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Today, we are happy to announce our newest initiative 'Awesome Apps' to empower your WordPress website to do more.A few months back, we started to think about what more can we do for our customers, who are part of our Continuous Improvement Program. This led us to think about what more can we do with WPoets website, and we started by implementing a 'Careers' section on our website. This allowed us to fully manage and automate our recruitment process and helped us save time and create a talent pool to use. Once we tasted this ease of use, we went on to create few more apps to start managing parts of WPoets operations using our own website. Finally, after lots of internal usage and tests along with few of the most enterprising customers of ours, we have managed to bring them for you. Here is the list of Awesome Apps that we are releasing today, [aw2.module slug='apps-catalog' title=''/] Do check them out and share your feedback with us. We will be adding few more useful apps in coming months, meanwhile, we hope you will do more with your website.

Last weekend we saw first ever WordCamp Nagpur and after our awesome experience at Kochi and Udaipur WordCamps we were really excited about attending it. If you did not attend the event do check out photos from the event at our Facebook photo album. Day 1 At WordCamp Nagpur, first day was dedicated to workshops,  Anirudha conducted a workshop on Rapid Application Development, which he also documented as an article that you can read and follow the steps. He showed the power of our Awesome Studio plugin to quickly create manage screens. While, we could not attend all the workshops, we did attended the one on setting up WordPress on VPS and using WP-CLI. Finally the day ended with plugin pratiyogita, where four participants shared the concept and demoed plugins they had build.   Day 2 Second day of WordCamp Nagpur was day of talks, they had two tracks one specifically for users and another for developers. On day two, Amit was one of the speaker in the Developer Track and he talked about Alternative Development Techniques on WordPress. Here are slides from his talk https://www.slideshare.net/teamphp/alternate-development-techniques-on-wordpress Apart from that we attended talks on using Vue.js for consuming WordPress Rest API, using Composer for managing WordPress projects and panel discussion on making money form WordPress. Overall Nagpur WordCamp was a very well organized, let's thank the organizers and volunteers of WordCamp Nagpur who worked hard to make this WordCamp such a memorable event. Now, we are looking forward to WordCamp Kanpur and other upcoming WordCamps in India.

In Januray we told you about WordCamps happening till March this year, after a small break we have another set of 5 WordCamps lined up for you to attend in the remaining part of 2017 in a city near you. If you have never attended any WordCamp before, you must attend at least one of them to know what WordCamp is all about and get the feel of why we attend all of them. WordCamp Bhopal is still in planning stage and may happen again this year. It feels good to see so many WordCamps happening in India, from only one WordCamp in 2009 to nine WordCamps in 2017, Indian WordPress community has come a long way. We are expecting to see at least 12 WordCamps happening in India next year. If you want to stay informed about these WordCamps and more follow us on Twitter or Facebook. If you have any suggestion or comments let us know here.

Last month we went to WordCamp Kochi, the first WordCamp in South India. Apart from WordPress, this trip will be remembered for food. Our journey started with this tweet https://twitter.com/thecancerus/status/832455323138953216

Day 1

We started our journey from Pune to go to Mumbai as our train to Kochi was starting from Mumbai. It was 24 hours train journey from Mumbai to Kochi, and we made the most of it.

Day 2

We reached Kochi, checked into the hotel and quickly got ready to go to the volunteer's meetup.  At met the volunteers and some organisers of Kochi WordPress meetup group for the first time, we were given our responsibilities for next day. We enjoyed our dinner with other speakers and sponsors then we were back to hotel.

Day 3

We left the hotel early to reach the venue of WordCamp Kochi in time, we did our registrations and started visiting sponsor booths to collect the goodies before they get over :) Amit was volunteering at the Happiness Bar helping attendees with WordPress related problems, he was also giving a talk on Creating MVP with WordPress and shared the case study of Ask Careers who had successfully used the MVP approach to validate their idea. https://www.slideshare.net/teamphp/building-minimal-viable-product-mvp-with-wordpress WordCamp Kochi had some great line-up of speakers, we learned few things from them and we are making some changes at WPoets based on what we learned at Kochi. Hari introduced the youngest volunteer at WordCamps in India, he started blogging at age 8, and now he is just 13 years old and now builds Android apps. Afterparty of WordCamp Kochi was made special by cutting a cake for Wappu and lots of talk, but the best part was the after-after-party trip to Pai Dossa. We eat dossa after having full dinner at 12 AM in the night. I think this would the highlight of WordCamp Kochi.

Day 4 & Day 5

We went around Kochi and visited Fort Kochi & Abhayaranyam, before flying back to Pune. At Fort Kochi we had a chance to check out some of Kochi Biennale event Nithin and Abhilash helped us with sightseeing and some great suggestion as to where to go, how to and most important connecting with locals who could understand English. Here is a small list all the variety of dossa and other food items we tried at Kochi and remembered to take a click before we finished them. You can check out all the photos of the event in our facebook album. Let's thank all the organisers and volunteers for organising such a wonderful WordCamp Kochi and maintaining the high standards. We are now looking forward to WordCamp Mumbai, which is in its 5th edition and happening on 25th & 26th March 2017. If you attended WordCamp Kochi then share your experience or comments here.

