Wordcamps are events organised by the Wordpress gang to pull together developers working on the popular blogging platform. The latest event took place recently in San Francisco, pulling together some of the top brass working on Wordpress. The affable inventor of Wordpress, Matt Mullenweg led the proceedings.

Wordpress sessions of interest:

• SEO for Wordpress
• Secret of virality
• BuddyPress: Social network for Wordpress

Andrew Mager made this wonderful blow-by-blow account of Wordcamp San Francisco 2008.

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Unfortunately I didn’t get to attend this session, but thankfully, through the beauty of blogging, there are numerous other accounts online.

BuddyPress grew out of a series of plug-ins that added social functionality to Wordpress MU (the multi-user edition). It is being touted as Facebook-in-a-box, ie. you can setup your own personal Facebook for your community.

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Credit: Andrew Mager"][/caption]

More screenshots from Andy Peatling’s blog.

Andy graciously added his presentation to…

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Stephan Spencer from Netconcepts led this well-attended session on how to maximise search visibility using Wordpress. Generally, blogs work well for search engine optimization (SEO) due to their emphasis on generating lots of regularly updated content. However, there are steps you can take to optimize the standard Wordpress installation.

Key points:

Internal linking

Try and ensure your internal links (from one page on the blog to another) are as relevant as possible. Using a tag cloud in…

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OK, I thought there would have been a whole lot of documenation on this, but I’ve been trying to crack this for a while (read: find something useful from somebody clever online).

I’ve tried a few implementations of PHP and XML-RPC myself, with probably the closest approach being using Keith Devens’ XML-RPC classes using this Sitepoint article. However, I wasn’t getting much back from Wordpress.

All that changed when I finally stumbled on this wonderful code snippet courtesy…

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It’s taken me some time to get on the tagging revolution, but I think it may just have happened.

Somebody introduced me to the SimpleTagging Widget for Wordpress. I guess for me the killer app was the type-ahead feature which helps you see what other tags have been used.

The other key advantage is the possibility to show the top related posts.

Having said that, on first try, I had a problem with a fatal error.…

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