Months of planning, late nights, Costco runs, phone calls & emails, scheduling, meetings, designing, raising funds, etc. all paid off, BIG TIME!

I’m very grateful to all of our amazing speakers, volunteers, sponsors, and attendees for making this year’s WordCamp Montréal a success.

Why was WordCamp a success?

If you’ve been following #wcmtl on twitter … do I really need to say more …

Here are a few points I see as a measure of success:

• 30% increase in attendees, not bad for the second time around.
• All-Star lineup of speakers from all over Canada.
• An incredible venue, the UQAM Coeur-des-Sciences complex.
• An AV guy that totally went out of his way!
• CUPCAKES!
• Bigger Better Sponsors and Prizes.
• More kids than I have ever seen at WordCamp in my life.
• CUPCAKES!
• Incredible feedback on twitter, facebook, etc.
• An excellent bunch of volunteers.
• Bagels and coffee every morning and 2 lunches!
• After party at Le Saint Sulpice where paid for by our sponsors.
• oh yeah, CUPCAKES!

And now a word from our sponsors …

We were very fortunate this year to have some incredible sponsors and micro-sponsors.

Microsoft – Microsoft loves to support open source, and we love them for supporting us.  For a second year in a row Microsoft graciously jumped on board as a GOLD sponsor! It was great to see them at another WordCamp. I have had the pleasure of working with there open source team on multiple events now (WordCamp Toronto 2009, WebNotWar 2009/2010, ConFoo 2010, and MonDev 2010) and it’s always great to see how far Microsoft has come in the open source. They also put together a great presentation on the WebMatrix. I look forward to seeing them more often at other events. Keep up the good work guys!

Netfirms – 1$ hosting and domains, 2 free iPad giveaways, and major sponsors! What more can be said. These really rocked. I had a great time hanging out with the Netfirms crew (above) they really showed their support for WordCamp and I hope to see them again in 2011!

Adobe – Who doesn’t use Adobe? Money isn’t everything! Adobe sent us thousands of dollars worth of software for prize draws throughout WordCamp. Thanks for the stuff Adobe, everyone already knows who you are and that your products are as pro as it gets, now they can see how generous you are on top of it all.

La Fabrique de Blogs. Depuis 2005, spécialiste WordPress, création de blogs sur mesure, design, formation, accompagnement, support, hébergement.

And last but not least our micro-sponosrs:

• Claude Malaison
• Joachim Kudish
• Kathryn Presner/Zoonini
• Jeremy Clarke

Final Words

I had a great time organizing/speaking/attending WordCamp Montréal this year. I want to thank everyone who made this happen and thank you  for all your support. I can’t wait to do it again next year!

Hope to see you all soon and the next WordPress Montréal Meetup.

What is it: Sad Keanu is a photoshop meme featuring the famed actor Keanu Reeves looking very sad in different zany situations.  It started as a thread on 4chan, and quickly spread in popularity to the rest of the internet.  The original photo is of Keanu sitting on a park bench eating a sandwich, but everyone just felt so sorry for him because he looked so upset, like a kid who gets picked on in school.

- http://www.bite.ca/bitedaily/2010/06/the-sad-keanu-story/

Thanks to @icyliquid for his version of Sad Keanu featuring my avatar!

www.phug.ca

A bit of history
When PHUG initially launched back in 2006 we were a small group of Seneca College students and faculty. The idea was simple, let’s get together once a week after class and geek out. Originally we wanted to start a PHP user group in Toronto, but soon realized we could, and wanted to, do more. So began PHUG, an open source community whose focus was to bring students and professionals together through free workshops on all things open source.

Success soon followed. Our workshops went from 10 people a week to 70 in a few months! Membership on the on the blog went from 50 users to over 4000 in less than a year! PHUG became known in Toronto as one of the hottest open source meetups to attend.

We eventually began organizing large events like WordCamp Toronto 2009, where we doubled numbers from the previous year.

With all this success why did we stop? Unfortunately, like most open source communities and projects, we ran out of money and those involved in organizing events and meetups had less and less time to devote.

