.7 is just starting to kick off, so there’s just not a lot of news this week. I do have a plugin that I want to share with you today and it is called WP Theme Change Logs. This the ability to add the change logs for themes hosted on the WordPress repository.

Right now, with a default installation of WordPress, you can go to the plugins area and, when you have an update notification, there’s a button that says, “Read more for more details.” You can click on that and you can see the change log and you can see what the developers changed since the last time the plugin needed to be updated. Well, this does the exact same thing with themes. That’s, for some reason, not built into the theme updater area and so this just gives you a little information from the Read Me, which the plugin goes through and it parses information from the Read Me and gives the read log or the change log details. It’s a very simple plugin.

It does exactly what it says, and it’s got more than 400 people using it already; so a brand new plugin that I wanted to highlight today in the, “Is there a plugin for that?” section. Okay, as I was thinking about what to talk about on this 300th episode, I was thinking a little bit about WordCamp Columbus that I was just at this past weekend and I was thinking a little bit about where I got my start back in December of 2010 and I thought about it and I was like, “Oh, I just want to talk about just how WordCamps have really influenced me in the WordPress community, in the WordPress space.”

So I started digging around a little bit and I was trying to figure out when my first WordCamp was. It turns out it was in June of 2010 and it was called WordCamp PodCamp Columbus. It was basically a conference tailored right towards me. It added two of my favorite things; WordPress, which I was very new and beginnery at the time, and Podcasting, which I was also very new and I had never even started a podcast. I had just barely had thought about a podcast and starting my own podcast.

So this was a really neat event for me because it just got me out there. It got me going to a conference that was free at the time because PodCamps were always free and so this WordCamp was free. There was no admission and I got to go and sit in and listen on sessions that were both dedicated to WordPress and dedicated to podcasting, which was really, really nice for me.

So I think just getting started there, that was my first experience with going to a PodCamp or a WordCamp and it really got the ball starting with how excited I got when I got in front of people and ultimately led me to starting this podcast and more than 300 episodes ago or 300 episodes ago, that’s when I got my start. So I just wanted to take some time and just talk a little bit about the things that I enjoy about WordCamps and hopefully to convince you to at least look for one in your area and get involved because they are so much fun and you learn a lot and you meet some really cool people.

So here are the few reasons why I enjoy WordCamps. The first one is I enjoy reconnecting with old friends and making new friends. So many people in the WordPress space always say it’s always about the community. The WordPress community is great. The WordPress community is great. That is 100 percent true. The WordPress community is amazing. It is so much fun to meet people that are using WordPress and just find out how they’re using it and get business ideas from them and get ideas of how they’re charging clients and all of these different things.

My favorite track at a WordCamp is called the hallway track and it is just a time to spend in the hallway or in a common space of the event and just spend time talking and learning and getting to know people. I love going to WordCamps now because now that I’ve been to several dozen WordCamps, it’s always great to see new friends and see what they’re up to and just kind of check in and do those types of things, but I also enjoy meeting new people. I enjoy answering questions because that’s what I do at WordCamps.

This past one, I was at the WooCommerce booth and I was able to answer WooCommerce questions. I was able to answer WordPress questions in general and just kind of hang out in a capacity where I get to help people in a live environment, which is very rare for me. Working on tickets day in, day out, I get to help people via email, but it’s not quite the same as helping and watching the face of somebody light up when they finally understand and they get that aha moment of what they finally have learned whatever has been taught.

Another thing that I like about WordCamps is I like to find out how other people are using WordPress. It’s really neat to find out and think through and just understand all the vastness of different websites that are out there that are built with WordPress. You know people are building stores. People are building websites, with membership sites. People are building just regular websites for people that have no functionality other than it’s a big newsletter or a big advertising campaign for a company or a business. It’s interesting to find out what types of developers are there.

Are they from a small agency? Do they work for a bigger company that works on websites? Do they run their own thing? Where are they coming from? It’s just so cool. It’s really, really neat and you can find out what people are doing. You can find out how they’re using WordPress for the clients, how they’re using it for them, what cool plugins that they may have created that are private plugins that they’ve created for their own clients or what type of theme frame works. Do they use it on every single website?

