Attending My First WPBournemouth, April 2017
Hey! This post's a little over two years old now, so some of what's here might be out of date. Still worth a read, but if anything really matters to you, it's worth double-checking against a newer source too.
Introduction
I have recently been attending a fair few conferences and meetups, I feel as though the winter hibernation is now over and it's time to get back out there As I use WordPress in most of, if not all of my personal and freelance projects, I thought it'd be well fitting to start having more of a focus on learning about how others are using WordPress. This is where WPBournemouth comes in. WPBournemouth is a small collection of developers both freelance and agency based. The meetup event is focused on bringing together those who are interested in WordPress. Whether they use the platform for blogging, coding plugins or using the platform in their designs and developments.
Location
The event itself was held at Box 44 at 6.30pm, I had left work at 3.45pm so that I could catch 2 buses and a train just to get there. I can't complain though as it gave me a chance to catch up with some blog writing that I had been postponing.
WPBournemouth
Usually, the meetup boasts around 20 attendees a month, the crowd is usually drawn in by the guest speakers topic for that month. Unfortunately this event did not have any volunteers for being a guest speaker and as a result, the numbers were smaller than usual. This didn't affect the quality of conversation and if anything it meant that discussions were easier to maintain without being overwhelmed by the different topics of conversations. One thing I was truly blown back by was the fact that I had met a developer who was part of the team working on a plugin that I use. The plugin is one I use on most of my WordPress websites called WP Migrate Pro. It went to show me how small the world is sometimes, as I had originally assumed the team of devs would have been located in America or some other part of the world. After half of an hour or so of conversation, the pizzas provided by WPBournemouth's sponsors arrived with vegan, vegetarian and ham/pineapple pizzas to choose from. I honestly enjoyed the small meetup event and I am looking forward to attending the May meetup, and who knows maybe sometime soon I will look to do a talk there!
Links
WPBournemouth website: https://wpbournemouth.uk/events/ Meetup event link: https://www.meetup.com/Bournemouth-WordPress-Group/events/238828721/