The WordPress community’s growth over the years has been tremendous, and we want to reinvest in it. So we’re taking the next two months to concentrate on improving WordPress.org. A major part of that will be improving the infrastructure of the plugins directory. More than 10,000 plugins are in the directory, every one of them GPL compatible and free as in both beer and speech. Here’s what we have in mind:

We want to provide developers the tools they need to build the best possible plugins. We’re going to provide better integration with the forums so you can support your users. We’ll make more statistics available to you so you can analyze your user base, and over time we hope to make it easier for you to manage, build, and release localized plugins.

We want to improve how the core software works with your plugin and the plugin directory. We’re going to focus on ensuring seamless upgrades by making the best possible determinations about compatibility, and offer continual improvements to the plugin installer. And we also want to give you a better developer tool set like SVN notifications and improvements to the bug tracker.

We’re also going to experiment with other great ideas to help the community help plugin authors. We want it to be easy for you to offer comments to plugin authors and the community, including user reviews and better feedback. We may experiment with an adoption process for abandoned plugins as a way to revitalize hidden gems in the directory. I’m not sure there is a better way to show how extendable WordPress is and how awesome this community is at the same time.

As Matt said in the 3.0 release announcement, our goal isn’t to make everything perfect all at once. But we think incremental improvements can provide us with a great base for 3.1 and beyond, and for the tens of millions of users, and hundreds of millions of plugin downloads to come.

July 3: WordCamp Germany – Berlin, Germany. I love it that they’re using BuddyPress for their event site. They have multiple tracks, and what looks to be a nice variety of sessions. It’s only a few days away, so if you’re thinking of going, get your tickets now!

July 10: WordCamp Boulder – Boulder, Colorado, USA. This was WordCamp Denver last year, but the organizers have decided to mix it up and go back and forth between Denver and Boulder, which also has a thriving tech community. This year the venue is the Boulder Theater (so pretty!), and there will sessions for bloggers and devs alike, plus a Genius Bar to help people get their WordPress sites all fixed up. The speaker lineup looks good, and I hear they’re pumping up the wifi this year. I’ll be there, likely hunched over a notebook with Lisa Sabin-Wilson (author of WordPress for Dummies and BuddyPress for Dummies) to talk about the WordPress User Handbook project, and/or hunched over a sketchbook with Kevin Conboy (designed the new lighter “on” state for admin menus in WordPress 3.0) to work out a new default WordCamp.org theme (using BuddyPress). You can still get tickets!

July 17–18: WordCamp UK- Manchester, England, UK. The roving WordCamp UK will be in Manchester this year, and is probably the closest to BarCamp style of all the WordCamps, using a wiki to plan some speakers/sessions and organizing the rest ad-hoc on the first day of the event. I’ll be attending this one as well, and am looking forward to seeing WordPress lead developer Peter Westwood again. I’m also looking forward to meeting some core contributors for the first time in person, like Simon Wheatley and John O’Nolan. Mike Little, co-founder of WordPress, is on the organizing team of WordCamp UK. Tickets on sale now!

July 24: WordCamp Nigeria – Lagos, Nigeria. Their site seems to have a virus, so no link from here, but if you’re in Nigeria and interested in attending/getting involved, a quick Google search will get you to the organizers.

August 7: WordCamp Houston – Houston, TX, USA. Houston, Texas, birthplace of WordPress! Fittingly, Matt Mullenweg will be there to give the keynote. WordCamp Houston is running three tracks — Business, Blogger and Developer — in recognition of the fact that people who are interested in using WordPress for their business may not actually be bloggers or developers themselves. This used to get labeled as a “CMS” track at previous WordCamps (including NYC 2009), but with WordPress 3.0 supporting CMS functionality out of the box, “Business” is a much more appropriate label. Who wants to bet on if there will be BBQ for lunch?

August 7 : WordCamp Iowa – Des Moines, Iowa, USA. Another placeholder page. Happening, not happening? I’ve emailed the organizer and will update this post once I know more.

August 7–8: WordCamp New Zealand – Auckland, New Zealand. They haven’t announced this year’s speakers or topics, but they’ve been running polls to get community input into the program. Of note: in 2011 WordCamp New Zealand will be shifting seasons and will be in February instead, when the weather is nicer.