It’s just so nice to be able to talk and just ask questions. Everybody’s so super open at WordCamps that it’s just really nice to just ask questions and nobody really holds information back. I’ve also noticed that. If you’re at a WordCamp and you have a question, even if it’s a question about how do you make money or how do you monetize this or that or the other thing or how do you set this up? Everybody’s so open to share. It’s not like, “Oh, I’m going to hold all the knowledge and no, you have to pay me for this.”

Everybody’s very, very open with their knowledge and just being able to share that at a WordCamp. So that’s the second reason why I enjoy WordCamps. The third reason is I enjoy learning new things about WordPress. Sometimes I don’t have time to sit down and just really dive into a topic and learn. So that’s what WordCamps are great for me. I love going to sessions and just sitting in and learning and trying to figure out, “Okay, how can I start using this?”

Wheels start spinning in my mind and I’m always thinking about, “Oh, I could do this on my website or I could do this or I could do that.” This WordCamp I didn’t’ have a lot of opportunity to go into sessions. I led a couple sessions and I had to staff the WooCommerce booth. So I didn’t spend a lot of time inside the sessions at this WordCamp. I did spend a lot of time just answering questions in the hallway track, meeting new people, and hanging out and just answering questions about WordPress because that’s what I get excited about as well.

The other thing that I like about WordCamps is that you get excited about WordPress in a new way and you think of new things to create. This is aways true. This especially goes for just this past weekend, I was spending some time updating parts of my template for YourWebsiteEngineer.com, mainly because I didn’t like the way that it looked. I was adding all of my slides and whatnot to my website so people can see those and I was like, “I just don’t like how this looks.” I have a complete events custom post site that I had really not styled. I really hadn’t spent a lot of time just customizing these pages, making them look much, much nicer.

So as I was in a session and I was learning about different things and customizing things within WordPress, it really got me excited to start working on my website again. I still have a couple of my tabs open on my computer for more and additional changes that I want to make on those custom post sites so, even though I work with WordPress inside and out every single day, I got re-excited about doing things on my own website from things that I leaned at this WordCamp. So I really, really like that.

Another reason that I love going to WordCamps is exploring a new city. Even though this WordCamp was an hour from my house in Columbus, in a place where we stop all of the time when we’re driving to and from my parents’ house, it was just really neat to explore a new city. I was able to go to a couple new restaurants that I’ve never been to before in the Columbus area and we stopped at a brewery before the speaker dinner and just spent some time trying local craft beers, things like that.

You get to experience in different places. I’ve been to, I don't know, four or five states in WordCamps and just to explore different cities, spend some time just learning about different cities and what they have to offer and how they’re different and things like that. So I really enjoy that. I really enjoy that. As much as I like to travel, it’s really fun for me to go, find a new place, explore the city a little bit.

I know that even at WordCamp North Canton one year, they did a walking tour and they walked us around the city and showed us different things about what happened in the city way, way, way back when and then we stopped at four or five different restaurants and we tried food from these different restaurants. It was kind of like walking history tour, which was really neat and not something that you get at every WordCamp, but it was definitely a great way to learn about the city.

Another thing that’s awesome about WordCamps is you can have the ability to learn about brand new WordPress products and companies. They may not even be new. They may be around for a long time, but you’ve never heard of them. A couple come to mind that I first found out about Clef, the plugin that allows you to use two-factor authentication to log into your WordPress accounts. It basically, when you have it activated, it comes up when you get to the login screen.

It has a barcode and then you scan the barcode and then, once you’ve scanned the barcode with your phone, it will automatically log you into your WordPress. You don’t need a password to get in. So that was the very first plugin that I realized and found from a WordCamp just by talking to somebody. That’s a neat way to handle a problem. I had never seen that before. I had never seen some way to login without actually having to type a password into your WordPress site. So I got to talk to the founder of the company.

I did an interview with him, probably 150 or more episodes ago, which was really cool. The other product that I met at that WordCamp was one called Desktop Server. Now I recommend Desktop Server ever chance that I get. It’s the way that you can run a WordPress site locally, right on your computer. You can find out more at YourWebsiteEngineer.com/DesktopServer, but it is a great plugin and a great platform that I probably wouldn’t have ever seen or used had I not met some of the co-founders of that company and seen a live demo of how the product works.

