I kicked off with Walking With Wordpress. One or two technical issues with presentation but on the whole I thought it went very well.
Simon Dickson followed with a session on Large Companies. Simon has been having great success with deploying WordPress for government offices, including No.10.

He has found that government departments are finding his development approach refreshing after the multi-million poud budget projects that grind on interminably.

Simon also expressed a desire to develop an ecosystem of WordPress professionals to collabarate with in a similar way to Microsoft’s partners. He indicated that WordPress had reached the point where such an ecosystem could be maintained.

I’m totally with Simon on this and the feeling in the room was equally positive.

Sam Bauers finished off the morning with a WordPress/BBPress technical presentation.

First up Simon Wheatley talked about plugin development, aimed at programmers not familiar with wordpress.

It was an excellent session and Simon’s explanations were very clear and succinct. Audience participation was encouraged and produced lots of questions, answers and debate.

It was a great session for people wanting to take their wordpress site to the next level.

Yours truly started the first session with a talk on essential WordPress plugins. We covered Askismet, WordPress Automatic Upgrade, backupwordpress, all-in-one-seo-pack, maxblog ping optimizer and Cforms.

Quite a number of attendees were already using some of these plugins or suggested alternatives. Good discussions ensued.

More plugins used included role manager, a plugin which gives more control over what users can do.

Another plugin, bad behaviour, sits on top of Akismet to provide enhanced anti-spam protection.

Next up to the podium was Nick Garner of Betfair to talk about SEO in WordPress. Points he made were expect results in 6 months, no sooner. It’s hard work. Enlist services of journalists to write copy and carry out online PR. Most small businesses don’t have the budget, and don’t want to spend the necessary time to master SEO themselves.

The last session sported a number of panelists including Rich Boakes, Tony Scott, Sam Bauers, Ben and Mike Smith. Many and varied questions both broad brushed and in more detailed.