WordCamp SF Aug12-14 -- Highlights

Fifth Annual WordCamp San Francisco Highlights Rapid Growth, Announces Developer Survey Results
Bluehost, DreamHost and Automattic are “Bling Bling” Supporters

The fifth annual WordCamp San Francisco was held at the Mission Bay Conference Center from Friday, August 12 through Sunday, August 14. WordCamp San Francisco is the official annual conference of the WordPress open source project.

The event was organized into multiple tracks per audience:

• first-time user workshop
• professional & large-scale implementations
• developers & designers
• bloggers & content creators

WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg also announced the results of the 2011 developer survey.

STATE OF THE WORD KEYNOTE
Each year at WordPress San Francisco, Mullenweg presents a “State of the Word” keynote that recaps the past year’s accomplishments, and provides a glimpse into future releases.

Highlights

• “22 of every 100 active domains created in the U.S. are running WordPress.”
• “WordPress 3.2, released in July 2011, had 500,000 downloads in the first two days, representing the fastest upgrade velocity ever.”
• “WordPress now has 15,000 plugins and 200 million plugin downloads.”
• “14.7 percent of the top million websites in the world use WordPress.” (source: W3Techs)
• “You are not customers of Facebook and Twitter… you are the product. The advertisers are the client.”
• “Being involved with the WordPress core is one of the most rewarding experiences for a developer on the web right now."
• “One of my dreams is for WordPress to auto-update like Chrome. Versions are so archaic.”
• “I obsess about every release and every feature.”

Mullenweg’s keynote is now available at WordPress TV. Video from all of the sessions will be posted there in coming weeks.

WORDPRESS DEVELOPER SURVEY
This year WordPress commissioned its first-ever developer survey, which ran for six weeks beginning on July 4, 2011 and generated responses from 18,000 users worldwide.

Results:

• 2,800 survey respondents are making a living using WordPress.
• 53% of the respondents are working as WordPress developers, 36% of which are self-employed.
• The 6,800 self-employed developers have created 170,000 sites, averaging nearly 25 sites per WordPress developer.
• The WordPress developer’s average hourly rate is $58.
• 92% of WordPress developers use WordPress as a CMS; 8% use as a blog.

Every day of the conference was sold out, with more than 1,000 total registrants. It was the highest attendee level for a WordCamp event, with U.S. and international representation including Amsterdam, Hawaii, Israel, Nepal and Romania. Thirty percent of the attendees were women.

Bluehost, DreamHost and Automattic were this year’s “Bling Bling” supporters. Additional sponsors included Microsoft, .tv, Zemanta, Voce Communications, ServerBeach, Layered Tech, Laughing Squid, GetShopped.org, Event Expresso and A Small Orange.

Upcoming WordCamps

• Los Angeles, September 10 
• Salt Lake City, September 10
• Kobe, Japan, September 11
• Cape Town, South Africa September 15

Adapted from Fifth Annual WordCamp San Francisco Highlights... Aug. 15, 2011.

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