Spending a beautiful Saturday afternoon in a conference may not sound all that fun unless you are talking about WordCamp Raleigh 2011. I have been waiting for this event since I went to the one last year and got so much out of it. Where else can in one day can find out about useful plugins, best practices and get to network? It just doesn’t get much better than this.

I started off the day with Syed Balkhi of WPBeginner. His topic was on speeding up WordPress. This was a hugely informative session for me, and very timely as my upcoming project is going to be a pretty big site on WordPress and speed will play a crucial role.

One of the best caching plugins is w3 total cache, but some other useful tips included using excerpts instead of full posts; show a maximum of about 5 posts per page; and of course to minimize your images. The role of database maintenance was also gone over.

One thing I also learned was to take your Google analytics out of the footer and place it after the body tag. It gives more accurate results that way. Great tip!

The second AM session was from Jayvie Canono (@onefinejay) and it was on bridging the designer/developer track. His talk this year (as well as last year) was super interesting. I really like this guy – love his tweets & I totally get where he is coming from in explaining the roles of the designer and the developer. I get it because when I freelance as principally a designer / front end coder, I need to know how things work in the big picture. You need to know the code and how it works.

Best quote from his topic is that designers need to understand coding more than developers need to learn about design – we need to learn all we can about coding because you talk to client first and need to articulate the principles of what site is going to do as well as how it looks. Great advice and what I really got out of this topic and identify with, is that you can never learn enough. This stuff is fun to learn so the more I plug around and find out how to get things to do what I want, the better it is for the project and the client.

For the first afternoon session (after getting some great sun at the Raleigh city plaza) I ventured into the developer track session to hear John Ford  because he gave a talk about WordPress security. He is with Automattic and focuses his time with  VaultPess. I am Really thinking about using VaultPress for my sites & got to ask him more details about it.

But his session was on how do we protect our sites in principle. Strong passwords are key and using one password for managing all your different passwords is a smart way to go (1Password comes to mind). Also be sure to check your WP install as it lets you know if your password is strong on the install. Also he stressed keeping WP updated. The WP community is great at keeping up to date. Keep up with themes and plugins too, and make sure your plugins and themes come from reliable source.

Another big step is to correct file permissions. If you are hosting on a shared server and if your file permissions aren’t set right, people can see your file permissions and your wp-config file. He also advised changing the access keys in wp-config. Good basic advice. Also, if you are with a good hosting company, they will give you details on how set file permissions.  The session was filled with good advice on security along with some coding details on how to protect your sites.

Next session was packed – standing room only! Andy Stratton  from Sizeable Interactive talked about theme frameworks and SEO. “No magic abounds here” was the focus of his talk. He wasn’t bashing theme frameworks because there are some good ones out there, but if you buy a thirty dollar theme framework, you don’t know what you are getting. Makes sense.

A common misconception of themes that are out there to purchase is that they are easy to customize, compatible with plugins and contain SEO “magic”. You have to ask if they really are easy to customize though. It really depends on who builds it & the developer’s knowledge and your knowledge. He went over the pitfalls of theme purchases. You have no idea who is doing them. Many have slick features but have huge security holes and open you up to risks. Also sometimes you don’t know how customizable a theme is until you get into it. For example, some themes don’t use standard outputting mechanisms that plugins need from WordPress.

Also, be sure your theme framework has good support. He wasn’t bashing theme frameworks because there are some good ones out there, but they have their uses and places where you never should use them. SEO pushed from theme frameworks is not always true. Good SEO is based on content and theme coding itself. That is the key -not often found in a thirty dollar theme framework. But basally he was saying  there are no magic bullets out there with theme frameworks.

The next session was on the power user track with Brad Williams of WebDevStudios.com on custom post types and taxonomies. His talk was good, but I am really looking forward to seeing his code online on slideshare so when I want to add my own post types and taxonomies, his code examples will help a lot. Also he wrote the Custom Post Type UI plugin which I have used and really liked. I got a lot of good tips out of this Q&A session.

The last session of the day was back to the developer track for me. Glenn Ansley of FullThrottle Development went over WP filters and actions. With actions and filters you can customize WP to the max. They allow you to customize the code functionality of WP without affecting the core code. He went into excellent detail on how to really use these to get the most out of your WP builds.

All in all, I got a lot out of WordCamp Raleigh 2011. I think the speaker list was really fleshed out this year and I have to give kudos to the organizers. Loved the conference and will be back next year for sure. Also I really appreciate the slides and videos being available online to go back to later on as I want to really get into some of the source code discussions that went on during this weekend.