So there was a WordPress video editor that was there that was working on a plugin to upload videos right to WordPress or right into YouTube and embed them on your WordPress site. I got to talk to her for a little bit and it was really neat that people come with their ideas and their products or their new plugin ideas and get to share those. A lot of times, they just come to WordCamps even usually sometimes kind of hijack the Twitter feed with the hashtag to get more eyes in front of different products that are out there in the WordPress space that we may not have heard about at all. So that’s another reason why I enjoy WordCamps.

Another thing that I like about WordCamps, and this won’t necessarily ring true for everyone, but I like sharing knowledge by speaking at WordCamp events. I like just spending time thinking up a session. “What can I talk about? How can I make an interactive presentation? What can I talk about that can span almost an entire hour?” That was the case at WordCamp Columbus when I did my talk about how to customize your theme the right way. I spent a long time trying to figure out, “Okay, I have an hour to fill. How can I fill this hour? I want to completely fill up the hour before lunch so that we’re not out early.”

I was done with my slides like 22 minutes into the hour and luckily I had planned some live demo and I was ready for it, but I just really like that whole process of thinking up an idea, formulating slides, making the slides look good, trying to convey some information, and thinking through how to make this visual topic. Now how can I make it as easy as possible because there are always beginners at WordCamps, there’s always more advanced people than you, but any way that you can share information about what you know in WordPress is always a great thing. I love just the information sharing between everybody at a WordCamp.

So speaking really gets me excited and it really helps me work on just delivery in general. It’s really nice when I try to make a joke in a live conference or a live event and you can actually hear people laugh, whereas on a podcast I’m just imagining you laughing at my silliness and my silly jokes that I say throughout a presentation.

So that’s another reason why I enjoy WordCamps, just being in front of people and seeing people’s reactions as I’m speaking, as every week I just get to look at my computer and my digital recorder as I’m recording and I have no real interaction whether what I’m saying rings true or makes sense or allows a light bulb to go off and just help you understand what’s going on with whatever I’m talking about on a weekly episode.

The last reason I thought of is it’s great to connect with WordPress listeners and podcast listeners. That’s something too that I really like about going WordCamps. Every WordCamp that I go to I get people like, “Oh, you’re Dustin? Thank you …” for either the podcast or “It was great meeting you” or different things like that. It just is really nice to me and kind of brings the whole thing full circle in the fact that the WordPress community is a great community. It’s great to meet new people and it’s great to go to these types of events where you can meet new people and you can hang out with friends that you know and it’s where I got my start.

So I just want to highlight the fact that WordCamps are great for people who have barely used WordPress before or people that have been developing with WordPress for years. You are going to learn something by going to a WordCamp. I just hope that there’s a WordCamp in your area. I know that they’re located all over the world. I think they were done in 80 countries last year, something like that. There were a lot of them done throughout the United States, throughout the entire world, and so if you have a chance to get to a local WordCamp, it’s probably one of the best investments of your time and your money.

These conferences run no more than $40.00 for a few days of all day, non-stop WordPress learning. They normally have snacks involved. They’ve got food involved. It’s all covered in that cost of that $40.00. So as we think about the rest of the year, there’s only a couple of months left in WordCamp season, if you will. There’s probably about three, three and a half months until the WordCamps will be over for the year. Then they’ll start back up on next year’s cycle. I highly recommend spending some time looking at WordCamp.org, looking at that schedule and seeing if there’s one that you could possibly make it to in the rest of the year.

I know that I’m scheduled to go to WordCamp Cincinnati and WordCamp Louisville this year and, before the craziness of next year starts. Next year I will be the lead developer or the lead organizer for WordCamp Dayton. So I’m excited to be on the other side of a WordCamp and doing all of the behind the scenes things in getting the WordCamp ready for a great weekend of fun here in Dayton in March 2017.

So that’s a wrap. That’s episode number 300. Nothing spectacular here, but things are good. Things have been amazingly awesome with WordPress. I love what I’m doing at WooCommerce. I love to continue to create these podcasts on a weekly basis, and I continue to think that I can be here for another 300. So that’s another five and a half years or so before I even think about shutting this thing down.

So that’s what I wanted to share with you this week. Again, next week will be more information that we’ll let you dive deep into WordPress and I’ll teach you something new next week. Until then, take care, and we’ll talk to you again soon. Bye, bye.