Yesterday’s Wordpress Cape Town meet was huge

If you don’t know what WordPress is yet, just take a look around at the Tech Leader platform and see WordPress in full swing. Tech Leader runs on the wordpress multi-user platform, one of the topics covered(by Ashley Shaw) at the WordPress event I had the pleasure of planning for last night.

Wordpress Meetup 3 Close on 40 WordPress freaks (mostly freaks) flowed into the event room at the Bandwidth Barn in Cape Town’s CBD to share their WordPress enthusiasm, knowledge, joys and pains. It was an event I am very proud to be associated with. Like any other technology lover, you can only understand it when you use the platform, so I suggest you check it out if you haven’t yet. It kicks the butt of all the competitors. Why else would New York Times online be powered by WordPress?

We managed to get sponsors for food, T-shirts, hosting, bandwidth and all that off very little marketing, just a bit of blogging word of mouth. Nowadays it gets the message out there faster than most other forms of communication.

I use WordPress to power the majority of the websites I develop for myself, personal projects and client work, and with the platform developing at the rapid speed it’s been moving at, it’s set to take take over the CMS scene. It’s by far one of the most user friendly web publishing platforms out there, and comes with some powerful built in features.

The speakers at meetup 3, affectionately known as WPCPT3, took us through the many facets of the platform which is much mroe than just a blogging platform.

Adii did a great job of filling us in on the many varied uses for WordPress, and Johan, our hosting sponsor, spoke about how to make your installation of WordPress much more secure from hackers and spammers.

We had Rafiq doing his SEO thang, showing off WordPress’ super SEO abilities, one of the main reasons many people choose it as a favoured publishing platform. WordPress is an SEO obsessed web guru’s dream come true, with all the plugins to keep you hitting top google ranks. Of course you have to write, and write about what’s relevant, something Rafiq covered as well.

An interesting point by Joey da Silva of Form Function, was that WordPress finds itself in the typical position of a CMS platform on the way up. Not bloated like the oldies, but user friendly and full of life, however slowly moving out of the reach of the absolute newbie, with some of the newer simple CMS solutions rearing their heads taking its place as the bare bones solution. It seems to be a cycle which repeats itself over and over. I suppose it’s the nature of the open source community which keeps this trend going.

The WordPress event attracted some top industry peeps, Creative Directors and blog personalities and quite a few newbies who were just around to learn what the craze is all about.

For more about WordPress, WordPress meetups and other geeky stuff, check out www.wordpress.org.za designed by yours truly and coded by Paul of WorldWideCreative – another of our proud sponsors.

WordCamp is coming to Cape Town in August. Watch this space.