Fairmont Chateau Whistler, photo by Duane Storey

Just announced 20 minutes ago – WordCamp Whistler 2009 is on!

I’m really excited about this one, Whistler will be a fantastic venue and it’ll be great to see everyone up there amongst the snowy backdrop.

The registration fee is a very reasonable $35, worth every penny to be in Whistler with fellow WordPress enthusiasts! With the registration fee you’ll get entrance, lunch, swag and access to the social.

There is a great group rate available at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler Resort for those who want to stay up and hit the slopes. The Fairmont is where the conference will be held.

I’ll also be giving my first BuddyPress “post beta/final release” talk. I’ll be looking to cover some more technical ground and explain how developers can create their own custom components and extend existing ones.

All in all this is going to be a fantastic event, head on over to the signup page and get registered!

If you’ve not upgraded to WordPress 2.7 yet, I can’t stress enough that it’ll be the best thing you’ll do this week.

A huge amount of work went into this version, all the way from laser eye testing to auto-upgrading to design refining. It’s the real deal. Endless kudos to everyone involved, amazing job.

The future of WordPress is bright.

After ten months of work, BuddyPress components and themes are available for download in their first beta release form.

We’re looking for testers, so if the project interests you, give it a shot and please report any bugs you find. Each component and theme will be upgraded to a final 1.0 version once it’s clear that it’s running with no major problems.

If you’re interested in testing BuddyPress without downloading and installing it, head on over to the demo site and register for an account there. The demo site runs the latest development release of BuddyPress.

For more information on the release, check out the blog post on the BuddyPress website.

I’ve just come home from WordCamp Whistler 2009. What a great event it turned out to be and it was lovely to speak to so many WordPress enthusiasts from the Vancouver area.

I gave a thirty minute presentation on the BuddyPress project. The presentation explained what the project is, its current status, and where it’s going in the future. I was also able to talk to some of the developers in the audience with some coding examples. It seemed to be well received.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

A big thank you again to the guys from BraveNewCode and sixty4media for their amazing job organizing the event!

I’ve just posted my slides from day one of WordCamp Milan entitled “BuddyPress: An Introduction”.

The presentation gives a general overview of installing, theming and extending BuddyPress. Those who are interested in starting with BuddyPress should find the slides useful.

My talk should be up on WordPress TV soon, but for now, here are the slides:

Here’s the video of my presentation from WordCamp San Francisco.

I’ve been working hard on BuddyPress over the past week since the beta of 1.1. There’s been over 45 tickets marked as fixed, many of those included patches. Big thanks to everyone who has helped so far in this final push. We’re looking good to have 1.1 final out by September 30.

If you’re building commercial solutions around open source projects, good for you. As long as you are respecting the licenses of those projects I have absolutely nothing against you. In fact, well done for working to create a sustainable business around projects that provide end users with core freedoms.

However, here’s the point many of the people before you have missed; give a little.

Give a little back to the core of the project. It’s the single most important thing you can do to help the project continue to move forward and for your business around that project to stay relevant.

Giving back is easy and you don’t have to be a programmer. Small actions like reporting bugs, updating documentation, and answering questions in the forums go a long way towards helping out the community and pushing the project in the right direction. If you are a programmer, consider writing patches for the project to fix those outstanding bugs you’ve been side-stepping and working around for so long.

Your image will do nothing but benefit from this, it shows the community that you’re in it because you love the project. It shows that you want to see the project continue to develop and get better and better. Most importantly it shows you’re not just in it to make a buck or two then move on to the next project when there’s nothing more to gain. Intrinsic interest speaks volumes.

A lot of companies on the web subscribe to a program called 1% for the planet. Let’s put a spin on that and start something called “1% for the project”. Instead of money, it would be 1% of your time per year spent towards helping the project that your company is built around. That’s two hours per month helping ensure your business continues to support a thriving open source project.

Hit the “Reply” link at the top right of this post to leave your comments.

BuddyPress 1.1.1 is now out with a couple of major and some minor bug fixes. Download: http://bit.ly/3zkLJI Changes: http://bit.ly/A2JiB