Last weekend I was at WorkCampUK in Manchester – it’s taken me this long to writ the blog post because I needed time to download my photos, however I’ve now done that and I didn’t get anything at all worth publishing, d’oh!

I am a wordpress user and even wrote a plugin once, but I’m an outsider in terms of community so I was looking forward to finding out more about the people involved with wordpress. I expected to meet some friendly folk and I was not disappointed at all – there was a wonderful range of people there, right from people wanting to start a blog to people making a living from wordpress development, and everyone in between. I attended talks on testing the internals of wordpress through to some case studies of sites built using it (thanks @simonwheatley) as well as sessions on plugins, business, and web technologies.

My biggest thankyou of the weekend goes to the Genius @pgibbs who took the time to reply to my tweet-appeal for someone to review my wordpress plugin and spent a good chunk of his afternoon wading through my newbie code – I got loads of great pointers, thanks Paul!

The event ended on a slightly contraversial note with some input from the Automattic people who had come over to attend the event – they’re putting a lot of work into improving the support for the communities running the WordCamps, which should have been good news, but one of the things that will change is that there’s a move away from having WordCamp naming to WordCamp to make space for more events. Suddenly the crowd I thought were so friendly turned a bit hostile, which I found odd. I hope they know that their frankly awesome event will be frankly awesome wherever it is and whatever it is called, I shall be looking out for the details for next year and hoping to see some of the crowd at events between now and then!

edit: I forgot to say I made a particular new friend, @apeei – you can see us here