This year I attended WordCamp NZ, it was a great event. Last year I presented and both WordCamp UK and WordCamp NZ (you can review my presentation last year here) I did not present anything this year as I found that last year I was too busy worrying and practicing my own presentation that I did not end up having enough time to sit back, enjoy the presentations, mingle, experiment with new ideas and stew over some self development.

Highlights

Security Talk – John Ford (automattic)

This talk was funny and informative, John is a great speaker. He covered the basics of what it means when your site gets hacked, and showed us a few examples of malicious code. He also shared with us his 6 steps to fix a hacked WordPress install:

• Contact Host – there might be a problem that they are unaware of, and it might effect more than your site.
• Backup your exploited site (weird right? but you may want to debug and figure out what happened, and what better way to do this than check the exploited site? Ofcourse many people forget this step as they try as quickly as possible to fix the site).
• Check the WordPress Codex – FAQ_my_site_was_hacked
• Remove Exploited Code (if your sites on svn `svn diff` there are also some useful plugins that can help like Exploit Scanner)
• Check your File Permissions – Some Exploits manipulate your File Permissions
• Restore your site from a back up because `You haz backups dont you?`

Fine Tuning WordPress for High Traffic Websites – Ryan (envato)

Ryans talk provided an in-depth look at how he setup and managed the envato network of WordPress sites (tuts+) from a Shared Hosting system, to Multiple Dedicated Servers to the system they run now, 1 Nginx Server with Images hosted on the Amazon S3 Network (sdn) he also announced a new Website dedicated to sharing information on WordPress Server configurations for high volume websites called scalingwp.com.

WordPress Group Deals Plugin – Justin Sainton (Zao Web Design)

Justin Sainton is a Free Lancing Web Developer specializing in WordPress Plugin development, he has recently been a core developer in the WP e-Commerce Plugin and started the development of the Groupon Plugin (aka Group Deals Plugin) His talk introduced the Plugin and showed the main concept behind the Groupon System.

Afterparty – Instinct HQ The Big Bug Hunt

WordCamp NZ Bug Hunt at Instinct HQ

After the last presentations on the Sunday we had an informal Beers and Coding ‘Party’ at Instinct HQ. What this involved was beers, and sausages while helping users with WP e-Commerce woes, settings issues, and showing users and other coders how we at Instinct test, and develop the WP e-Commerce Plugin in a hope we can share some knowledge and discuss better procedures. The main event was having John Ford from Automattic show me how he uses SVN to develop and deploy websites. The benefits of this are:Allows you to setup Development, Staging and Live sites. Updating WordPress and Plugins through SVNIf you site gets hacked you can easily do an `svn diff` to see what files have been effected
All in all WordCamp NZ 2011 was a great success, and gave me a lot to think about. I have already moved screamingcodemonkey.com to an SVN system which has been pretty exciting, and will continue practicing the technique before I write a good tutorial on the subject

Till next time

Less Screaming More Coding!