Today was the 3rd Cape Town WordPress Meet and I can honestly say that it was incredible! Not only did we have great speakers, delicious food, but we even got free t-shirts! I want to take a minute to out each of the people involved quickly:
Sponsors:
A big thumbs up to the following sponsors who made the event happen: Nomad-One, FormFunction, Frogfoot Networks, Radiiate, WorldWideCreative & Butlers Pizza. Without these great sponsors, events like this would never be as amazing!
Speakers:
Johann Botha – Johan gave an extremely interesting talk on security and WordPress, outlining the fact that WordPress was not built initially to be such a huge system, which would require indepth security planning. He also outlined a number of methods as to how people can go about increasing the security of their WordPress installs. I know that I will be implementing two of his ideas immediately.
Ashley Shaw – Ashley gave us a lovely look at WordPress MU (Multi User), bbpress and Buddy Press, showing us how one install could be used to run a myriad of blogs as well as how one could use WordPress as a forum or social network – he feels that 2009 is the year that this is going to explode!
Adrian Pienaar – Adii gave a talk on WordPress alternatives, and WordPress as a CMS. This was a killer talk and one which I’m sure everyone there, pro blogger or not, would have learnt a great deal. Thanks Adii, seriously awesome talk!
Rafiq Phillips – Rafiq aka web addict gave us an introductory talk on WordPress and SEO (Search engine marketing), although the chat was very simple (that was his aim), even for people like myself who claim to be on top of SEO, were able to learn something. He mentioned some really excellent plugins, which he’s promised to blog about shortly.
I also ran into a number of people, such as Foxini, The Bagley, Jayz, Nadah, Marc, Marc P and a few others, please excuse me if I’ve left you off the list, I’m incredibly exhausted and have a ton of things to do before I can “switch off”.
I can honestly say that the event was incredibly well organised and ran very smoothly. I asked a few people afterwards what they thought and I only received positive feedback!
Everyone received a free WordPress Cape Town T-shirt and Johann kindly gave me a Frogfoot T-shirt as well. Nothing more fun for a geek than receiving a free tee!
Sounds like awesome fun! And prizes to boot.
To make my earlier suggestion a bit more Public …
We out-of-towners would love to know what you guys get up to there, so for any “powers that be” reading this comment … please record the guest-speaker addresses and publish it as a podcast !! :)
@Jaywalker – It was an incredible event, it’s scary to see how far it’s come since the first one!
@Dono B – I must say, setting up streaming video would be an awesome idea, or even just recording it and then showing it online. I know that Nur (Nomad-One) was walking around with a digi-corder, so hopefully I’ll be able to post some footage soon :)
Was good to see you again Chris.
Next up… Wordcamp!
Good to see you too bud, it’s been a long time!
Wordcamp.. indeed, and once I’ve gathered more information, I’ll blog it :)
Sorry I missed out on being there … seems like it was damn useful. Will hopefully make it to another one in the future. Would be fun to put some faces to the names too, I reckon =)
Hey. Loving the freebees! I very much enjoyed the WP security Talk. Made allot of sense to me. The Pizza was great too! Thanks Butlers. Hope that the next event will be just as much fun. Great job guys!
@justBcoz – It was an incredibly well organised and executed event, I was somewhat blown away. Faces to names.. that’s a good idea!
@Fox – Freebees are always the best! ;) Security.. agreed, really great to hear that it’s possible to up security without being a linux guru. Hope to catch you at another event soon mate!
Yeah… WPCPT #3 was seriously awesome and so much better than last time! Hats off to Nur that organized the whole thing.
Glad you liked my presso Chris… I’m always happy to oblige! :)
And I meant what I said last night in that it is great to think that 50 geeks can meet up every now and again to just discuss WordPress! Kudo’s to all the CT geeks!
Ye, Nur did an outstanding job! Ye mate, woulda been even better if you were live blogging on your own laptop, perhaps next time or at Wordcamp :)
Oh man, I totally feel your passion!
I’m sorry I missed it – the first one I’ve missed :(
But I’ll be sure to attend WordCamp tho!
Kudos to Nur – I know how much work is involved in organising!
Thanks for organising Nur.
@Foxinni, happy you found it useful.
@Christine – I’m sure after the success of this one, that there will be many more and many more of this caliber!
@Joe – Great talk!
I only saw this comment now, we really should be having another event! It sort of just stopped when everyone heard about WordCamp, quite dissapointing :/
Sho-to-ka-ka-a-like:)
Hehe :D
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