Friends and followers will be aware that I’m a regular at the South Yorkshire WordPress Meetup or #SYWP for short.
The event takes place at the Sheffield-based GIST Lab and all WordPress-ers are welcome!
Xmas SYWP!
So if you have nothing planned for Tuesday the 13th of December (about a weeks time!) why not pop over to Sheffield for the Xmas SYWP where I will be personally be doing a shorter version of my popular ‘WOW Plugins‘ talk titled ‘Mini-WOW Plugins from 2011‘.
Sheffield + WordPress + The GIST Lab = Awesome
For those new to this event, here’s the brief: Each month we try to bring together a mix of WordPress Q&A, general WordPress advice, a bit of hands-on and some project insights.
There is generally a structured time-line but we throw in an open forum at the end and best of all the PUB after for any follow-ons 
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I spent most of today volunteering for the GO ON Barnsley campaign. Basically wearing a rather fetching t-shirt and badge (see above photo) and bestowing the wonders of this new fangled ‘internet’ thing to anyone who would listen.
It was a lot of fun and I’ll be doing the same again twice this month. I even helped out designing the ‘Barnsley’ version of the GO ON logo:
The GO ON Campaign, getting people online
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I’ve been working on this one for quite a while now, check it out over at The Evolve Blog.
Screenshot
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Last month I did a presentation on all the different types of CMS tools that are now available at the South Yorkshire WordPress (#SYWP) meetup. You can find the notes here which were awesomely written by Chris Witham.
The rise of the micro-CMS
Some of the popular items were Unify, Perch and Cushy which fall into the category of ‘micro’ CMS applications.All of these are designed to be easy to add to any flat (static) HTML/CSS site. They have no jazzy dashboards/backends to speak of and all pretty well supported.
Pretty Forking Good
Out of all the other CMSs mentioned Fork was the one which got the most interest from the group.
It has a beautifully designed website and a simple, easy to follow dashboard and theme/module system. Everyone in the room commented on how this CMS could go far given the right attention.
All comes back to WordPress
Of course, this was a WordPress meetup and as deliciously inviting as some of these other CMS tools looked my ultimate point was I/we always come back to WordPress for a few solid reasons:
- Plugins – Need WP to do something? Find a plugin, if you can’t find it, hire someone or hack your own – no other CMS has this many available features.
- Releases – This sometimes puts people off WordPress but we should all be thankful. WordPress releases are quick and easy to implement and there are no horrible version splits and upgraded sites generally work pretty well with new versions without much worry. (YES I know its not that simple but its better than Drupal with version 6, 7, 8 and even 9 on the horizon all being used and supported).
- Popularity – Just check the figures. WordPress is now a synonymous CMS brand.
- Community – WordCamps, meetups, online news forums, the community is not only large its well organized and passionate.
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