Last week on the WPCandy Roundtable Podcast with the BuddyPress Core Team, someone submitted the question “What are the chances of a BuddyPress Camp in the future?”
I thought the question was a lighthearted, fun one that might evoke a joke or two, o seven some more of Boone Gorges singing (which it kind of did). I didn’t expect this really insightful response to the question from John James Jacoby:
If the community was to the point, and large enough where someone wanted to throw together a BuddyPress only thing, I would be totally down for it.
That said, I think what would be the segue towards that is to have a plugin camp. You know, let’s just talk about all the cool plugins specifically. And it can still be like a WordCamp where there’s a user track and how to pick a plugin and how to use a plugin and which ones are favorites and you can have a developer track where developers can talk just about the plugins they’re building…
So eventually for it to get to the point where plugins can just have their own conference, and WordCamp can still sort of be all the things in one, I think that would be a stepping stone toward BuddyPress having its own event.
That made me stop and think quite a bit, both during the show (around the 52 minute mark of the episode) and afterward. The more I think about it, the more I think conferences focused on plugins and brands built on WordPress will really help confirm the strength of the WordPress platform.
