Even if you’re a developer, designer, content strategist or marketer who works with WordPress on a daily basis, you’d be forgiven for thinking a two-day conference on the CMS might possibly be - evening beers aside - a little dry.

You definitely wouldn’t expect it to be a life-changing experience, let alone one that would move some attendees to tears.

Yet when Hallam’s development team headed out to Serbia for this year’s WordCamp Europe event, that’s exactly what it was.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t quite up there with spending a year studying with Tibetan monks or meditating in a Hindu ashram. But I for one came back with a different perspective on WordPress, my career and life in general.

Community Service

Before this turns into Eat, Pray, Code, let’s back up a moment.

‘WordCamp’ is the name given to major gatherings of people who use WordPress in a creative way. The first of these took place in San Francisco in 2006 and was organised by WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg, but since then several hundred independent, community-run events around the world have followed the same model on a variety of scales.

The key word in the last sentence is ‘community’. WordPress is a community-driven piece of software, relying on developers and designers - often working for no financial reward - to build not only the range of plugins and themes most are familiar with, but

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