WHAT IS WORDCAMP?
WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress, the free and open source personal publishing software that powers over 75 million sites on the web.
Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other. At a WordCamp you will learn about how to use WordPress and create awesome content and sites for the web, but that’s not all. You will also be able to network with other designers, developers, business owners, freelancers, bloggers and more. It’s an event where you can learn, connect, and have fun!
WordCamps come in all different flavors, based on the local communities that produce them, but in general, WordCamps include sessions on how to use WordPress more effectively, beginning plugin and theme development, advanced techniques, security, etc. To get an idea of the types of sessions typically seen at WordCamps, check out the WordCamp channel at WordPress.tv.
The first WordCamp was organized in San Francisco by Matt Mullenweg in 2006. Since then, local communities around the world have organized over three hundred WordCamps, and we anticipate that number will pass a thousand within the next couple of years.
WHAT IS WORDPRESS?
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
WordPress was born out of a desire for an elegant, well-architectured personal publishing system built on PHP and MySQL and licensed under the GPLv2 (or later). It is the official successor of b2/cafelog. WordPress is fresh software, but its roots and development go back to 2001. It is a mature and stable product. We hope by focusing on user experience and web standards we can create a tool different from anything else out there.