Podcast: Play in new window
Last June I was at WordCamp Europe Athens. My second Wordcamp Europe. WordCamps are professional congresses for people who work with WordPress from different perspectives such as design, marketing, development, etc.
And the congress par excellence is the one held annually in Europe, which this year has been in Athens. Last year I also participated as organizer in the WordCamp Europe Oporto.
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Organizer on Sponsor Team
9 months of work, 40 meetings and we have arrived at this picture:
You learn a lot. You learn how to coordinate a multi-language-multi-disciplinary team and volunteerism. A lot of work. A work of attracting sponsorships, signing contracts (this year with a novelty for signatures with Firmafy)
We have been nine people for one year and almost 40 meetings we have raised almost 1.2 million euros which all goes to make the event possible.
At the end we have to work with the sponsors is a part that really makes the economic realization of the event possible, with a lot of expenses: food, catering, production, etc.
I’ve been running several brands like SiteGround, GravityForms…
What we do is we take the sale, sign the contract, show them what their sponsorship package has in it, where they have to go, the logos and the information they’re going to put on the website.
Well, a series of information that throughout the year are working and already, in our team the advantage is that the last week, as everything is already planned and done, is that it works very well.
The event
The truth is that a quite interesting event, impressive the truth. I who have been going to different WordCamps since 2016, in the Europe the dimensions are brutal. You find very expert people, Directors and Project Managers, Senior Developers from large companies and the best thing is that you can ask questions and they are open to help you.
For example, what I get especially from the WordCamp was a conversation with Carlos Bravo WordPress editor who helped me to implement the new tests that are already using the Gutenberg editor with END to END type from Playwright and also the WP-ENV based tests. I’m sure I’ll be preparing papers for upcoming events on these topics.
I always say this for people who come for the first time to a WordCamp. And that is to participate and even propose a presentation so that you can, well, you can go deeper and share it with more people.
Also, I recommend going to the talks, meet people, make yourself known, introduce yourself and above all try to get, well especially in the Europe edition to meet people before, you want to see, because of course having three thousand people in an event it is true that you find many people in the hallway entering from one side to another, but it is not so easy if you want to look for a person and find it.
WordCamp parties
The parties that take place around what is the event itself that take place the nights of the day before and during the event are awesome.
This year we have been to Patch Stack and Elementor which was on a terrace. It was great also the Siteground one with Moncho who invited us and you could see the Acropolis from the rooftop. Awesome.
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And there I was, I was with Matías Ventura talking quite a while, about how the Gutenberg editor, the new WordPress editor, had evolved, with a very interesting upcoming preview of how custom fields will be part of the editor itself with any block. This changes everything to do with custom fields and how block data is stored. It will simplify it a lot.
And I was also talking to his colleague Pablo, Director of Design at Automattic , so I was talking for quite a while about how you could work and make web pages quickly with the new editor.
Contributor Day
The first day is Contributor Day, it’s the day when everyone who works with WordPress gives up their time to make it possible.
Contributor Day makes it possible, and being WordCamp, to talk to people in person that during the year you meet or need to meet.
And I as I will advance in another post I am part of the Global Plugin Team Review, this means, the team that is in charge of reviewing plugins for official WordPress repository.
It’s a pretty important team because it also touches sensitive information about security and a part of WordPress is the plugins. I will gradually tell about my work on the team.
Being in the Plugins team, I was with Fran Torres, meeting other teams like Core, with several meta people, and finally we were also participating the plugin table, we offered those who volunteered there to the table, review their own plugin and answer them about their issues.
We were there until lunch helping to review plugins, helping people to see how to work with plugins, how to make plugins, how to submit plugins, and it was pretty good.
Day 2: Lectures
Day 2 already starts the talks, and I attended several of them, in addition to visiting the sponsors, coordinating a little bit that everything was fine, since the first day you have to be aware of detail to be able to solve it on the fly.
This year, unlike Porto, the sponsors were in another place, more open, and quite liked the distribution.
WP-CLI workshop for developers
.I was interested in the WP CLI Workshop for developers, that Milana Cap did, although I know it since we have been working with WP CLI for several projects, it is true that there were some commands that I didn’t know and they were quite interesting, for example how to save users in a CSV.
wp shell
Gives you a console to interact with the WordPress and you can use functions
for example:
wp shell
get_option('blog_name');
update_option('blogname', 'name');
.
to execute a file
wp eval-file
to pass the users in a CSV by WPCLI
wp list users --fieds=ID,user-login,user-pass > users.csv
Another one I went to was “Take your WordPress website to another level using a translation” which I really didn’t like and I left early because I thought it was going to be more in depth and in the end it was just touching on how to translate.
I already knew that in fact the Artificial Intelligence in the topic of translating is also working very well and in fact in the next WPAutoTranslate plugin in the next version we are going to put the translation with Artificial Intelligence.
Another talk I was was the Create ultimate blocks from spec by Pedro Crespo who was detailing how to go assembling the various files that are necessary to create your own block in WordPress. Very interesting.
Day 3: Speeches
And finally, the third day…
On the third day, the talks continued and what caught my attention was the appearance of Matt Mullenberg, Josefa and Matias Ventura, who were talking a bit about the future of Gutenberg and the phase in which WordPress is now embarking on.
Which if you don’t know, we’re finishing phase 2 which is the phase of locking down the editor for editing the site, phase 3 which is the next phase which is the collaborative phase and phase 4 which I hope will be coming soon is the multi-language phase.
They showed a video that caught my attention, I liked it a lot and I share it with you and it showed how to make web pages with Gutenberg that today has evolved a lot the design, and has improved a lot, it is very fast and very easy to handle.
Gratings
The closing was followed by the announcement of the location of the next WordCamp Europe, which will be in Turin. And we were called to the stage to thank us.
We were called to the stage to thank us.
Afterparty
The Afterparty was a disco and I was with Angelos and Sber, who had Agencies like CLOSE from Greece and Holland respectively.
We were talking a little bit about how they are organized, prices they realized at the time of budgeting, the truth is that some prices even called me of they were more expensive.
In Greece, for example, that they had like cheaper and the price per hour, how they presented the proposals and well, it was a little bit of a surprise that some countries are a little bit more expensive than we could imagine.
And also, that day too, we were lucky enough to have Matt Mullenveg say hello and take a photo.
Those of us who are groupies and geeks were able to have the opportunity to have a photo with him, and it is appreciated that he comes to the sale and wants to meet people and talk to them a little bit, so very nice.
And finally, the trip was made with Jesús Yesares, Javier Casares and Fede Padilla, we had an anecdote that we almost didn’t get to the airport because Fede arrived just after the After Party to the Taxi to get to catch the plane.
Congratulations to Juan Hernando, who has joined the Global team to organize the next WordCamp in Turin.
In short, it is an event that is very good, that attracts a lot of attention, that if you are a web professional, you should not miss it, because you will find professionals and companies that you use every day, so you can ask directly questions, initiatives and things you need. So, for nothing, encourage you to the next one that you will surely see me in Turin.
Other references:
- Wajari at WordCamp Europe in Athens .
- Javier Casares at WordCamp Europe 2023
- Nilo Velez on WCEU 2023 photos
- Official WordCamp Europe 2023 Photos
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