WordCamp Europe 2024 summary
The largest WordPress event in Europe, WordCamp Europe, took place in Turin this year. It was three days of presentations on WordPress topics, community gatherings and participation in WordPress development.
3000 tickets were sold for the event, which is about ten times the scale of the WordCamps in Finland. From Evermade, Marco, Miikka, Mira and Teemu went to the event. Here is a summary of it all. The photographer was Mira.
Turin, Italy
The venue was an old Fiat factory, which has been converted into the Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre. The location was close to the city centre and well connected. The old car factory provided a spacious setting for three presentation lanes, a sponsorship area, catering and community meetings.
Turin is a beautiful old city, but on the days of the event there was little time to see the city. The programme usually started at 9am and finished at 5pm, after which we headed to our accommodation for a short rest before moving on to evening shows and dinner. So it’s worth tactically planning a couple of days at the beginning or end of your WordCamp trip to get around the city.
Contributing to the building of WordPress
As usual, the first day of the event was a Contributor Day, where we were introduced to the different development teams and got to do hands-on work in these teams. There is a huge variety of ways to get involved in making WordPress happen: developers, documenters, translators, designers, accessibility experts, community event organisers, photographers and more.
I was the General Translation Editor for WordPress. Working with the Polyglots translation team was an easy choice for me. Together with my Finnish-speaking team members, we translated texts for the WooCommerce ecommerce platform, as the Finnish translation of this plugin was lagging behind. During the day, the translation progressed by about 2500 strings.
At the end of the day, the leader of each team reported on what had been achieved. For many, Contributor Day is an important first contact with conributing to WordPress. Miikka and Mira did their first translations during the day, which are already part of the official WooCommerce Finnish translation. Marco was part of the documentation team.
#Swag
The sponsors had a lot of different exclusive swag in addition to official WordCamp merchandise. I grabbed these:
- Four pairs of socks
- A jar of jam (there was honey too)
- A gym towel
- Two canvas bags
- A t-shirt
- Stickers
- A stress toy
- Chocolate
- Liquorice
- An energy drink
What was WordCamp about?
Siobhan McKeown and Dee Teal discussed ways to get more women on the board of WordPress companies.
WordCamp topics are carefully balanced so that there is something for everyone and the focus is not too much on presentations for developers. At best, there are three rooms of speakers at the same time, so you won’t have time to hear everything. Recordings of live streaming from the different rooms will be available on the WordPress YouTube channel and later on from WordPress.tv.
Here’s what I learned from the presentations:
1. The AI hype is slowing down
AI was still on the agenda, but people are more critical and cautious about it. At WordCamp, there was talk of the limitations of AI tools and the risks associated with licensing the impact of AI-generated code. Matt Mullenweg envisioned the migration of AI assistants to operating systems and devices, which makes it important for WordPress to work with these assistants.
2. WordPress is not going to a headless direction
WordPress is a flexible content management system, on top of which it is possible to build interfaces such as applications or headless websites. However, WordPress itself is not going in the direction of headless implementations and this is demonstrated by the latest development of the Interactivity API, which brings a standard way of bringing interactivity to elements (powered by a lighter version of React, Preact).
3. Gutenberg is still a priority
In the next version of WordPress 6.6, the block editor will again get new features and usability improvements, but performance and loading speeds will also continue to improve.
In terms of technological developments, other interesting highlights included Playground (WordPress running in the browser), HTML API (a dedicated PHP tool for handling HTML) and Block Hooks (the ability to dynamically display blocks in existing and new content).
A look into the future of WordPress
The third day ended with a presentation by Matt Mullenweg on the future of WordPress. Matt is the co-inventor of WordPress and CEO of Automattic (whose products include WordPress.com, WooCommerce and Tumblr). The presentation can be viewed in full on YouTube.
The main guiding principle in the development of WordPress was summed up as follows:
Simple things should be easy and intuitive and complex things possible.
A few more highlights from Matt’s presentation:
- If you build WordPress, use WordPress. Developers and designers should also be WordPress users and stay close to the end users.
- WordPress’ market share is growing again and now already covers 43.3% of the web.
- Playground has the potential to make a big difference. For example, it could be used to test updates or site changes before they are implemented, or to copy a site for a technical expert to examine. The technology is still in its infancy, so the full potential is not yet fully understood.
- Plugins and themes should be provided with an infrastructure for documentation and discussion (Slack) similar to WordPress.
- “Speed build challenge” is a new entertainment phenomenon, where people are challenged at events or on YouTube to build a site or page with Gutenberg against time or a competitor (in the Q&A section, Matt was also challenged to take part).
Finally
Many thanks to the organisers, volunteers, speakers and sponsors. WordCamp Europe is definitely an event worth experiencing. The size and diversity of the WordPress community only really becomes apparent when you attend WordCamp.
As an introverted Finn, you don’t necessarily have to socialise too much with strangers, as there are always a bunch of Finns at the event. It’s also worth taking part in the informal Finnish meet, which is a tradition in our Finnish WordPress community.
Next year, WordCamp Europe will take place in Basel, Switzerland. See you there!
PS. We were at WordCamp Europe last year, too. Go here for our WCEU 2023 summary.
