WPCPT3 Report

Last night’s WordPress Cape Town 3 Meetup was a huge success. The Events Room at the Bandwidth Barn was packed with WordPress enthusiasts. The event was a social and educational gathering for people interested in WordPress. This growing blogging and CMS platform is growing worldwide and communities are forming all over. WordPress is only 5 years old, but has a strong backing due to the ease-of-use and robustness of the platform.

First off Johann Botha spoke on WordPress Security, and I must admit that he highlighted many security issues that I was not aware of. Johann’s personal website is at www.swimgeek.com, and one of the companies that he has co-founded is an ISP called Frogfoot Networks (who were one of the sponsors of the event). Johann highlighted vulnerabilities of WordPress, and the common reasons for hacking – like email spam, SEO spam, etc. He mentioned a few methods of improving security, 2 of which are to implement strict file permission settings (especially on themes, etc), and Apache htpassword protection.

Next Ashley Shaw from LightSpeed spoke about WordPress MU, BuddyPress, and bbPress. WordPress MU is used for multiple blogs which can be used in schools, organizations, and even in publication houses, etc. It’s very handy because thousands of blogs can be controlled with one point for installation, upgrades, etc. A very handy tool for building blogging communities. BuddyPress, on the other hand, transforms WordPress MU into a Social Networking platform. bbPress is used to create forums for support and other usages. A lot of business ideas came to my mind during Ashley’s talk, and the possibilities with WordPress are just seeming endless! :)

Next up was Adii, the “WordPress Rockstar” – see www.adii.co.za for his blog. I’ve spoken to Adii a few times online, but last night was our first meeting. It’s great to meet people you’ve connected with online for such a long time. Adii spoke about WordPress as a CMS & Alternative Uses for WP, and you can read his blog post about it here.

The last speaker for the evening was Rafiq Philips. You can view his websites www.rafiq.co.za/phillips/ and www.webaddict.co.za. Rafiq spoke about SEO – Search Engine Marketing for blogs, and he gave us some very crucial tips on how to rank your website effectively with Google. I made lots of notes while he was presenting, and he also showed us some live examples or high ranking websites, which was great.

My good friend Christopher Mills also blogged about the event, click here to view his post.

We also received an important announce last night. WordCampSA will be held in Cape Town on 21 August 2008. WordCamp is an event for bloggers and WordPress enthusiasts, and these events have been held all over the world already. The Cape Town event is also going to have the founder of WordPress in attendance, so its surely going to be a huge event. Online registrations will be open soon.

All in all it was an evening well spent, and we thank Nur from Nomad-One for being the chief organizer, and thanks also goes to all the kind sponsors. Well done guys!