WordCamp Boston 2012 occurred on a hot and steamy weekend on July 14 & 15 at Boston University.

My WordCamp experience started with a vibrant presentation by our own Jess Jurick on some lesser trumpeted capabilities that WordPress offers. She covered some of her favorite plugins such as Gravity Forms, WooCommerce and BuddyPress while showcasing some sites that push the boundaries of WordPress far beyond blogging.

Sam Hotchkiss offered attendees another atypical take on WordPress with Using WordPress as a Web App Framework. If you have an idea for an app, you can produce that interactive, secure, desktop-like program using WordPress! Features like user support, admin management, security, rapid deployment and many other essential requirements of app development are all part of WP’s framework.

Jake Goldman, our President, gave a polished presentation focused on applying WordPress to enterprise environments where complex, scalable and mission-critical web development is essential. Topics included marketing to enterprise level clients, demonstrating WordPress’s value as an open source CMS with an enormous developer community, and the advantages of VIP Hosting.

Erick Hitter convinced attendees that there is more to learning WordPress than just reading the codex. In “Learning WordPress from WordPress”, he talked about how WordPress Core is structured, its naming convention and what developers can gain by exploring the inline documentation within the code.

Chris Cochran and Jesse Friedman both talked about utilizing WordPress for mobile devices and using responsive design with progressive enhancement. They provided great insights on device and feature detection as well as debugging and getting your site to load in 3 seconds or less.

Sean Butze did a presentation on Improving usability in the WordPress Admin. With each release of WordPress, the amount of options and tools available to clients can be daunting. But, developers can control this experience by turning off what their clients don’t need and stream lining the publishing process to their exact needs.

10up’s Luke Gedeon explored techniques for hooking into the JavaScript found within WordPress. I was hungry for more and I would love to see more presentations on JavaScript and WordPress at future WordCamps.

The WordPress community really puts together an amazing conference. Don’t miss out on the next one!