Here’s the video of my presentation from WordCamp San Francisco.

My talk should be up on WordPress TV soon, but for now, here are the slides:

I’ve just posted my slides from day one of WordCamp Milan entitled “BuddyPress: An Introduction”.

The presentation gives a general overview of installing, theming and extending BuddyPress. Those who are interested in starting with BuddyPress should find the slides useful.

I’ve just come home from WordCamp Whistler 2009. What a great event it turned out to be and it was lovely to speak to so many WordPress enthusiasts from the Vancouver area.

I gave a thirty minute presentation on the BuddyPress project. The presentation explained what the project is, its current status, and where it’s going in the future. I was also able to talk to some of the developers in the audience with some coding examples. It seemed to be well received.

Here are the slides from the presentation:

A big thank you again to the guys from BraveNewCode and sixty4media for their amazing job organizing the event!

After ten months of work, BuddyPress components and themes are available for download in their first beta release form.

We’re looking for testers, so if the project interests you, give it a shot and please report any bugs you find. Each component and theme will be upgraded to a final 1.0 version once it’s clear that it’s running with no major problems.

If you’re interested in testing BuddyPress without downloading and installing it, head on over to the demo site and register for an account there. The demo site runs the latest development release of BuddyPress.

For more information on the release, check out the blog post on the BuddyPress website.

If you’ve not upgraded to WordPress 2.7 yet, I can’t stress enough that it’ll be the best thing you’ll do this week.

A huge amount of work went into this version, all the way from laser eye testing to auto-upgrading to design refining. It’s the real deal. Endless kudos to everyone involved, amazing job.

The future of WordPress is bright.

Fairmont Chateau Whistler, photo by Duane Storey

Just announced 20 minutes ago – WordCamp Whistler 2009 is on!

I’m really excited about this one, Whistler will be a fantastic venue and it’ll be great to see everyone up there amongst the snowy backdrop.

The registration fee is a very reasonable $35, worth every penny to be in Whistler with fellow WordPress enthusiasts! With the registration fee you’ll get entrance, lunch, swag and access to the social.

There is a great group rate available at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler Resort for those who want to stay up and hit the slopes. The Fairmont is where the conference will be held.

I’ll also be giving my first BuddyPress “post beta/final release” talk. I’ll be looking to cover some more technical ground and explain how developers can create their own custom components and extend existing ones.

All in all this is going to be a fantastic event, head on over to the signup page and get registered!

Some exciting news on the BuddyPress front – the first beta release of BuddyPress will be on December 15th.

In an ideal world it would have been great to put out a final release before Christmas, but there was simply too much left to do before the feature freeze on the 15th. There needs to be a solid period of testing in the beta phase before a first final version can be released into the wild.

The plugins will all be released as standalone versions with their own beta and final release. It doesn’t make any sense to package all the plugins together as a “1.0″ version as they all work on their own and won’t rely on each other to run.

The only possible issue I see with individual plugin releases is confusion with BuddyPress plugin version numbers. For example, in the future if you upgrade to “BP XProfile 1.5″, this may require “BP Core 1.4″ or greater. Users will need to upgrade both plugins to get things working and that could cause confusion.

I’d like to see a system built that will display all the versions of components you are running and also check for incompatibilities. For example, if you installed a new version the friends component, which needed a new version of the core, it would tell you this upon install. That would clear up a lot of potential problems around installation and upgrades.

It’ll be exciting to see what people do with this thing. Head over to http://testbp.org to give it a try.

I’ve just spent today switching the BuddyPress testdrive site over to a new server. The site was previously running on some server space kindly donated by andrea_r.

The test site is closing in on 1,000 registered members, this is rising by around 50-75 per day. We didn’t want to jeopardize Andrea’s other sites, so decided it was best to move it.

I’ve now set the site up on its own VPS, which gives greater flexibility with the apache/php/mysql setup.

I thought I would share a trick to speed up your own WPMU installation. I’m by no means an expert in this area (at all) but this worked for me.

1. Upgrade Apache and PHP to the latest versions.

Many WHM/Cpanel enabled VPS accounts have a script called “easyapache” (usually in /scripts/easyapache). This will let you easily upgrade both Apache and PHP at once. Apache 2.2 from what I read has performance advantages over 2.0 and definitely 1.3.

2. Compile PHP with eAccelerator

If you’re using easyapache then you just need to check the box to add this to your PHP setup. If not, then follow the instructions on the eAccelerator docs. eAccelerator is essentially a caching tool that will significantly speed up PHP scripts. You can read more about it on wikipedia.

Once I had the latest Apache and PHP installed, along with eAccelerator, the generation time reported by WordPress was significantly reduced. On the old server this could be anywhere from 1-5 seconds, but with the new server and eAccelerator this was reduced to 0.1-0.8 seconds. A very significant performance improvement.

Have any performance tips you’d like to share?

Here are my slides from WordCamp and also the links from the last slide. I hope you enjoyed the talk, Matt makes presenting look so easy, but it’s pretty tough once you actually get up there! The feedback was great, and I’m glad people enjoyed learning about BuddyPress.

Slides:
– http://www.slideshare.net/apeatling/buddypress-wordcamp-presentation

Links:
– BuddyPress Testdrive: http://testdrivewpmu.com
– BuddyPress Website: http://buddypress.org
– SVN: http://svn.buddypress.org/trunk
– Mailing List: http://tinyurl.com/6ee7jo
– IRC: #buddypressdev (Freenode)
– Twitter: @buddypressdev
– Screenshots: http://tinyurl.com/657ycl