March 1, 2011 WordCamp

My trip to Melbourne for the Australian WordCamp was filled with excitement, from taking off in Auckland and realizing I had left my Visa Card at either the Pie Shop or Money Exchange, all the way to checking in early Monday morning for my return flight, only to find out I had booked my flight for a month later.. it was all very very exciting.

The WordCamp itself was amazing. I got a chance to catchup with some old friends, and make new ones. It was an absolute treat and honor to meet Dion Hulse (dd32) a WordPress Core Committer, Japh a veteran Web Developer, and Brent Shepherd author of ProsPress. My icing on the cake however was meeting a guy that I have had communication with for the last 2 years, he has helped me with problems with SVN, reviewed and suggested changes to my commits and been a true team player, James Collins. He ran around the entire weekend like a headless chicken organizing and sorting out the event so we did not get much time to talk, which was unfortunate but hey ‘thats life’. It was still a pleasure to put a face to the code and nickname thats been a core contributer for WP e-Commerce.

Panel Discussion of Monetizing Plugins and Themes

So what did I learn at WordCamp Melbourne that I did not learn at WordCamp NZ? Well if anything it solidified my thoughts on Project Development, and how to streamline the release process. The key points being:

1. Have a bug tracker tied to the repository
2. Setup milestones
3. When you get to a feature freeze – stick to it
4. Every commit you plan on making, make sure you get someone to review it.
5. Committers and contributors need to have regular online meetups where they can discuss #4 and make sure they’re not
   • Re-writing / duplicating code used somewhere else
   • Using different coding standards

For WP e-Commerce this involves 2 things

1. Setting up a new SVN repository as the WordPress Plugin Repository does not allow milestones to be setup as it is filled with all 13,000 Plugins so change sets and milestones are ineffective.
2. Setting up an IRC chat channel #wpec-dev and providing chat transcripts, and trac-bots. Where all core contributers can meet on a regular weekly interval.

Basically I learnt a lot about the things that need to be done to make the development of a large community driven Plugin work. I also learnt that Melbourne Web Developers know how to blow off some steam and party! These cocktails were the peak of the after party!

Cocktail Drinks from the Croft