WordPress Meetup Cape Town #2 takes wpcpt meets a step up

Yesterday’s wordpress meetup at the Bandwidth Barn was a step up from the first one held in Feb. Because of my huge workload right now this post will be written one sentence at a time. For now if you don’t yet know about the wordpress meetups check it out at http://wpcapetown.wordpress.com or just google “wordpress cape town meetup” or something of the sort. Callum’s suggestion of using “wpcpt” as our master tag when refering to the local meetup is one I think we should go with.

For starters the turnout and involvement was much better than meetup#1, though there are a few critical aspects of the meetup we now need to discuss going forward to make it something of real substance. Anyone interested in the attending the next one give me a shout. We’ll be putting together a planning team soon.

Those who made it this time around were in no order of priority: ChrisM, Callum Macdonald, Henk Kleynhans, Adii, Foxini, Sarah, Selim Kagee, Nadah, Jamaal, Francois Raubenheimer, rafiq, Foxinni, Stelio, Johann Botha, Kilian Hagemann, Miguel, Frans Kuipers, Joe(amobia),

At the meet Callum did a sterling job of drumming up excitement and getting people interacting. Well, errr, he tried his best and though there was a slow start we got a few sessions onto the white board for people to vote on. People were interested in chatting about WordPress MU, Using wordpress for social networks, Drupal comparison, Why wordpress, WordPress security, Plugins, WordPress 2.5

There was a range of people at different levels of wordpress knowledge and experience so it was a bit tricky, I’d pitch myself in the middle somewhere between the complete newbies and the ultra wordpress geeks like Callum.

I was particularly impressed by the way Nadah of work online, a complete wordpress newbie and sceptic from the first meetup, has quickly become a total enthusiast. She admits becoming somewhat of a blog junkie of late.

Comparing Blogger, Moveable Type & WordPress, by Henk

Henk hit us with an awesome session taking a critical look at 3 different blogging platforms and questioning the pros and cons of each. From where I’m standing wordpress comes out tops, though the others may have a point or 2 over wordpress on different levels. Henk currently runs at least 1 blog on wordpress, blogger and moveable type.

I personally get a yucky feeling whenever I am faced with a blogger based blog and tend to stay away from them as much as possible. It has to have something to do with the fact that I’m a designer and a sucker for pretty looking things which blogger does not facilittate very well.

I’m hoping we can get the PPT Henk put together to show you all, will have to ask him nicely.

What’s your fav plugin

The session broke out into a plugin show & tell with a few of us sharing plugin ideas and asking about plugins we’ve been wanting to get out hands on. I was off on a tangent about a plugin which allows you to manage sidebar content out of a specific post category or page though I don’t think I got my point across very well. We discussed some issues surrounding cache plugins including my recent disaster with WP Super cache and hope to get a recommended plugins list going. Chris recommended php speedy to help imrpove performance for high traffic sites.

WordPress Security Issues

One of the more technically focussed topics which were discussed was security. The concerns were voiced by those who are managing and hosting multiple installations of wordpress for clients or organisations. WordPress is known to be exploitable and there have been cases wherewell known sites have been hacked into and even hijacked completely. The discussion centred around updatability of multiple installs as well and the guys through a few suggestions around including working off the SVN codebase.

The guys lost a few of of us along the way when they veered into ultra-geek mode.