20th November 2011 was the first ever Wordcamp in Singapore. It was actually quite good as the speakers all knew their stuff quite well. I always find the way to judge a good session would be how much notes I make and this time, I made lots. I won’t try to cover everything in this post.
Philip Arthur Moore
The session started with Philip Arthur Moore from Automattic. For those who don’t know, Automattic is the company that brought us WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, Polldaddy, etc. They even did the WordPress iOS app.
He focused his talk mainly on best practices for debugging and the following were some good plugins to use especially for theme development:
Really cool stuff.
Update: His post here.
Ric Shreves
Next up was Ric Shreves from Water & Stone. He seems to be THE man who knows best about Open Source CMSes in this region. His company even does a yearly survey and latest would be the 2011 Open Source CMS Market Share Report (Nov.11) which is free for download.
Ric shared a few insights of the data and the following were my main take aways.
- Concrete5 can compete with WordPress in terms of its admin interface.
- EZPublish is good for multilingual sites.
- Liferay is good for enterprise use.
- Magento is tough to use, but very strong.
Mingfei Yan
I was extremely impressed by Mingfei who shared on HTML5. She really knows her stuff and have even have a HTML5 demo site. Do check it out and see what HTML5 can do.
You can check out worldsbiggestpacman.com to see the powers of what HTML5 can do.
Mingfei works at Microsoft and this being a web meetup, some in the crowd poked fun at Internet Explorer and mentioned how other browsers are better, etc. I do feel its kinda childish. Her sharing was totally unbiased, that I really respect her for.
CS Ling
I’ve heard of CS Ling for a long time and finally get to meet her in person. She shared on creative ways to use WordPress. She showcased some of her sites such as lifelistchase.com, lifelistling.com and cslingphotography.com. All pretty nice sites running on WordPress.
Murray Bourne
Murray runs Interactive Mathematics and he shared on Analytics.
- Quantcast
- Google Analytics now real-time
- AXS visitor tracking
- ClickTale heatmaps
- Browsersize by Google Labs is pretty cool too.
Forum
The last session of the day was a forum where user group representatives from Joomla, Drupal and WordPress took questions from the floor and had a lively discussion.
There was a question that why locals were usually not as involved as expats. Preetam made a good point where locals had commitments, hence its harder for them to take time out. This also seems to be the trend in the region as he do travel alot to such meetups, so i’ll take his word for it.
Overall, I would say the event was pretty good and I did learn a few new things. I do hope the next one will be even better.
Thanks for the summary, Nick.
Just a technical note – wonder why you are using class=”broken_link” randomly 9apparently), when the links are not actually broken…?
The plugin was buggy. I’ve since updated it & its looking ok now. Thanks for the heads up.