This is the original WordCamp. Every year has been fantastic!  There is no other event that brings so many of WordPress‘s elite together.

They’re friendly people to boot! Thankfully, the elite are welcoming and generous with their time, knowledge, talent and bad jokes (puns). It’s a great learning environment.

The best kept secret about WordCamp is that the speaker line up includes many technology and web luminaries – Matt Cutts, Philip Greenspun, Tim Ferriss, Tara Hunt to name a few of the incredible speakers.

Can you believe it is near free — the $25 cost doesn’t even cover the cost of the food. Thank you sponsors!

Even if WordPress wasn’t your thing (shame!), if you’re in the web, it should be a must attend event. It’s a great event for all bloggers and anyone publishing online.

There is also an after party celebrating the sixth anniversary of WordPress!

And Sunday, we’re hosting a barcamp-esque WordPress developer day:

…expect more hardcore geek content like heavy WordPress performance optimization, BuddyPress internals, an intro to Erlang, a guide to secure coding, WordPress-as-CMS discussions, and more. If there’s a topic you’d like to lead start thinking about it now…

There are only 64 spaces left for WordCamp, so sign up now! (Already 536 people have registered.)

I hope to meet you there.

Budd Family helping at Genius Bar WordCamp SF 2008, as seen at http://central.wordcamp.org/

Andy and Alex have been hard at work on it for some time. It’s really impressive and I’ve only started to play with it — it being searchable is a huge enough leap for me. I don’t use a lot of images and other media, so I’m eager to see what you experts think of the experience.

Lorelle describes it as hot. And Matt is eagerly waiting for it to be ready:

My pictures are ready to go, I’m just waiting for certain features within WordPress to start working and creating intermediate sizes so I can upload them to my blog instead of Gallery.

Andy responded

The Media Library only knows about files that have a record in the posts table with post_type = ‘attachment’. These records are created when you upload a file via WordPress. Uploading via FTP, etc., has no effect on the WordPress database.

We do not scan your upload directories and that is not now planned. I would like to see a plugin do this.

So Andy has dropped the gauntlet. Which plugin developer among you will rise to the challenge? You will garner much fame and admiration from your fellow WordPress participants!

Update: Less than 9 hrs since I published this, the amazing Dion Hulse, or as we know him, DD32, has created Add From Server:

A WordPress plugin which allows you to browse the filesystem on the webserver and copy any files into the WordPress uploads system, Once imported it’ll be treated as any other uploaded file, and you can access it via the Media Library.

On wp-testers list Dion adds:

While it doesnt scan the directories for new files, I just wrote up a plugin to allow importing files from the web servers filesystem into the WordPress uploads system.

It simply allows you to select files, and then import them into the uploads folder(They’re copied).

It needs more work obviously, And i’ll have to add some logic to detect that its adding a file from within the uploads folder to prevent duplication i guess.. Another function that i’d like to add is a watch-directory, Any files which get uploaded into that folder, get imported automatically (and optionally deleted from the source dir afterwards), But thats all for the next release in another week or so most likely.

It is a work in progress, as all great things are. Already this is going to make a lot of people happy!