Greetings! I just wrapped up a long weekend in beautiful Portland Maine for the very first WordCamp Maine. There were fantastic presentations, time saving tools, great food, and amazing people.

The Presentations

There were some really great presentations over the weekend. Here's my favorites:

Cain & Obenland In The Morning by Michael Cain & Konstantin Obenland

I've seen Cain & Obenland in Phoenix and Atlanta and they've been great each time. This time they talked about how WordPress gets options from the database. It sounds pretty basic but there were a couple finer points.

• WordPress actually fetches all of the options from the database
• WordPress will store the options in a cache for future requests
• WordPress is smart and will store options that don't exist in a separate variable called $notoptions and it won't query the database if the option is in $notoptions.

Scratching the WordPress Itch by Siobhan McKeown

Siobhan shared the history of WordPress and honestly, it was moving. Understanding the history behind WordPress makes all of the philosophies the community holds dear make sense. Seeing the struggles and problems paints a clear picture of why we need WordPress but more importantly why we need a community that upholds those philosophies and builds upon them.

Development Panel with Rachel Baker, Sam Hotchkiss, Xiao Yu, Patrick Rauland, & Konstantin Obenland

I love panel discussions because there's always good debate. We talked about several interesting topics:

• The future of WordPress after the JSON Rest API
• The financial investment behind building a major WordPress plugin
• Development tools (look at Dash which allows you to download documentation for offline use!)

Outsource your content marketing (the WordPress way) by Chris Van Patten

Chris showed us how easy it is to hire someone to do your content marketing using a site like E-Lance. I'm honestly still on the fence about having someone write any content on this site. It feels a bit cheap for a personal site but I'd definitely consider it for a business site.

The Food

The food was delicious and I didn't even have any of that Maine lobster (remember I don't eat meat)! I did have some amazing pizza, tater tots, & coffee.

The People

The best part of a WordCamp is always the people. Many of whom I already mentioned above because awesome people give awesome talks. If you haven't met these people get out to a WordCamp, shake their hands and start a conversation. You wont regret it.

• Rachel Baker is a rockstar at 10up
• Sam Hotchkiss is the big cheese behind Brute Protect
• Konstantin Obenland codes away on the best starter theme out there -> Underscores
• Siobhan McKeown is warm, friendly, and the master of documentation
• Derek Smart is such a relaxed and talented guy. He deserves mad props for hosting me this weekend after my hotel reservation snafu.
• Chris Van Patten knows what you should focus on and what you should pay someone else to do for you
• RC Lations is a great moderator, he's super friendly (he made sure I didn't get lost several times), and an organizer
• Gary Thayer & Stephen Quirk are both down to earth guys & organizers of the conference. They did a phenomenal job

So thanks everyone at WordCamp Maine! I had a great time. If you've never been to a WordCamp before I definitely suggest you check it out. You'll learn so much. And here's a link to my WooCommerce slides.