Last month we went to the first edition of WordCamp Udaipur, our 5-day trip started with this tweet https://twitter.com/wpoets/status/824593025938653184

Day 1

We started from Pune to Bandra in the afternoon and reached Bandra Terminus around 9 PM. We had two-hour stay at Bandra before our train to Udaipur arrived and around 11:25 we left Bandra.

Day 2

We had awesome Poha for breakfast and for lunch we had fruits and Channa. We reached Udaipur at 3:55 PM, and were checked it at the hotel by 4:30 PM. Since both Amit & Nisha were speaking at WordCamp Udaipur our team was invited to the speaker's dinner. After a refreshing tea, we were ready to explore Udaipur, and the first place we went for was Gangaur ghat. We met with Abhishek, Vachan and rest of the gang, after spending some time with them we decide to go towards the Rass Leela hotel for the speaker's dinner. It was nearby, so we decided to walk, and for the first time, our reliance on google maps failed us. We reached somewhere in the vicinity of the hotel and we had to basically fall back to old ways of asking for directions to finally reach the venue. It was a cold night, but the lakeside view made us all forget all about the cold. We had fun eating and mingling with other speakers, volunteers and sponsors. We had a hard time finding an auto to take us back to the hotel, but overall, it was great first day intro to the city of Udaipur.

Day 3

The day of WordCamp. Amit left early for the venue, as he was volunteering and was responsible for swag distribution. While Amit was busy with swag distribution, Savita and Nisha were attending talks. Anyone coming for the WordCamp Udaipur can be forgiven for thinking if they have come for WordCamp Pune ;) as registration desk was also managed by volunteers from organizers of WordCamp Pune. During the day we also had some fun with Wappu Sa. At WordCamp Udaipur, Amit talked about rapid prototyping with WordPress, and Nisha was part of Panel on Women in WordPress. Here are the slides from Amit's talk. https://www.slideshare.net/teamphp/rapid-prototyping-with-wordpress Nisha talked about the importance of family support in her career, you should also read her heropress story. As the WordCamp came to an end, we were once again stuck with a situation of not getting any Uber or Ola to the hotel, and this time Vajrasar came to our rescue and he dropped us back to our hotel. We collected lot's of goodies from the sponsors of WordCamp Udaipur. Next, from our hotel we went to after party, we had some great discussions and dinner.

Day 4

We started the day with simple breakfast, and then we went to explore the Udaipur city, we visited a Car Museum. https://twitter.com/thecancerus/status/825557136163868672 We went back to Gangaur Ghat and had awesome lunch of Dal Batti with WordCampers from Pune and Mumbai. We took a boat ride in lake Pichola to get the awesome view of Udaipur. Finally, we went to city palace and we walked for almost 2 hours and we meet almost everyone from after party again during the tour. After city palace tour we were so tired, we called it a day and back to our hotel, this time it was easier to get a cab. Our fun filled stay at Udaipur was over. https://twitter.com/wpoets/status/825727493055328256

Day 5

We reached Bandar in the afternoon, and back to Pune by evening. Our trip to WordCamp Udaipur was longest WordCamp trip that we had taken as a team. We came back with the bunch of learnings and managed to attend all talks we were looking forward to.  It's time to thank all the organizers and volunteers of WordCamp Udaipur for making it rock, and raising the bar of organising WordCamps in India. Leave your feedbacks and comments on our facebook post.

2017 is an awesome year of WordPress community in India, for the first time in years we are going to have at least 4 WordCamps that are confirmed and at least 3 more are planned to happen in a later part of the year. Here is a list of upcoming WordCamps in the first quarter of 2017. We are excited to see the growth of WordPress ecosystem in India, are you?

In November we attended  WordCamp Kathmandu, It was the usual one day, two track event. It was one of the first WordCamp events we have attended that actually started on time. It started with Sakin, the lead organizer for this year's edition recounting the history of WordCamps in Nepal, and why they renamed this year's edition to WordCamp Kathmandu and ended with a panel discussion on career in WordPress. You can check out rest of the photos of the event at our Facebook page. Amit talked about his pet theme of being able to assemble websites, check the video of his talk below and you can watch other talks at WordPress.tv. http://wordpress.tv/2016/12/07/amit-singh-stop-coding-start-assembling-your-websites/ We hope he was able to convert at least few people to stop thinking about code, and instead start thinking about solutions. Overall WordCamp Kathmandu was an awesome experience for us, and we would like to thanks all the organizers and volunteers for putting a great show. In case you still don't know, WordCamp Pune is around the corner and WordCamp Udaipur is right after.

Last weekend we went to WordCamp Nashik, it was the last WordCamp of 2016 in India. Our experience can be summed in one word 'awesome'. It was first time that a WordCamp was being organized in Nashik, but they still managed to set a standard for upcoming WordCamps in India. WordCamp Mumbai had set the high bar on content then Nashik has set the high bar for execution. Amit was part of the business panel as well as volunteer at the Happiness bar. Even though it was a single day, single track event they managed to cover the needs of everyone. They had advanced and long talks, they had basic and lighting talks and they had panel discussions on contributing to community & starting a business. The best part was networking area, that actually facilitated the discussions, and during various breaks, people took full advantage of it. We would like to thank all the Organizers, Volunteers and Speakers of WordCamp Nashik, they have raised the bar for WordCamps in India further. For us the WordCamp ended the next day with a visit to Tapovan, MilesWeb office and awesome veg thali at Nashik coffee house.