That’s the past.

New design, new features, and a new vision
I felt it was time to bring PHUG back from the dead. So I connected with some ex-phug’ers, colleagues, and community organizers to see how we could re-invent PHUG. This time around our focus is to bring you the most current information on all things open source from events, workshops, communities, projects, tutorials, and more on our new site. Based on years of user feedback and ton of great advice from seasoned community leaders we have decided to completely revamp the site into what you seen now.

We have decided to go with a forum instead of a blog, but not just any forum. We are using Vanilla Forums, a powerful and sexy open source technology that meets all our needs.

With a forum every PHUG member has a voice! Feel free to start discussion, share your thoughts, connect with other members. Post an event, a tutorial, useful links, and more.

Together we can build a strong community and a better PHUG!

So, let’s get PHUG’in!

If you’ve got a cool customized Vanilla Forum (hosted or self-hosted) submit it to the showcase!

make sure to follow the Vanilla progress on twitter and facebook, plus I will be uploading screenshots of the new themes on flickr soon…

I’ve been working on some experimental Vanilla themes and can’t wait to release them. I’ll publishing a ton of new tutorials here and on the Vanilla blog soon.

I have also been planning a few events, most importantly MonDev which starts next week! I’ll be organizing and presenting at MonDev Open Source Demo Camp next Tuesday May 25. Mark will also be a doing a presentation on Vanilla 2, so make sure to check that out. I’ll be at StartUpdrinks on Wednesday May 26th, come have a drink with me and the Vanilla crew. Thursday is Make Web Not War, I’ll be doing a presentation on WordPress on Windows, plus I am looking forward to the truce party that night!

More to come…

I will also be helping organize WordCamp Montreal this year and a few Vanilla events (can’t say anything yet)

If that’s not enough … I still have the next issue of creer to work on and I am hoping to finally re-launch PHUG! Maybe I’ll build it using Vanilla this time.

The next few weeks are hectic, but I am looking forward to meeting up with old friends and and hanging out…

I am very excited to announce that I will be joining the Vanilla Forums team!

As of mid may I will be there new Social Media Manager. I will be helping to improve theming capabilities,  developing quality custom themes, and will work closely with the user & developer community. You will start to see a lot more of me on their blog,  twitter, and on the community forums.

A little bit about Vanilla

Over 300,000 people use Vanilla to build community around their website, brand, or business. For free.

With Vanilla Forums you will have a simple, powerful discussion forum for your community up and running within minutes.

Vanilla is open source forum software that is used to power discussions on hundreds of thousands of sites across the web.

At VanillaForums.com, you can sign up and have a discussion forum created for you instantly. The discussion forum can be used for any purpose, but typically businesses / individuals / brands will use a discussion forum as a place where they can enable their customers / friends / fans to interact with each other.

You can read more about Vanilla features here.

Try Vanilla out!

Brendan Sera-Shriar talks WordPress as a CMS, the power of jQuery, and more in this interview from the ConFoo Report by Christian Aubry.

Here’s how it all started…

Google has a special logo up on the Google home page today. The Google logo is made up of legos, to celebrate Lego’s 50 year birthday.

Google’s culture has always had a special place for Lego. Google’s first servers were “modded” up with Legos. The Google founders have admitted to having a special “fondness” towards Legos, and we all know that computer geeks can’t get enough of their legos. Google has Lego art in their offices. Lego fans have built Google logos in Lego, and so have Googlers themselves.

If you visit Google.com, you will see the logo. You won’t see it after you do a search on Google, so there won’t be a small Google lego logo (or at least not at the time I am writing this). Google UK has the logo, and so do Google France, Google Mexico, Google Israel, and Google Denmark. In fact, it appears all Google country-specific sites may have the special logo up for the day. That doesn’t happen with all special logos, so this is truly an international celebration!

Lets see yours!

I can’t wait to test it out!

Some other features included:

• CSS inspection
• Integration with Adobe Browser Lab
• PHP custom class code hinting
• Subversion support
• Site specific code hinting (for example WordPress)

Read more here