August 20–22: WordCamp Savannah – Savannah, Georgia, USA. Disclaimer: I am completely biased about Savannah, since I’m one of the organizers. This will be the first WordCamp in Savannah, and it’s being held at the Savannah College of Art and Design River Club, an awesome venue that used to be a cotton warehouse or something like that. Since Savannah doesn’t really have a cohesive WordPress community yet (though a fair number of people from Savannah attended WordCamp Atlanta earlier this year), this WordCamp is aimed squarely at building a local community. We’ll have a local meet-and-greet, regular sessions with visiting speakers (lots of core contributors coming to this one, plus Matt), and on Sunday it will be combination unconference/genius bar/collaborative workspace. Oh, and a potluck! We’ll also be running a pre-WordCamp workshop for people who have never used WordPress but want to get started, so that they’ll be able to follow the presentations and conversations littered with WordPress-specific vocabulary over the weekend. Ticket sales just opened, so get your tickets now.

For a schedule of all upcoming WordCamps, visit wordcamp.org. The autumn schedule is already packed! If you don’t see WordCamp in your area and are interested in organizing one, get more information and let us know.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country.

For some reason that has stuck with me all these years. Today I’m going to rephrase and re-purpose that line:

Now is the time for great theme developers to come to the aid of their community.

The theme directory has been chugging along for more than a year now. During that time we’ve tinkered with the review process and some of the management tools, but haven’t really opened it up as much as we’d like. It’s time to rip off the band-aid and take some action; to that end, we’re looking for community members to help with the process of reviewing themes for the directory.

Right now this is a bit like a New Year’s resolution to exercise every day: it’s what we need to do, but we’re still figuring out exactly how it will all work. That’s part of the community involvement as well — we expect that those who pitch in will also help shape the process.

What’s involved in reviewing themes for the directory? There are some obvious things, such as being familiar with PHP and WordPress theme code (and the theme development checklist), with an eye for security issues. You would also need to have the ability to set up a separate install of the latest version of WordPress for testing theme submissions.

Hopefully a few talented theme developers are reading this right now and saying to themselves, “I’d love to help! How do I get started?” Just join the new theme reviewers mailing list and we’ll get you up to speed on this new opportunity to come to the aid of your community.

If you’re unfamiliar with WordCamps, here’s the skinny: the San Francisco event is the flagship, put together each year under the direction of WordPress co-founder and lead developer Matt Mullenweg, who traditionally reports on the “State of the Word” and assembles a lineup of speakers that have inspired him over the past year. This year’s lineup includes luminaries such as Richard Stallman, the father of Free Software, best-selling author Scott Berkun, and Salon.com co-founder Scott Rosenberg. As the final speaker list is finalized, the remaining speakers will be added to the WordCamp SF website, but a surprise or two is still possible.

Though the main event is on Saturday, May 1, there are additional days of WordPress goodness in store. Saturday, May 1 will be the main conference with scheduled speakers. There will be keynotes, session tracks for both bloggers/end-users and developers, and lightning talks to provide a broad mix of content, followed by a raging afterparty. Sunday, May 2 will shift location and tone, with a low-key developers’ unconference for the super-code-focused attendees. May 3 and 4 are conference-free, but a WordPress core contributor in-person code sprint will span those two days, bringing together core contributors old and new from around the globe for two days of intense hacking (and let’s face it, 3.0 bug fixes).

If you’re in the Bay Area, or can be, and want to attend WordCamp San Francisco, go get your ticket today!

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Other Upcoming WordCamps

It’s definitely WordCamp season; just check out the growing list of upcoming WordCamps over the next couple of months! If you don’t see a WordCamp near you listed here, check the rest of the schedule at WordCamp.org. In the meantime, don’t forget that many WordCamps post video of their presentations on WordPress.tv.

April 24 (today!) – WordCamp Orange County
Irvine, CA USA

April 29 – WordCamp Nashville
Nashville, TN USA

May 1 – WordCamp San Francisco
San Francisco, CA USA

May 8 – WordCamp Paris
Paris, France

May 8 – WordCamp Argentina
Buenos Aires, Argentina

May 8 – WordCamp Chile
Santiago, Chile

May 15–16 – WordCamp Denmark
Copenhagen, Denmark

May 15 – WordCamp Victoria
Victoria, BC Canada

May 21–22 – WordCamp Italy
Milan, Italy

May 22 – WordCamp Malaysia
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

May 22–23 – WordCamp Raleigh
Raleigh, North Carolina USA

May 29–30 – WordCamp Fayetteville
Fayetteville, Arkansas USA

May 29 – WordCamp Yokohama
Yokohama, Japan

June 5–6 – WordCamp Chicago
Chicago, Illinois USA

June 12 – WordCamp Reno-Tahoe
Reno, Nevada USA

June 12 – WordCamp Vancouver
Vancouver, Canada

June 18 – WordCamp Catania
Catania, Italy

June 19 – WordCamp Columbus
Columbus, Ohio USA

The sprint will go full force until Monday afternoon, when the lead developers and core committers will all stop to take a breath and look at the remaining bug reports to see how we did over the weekend, so don’t wait! And thanks!