WordCamp Europe in Vienna and the WordPress Development Vector

This year's WordCamp Europe 2016 conference was held in Vienna and gathered more than 2,300 guests. The capital of Austria is great for holding such events, there are all the conditions: a convenient location, large conference rooms, an active WordPress community. And there is something to see after the conference. Several of our developers visited WordCamp Europe 2016. Under the cut - their story about the most interesting reports and events.

Conference format

The conference lasted three days: in the first two days we listened to speeches, and the last day was given to the contributors. Reports were in various categories: Development, Design, Business, Content, Community, and passed in three streams, so everyone could find something interesting for themselves. The speakers paid much attention to the issues of high load, Continuous Integration, REST API and the Calypso project.

About 600 volunteers signed up for the day of contributors. On this day, one could take a direct part in the development of WordPress, learn how kernel developers, translators, as well as teams testing plugins and themes for the official catalog work. Even it was possible to get advice on organizing the WordPress community in your city.
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A nice bonus was the performance of Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, the founder of Automattic, WordPress.com, Akismet. But more on that below.

The most interesting reports

PHP7 and WordPress

The release of PHP7 could not go unnoticed at WordCamp Europe: how to get WordPress to work with PHP7, said Dan Blowes in his report “ What's New in PHP7” ?

WordPress core and many plugins already support PHP7. Quoting the author, you can say: "Upgrading to PHP 7 is easy, and probably everything will work right away." But still, he touched on points to which attention should be paid if you decide to migrate your site to PHP7.



The speaker spoke about the innovations in PHP and the benefits that can be obtained when upgrading to the seventh version. Dan showed impressive WordPress acceleration statistics for PHP7 versus PHP 5.6.

A couple of WordPress REST API reports

Especially important were the reports on the REST API. This is one of the most important and actively developing areas. News from the WordPress REST API developers themselves, about the difficulties and decisions made - incredibly valuable information. Thanks to Joe Hoyle and Adam White! View their speeches from The Ultimate REST API talk and Using WordPress interfaces .



The reports cover issues related to both the use of the API and its development and extension.

Now the REST API is not yet part of the kernel, it exists as a plugin . Adam in his report highlights the benefits WordPress will get when integrating REST into its core. However, we already have the opportunity to build our applications using the new API.

REST API gives unprecedented flexibility and the expression "WordPress is limited only by your imagination" becomes a reality.

Calypso admin panel

Due consideration was given to the relatively new development - Calypso. This is the administration panel for WordPress sites, written in JS and working through WordPress REST API, which will definitely become popular.



Designer Calypso talked about the project as a whole, as well as what its development team cost, and shared approaches in organizing effective communication in the project. As David Casali said: “Communication is oxygen.” It is impossible to disagree.

The experience of building a high-loaded WP-site

WordPress has long been used to develop high-loaded news portals. Such sites as TED, TechCrunch, CNN, NBC built their sites on it. Yes, building a high-load site is not easy, but the speakers from NewsCorp Australia told how to do everything right.

Their experience is another precedent that proves the possibility of building portals on the WP with millions of views per day. Speakers gave valuable information about the development team and workflow, talked about continuous integration, environment and visitor statistics. They also shared information that will help calculate the costs necessary for such a project.



Incredibly useful report, including from the point of view of communication with customers: How NewsCorp Australia scaled WordPress to host Australias largest 'news' websites on WordPress VIP .

About legacy projects

Andrew Nacin - Lead WordPress core developer. Based on many years of experience in developing such a popular CMS system, kernel developers have identified and summarized the key points of the WordPress philosophy , which Andrew adheres to.

It is always hard to get a large project "inherited" from people who are not really thinking about the future. And even hurt. If you have such a project, then the Andrew report will help you understand how to turn it into a stable and not requiring inadequate investment product. Video report is available here .

Elasticsearch and ElasticPress

Full-text search through MySQL databases is not in itself an optimal solution. And on high-load sites and sites with large amounts of data - and even more so. Elasticsearch is one of the solutions for implementing an effective search. How does it work, how to configure Elasticsearch, how to protect data, and finally how to use it in your projects? Taylor Lovett answers these questions in a Modernizing WordPress Search with Elasticsearch report .

Taylor also talks about the ElasticPress plugin. The speaker is one of the developers of this plugin, and knows what he is talking about. In general, meetings with component developers are always a unique opportunity to get information about the intricacies of use and future development plans.

Safety report

Of course, the most popular platform for developing websites in the world is one of the most attacked. Therefore, it is necessary to constantly pay attention to the issue of information security.

Maurizio Pelizzone (Maurizio Pelizzone) made a presentation on the security of WordPress sites: WordPress Hardening - Ten tips in ten minutes . The lecturer gave useful tips on how to reduce the risk of being hacked and sleep well.

Copywriting for professionals

At the end of the first day of the conference, the author of the best SEO plugin for WordPress, Jost de Valk (Joost de Valk) with his wife Marieke van de Rakt, made a speech. In the report Beyond SEO - Copywriting for professionals they told about the next stage of the evolution of search engines and the importance of high-quality texts.



Speakers against the scorched earth tactics. Yost and Marieke prefer a sustainable and holistic approach to SEO, which involves focusing on all areas of optimization:

• Technical quality.
• Good UX & UI.
• Impeccable security.
• Perfect PR & Social

The basis of this approach is quality content. And the report sounded the principles for constructing such a content. In addition, the speakers talked about the relatively new function of their plugin, which allows you to make recommendations for improving the texts on your site.

Interview with Matt Mullenweg

Separate attention deserves an interview with Matt Mullenweg: Interview and Q & A. Matt's talk is a traditional part of WordCamp Europe. A sofa was set on the stage and they provided almost a homely atmosphere. In the second part of the speech, Matt spoke with the audience.



We discussed the potentially leading role of the REST API and interfaces on JS. We talked about the most successful and promising projects: Jetpack, WooCommerce and WordPress.com, which do a lot for the success of WordPress in particular and for the open Internet in general. They also remembered their competitors, but Matt does not consider them dangerous.

And much more

There were other interesting reports that we did not attend, because they could not be simultaneously on all three streams. The full list of videos, as always, is uploaded to wordpress.tv .

Contributors Day, how the WP core is developed

The conference was not limited to two days, full of interesting reports and communication. For those interested, a Contributor Day was scheduled, for which about 600 people signed up. He passed at the University of Vienna, in the building of the Faculty of Informatics.

Each participant chose a direction in which he could get acquainted with the process of open-source development and provide all possible assistance in developing WordPress. Among the directions were: kernel development, plugin and theme development, internationalization, design, marketing, support. Each group was coordinated by an experienced curator. The motto of this day was “Give up WordPress.” You could join the community, gain new experience, improve your professional level and make WordPress better.

Future WordPress

WordPress is actively developing. The most interesting and promising areas are REST API and JS interfaces. And the latter have become possible in part thanks to all the same REST API.

Many improvements in the core, for example, in recent releases, internationalization has been significantly improved. The technology stack, development approaches, tools, and more — everything has changed a lot since the first WordPress version appeared. There is progress, we are seeing regular releases that bring something new.

The good news is that the kernel already supports PHP7. We at NIX Solutions are already developing projects in fresh PHP. But as for the full transition to the seventh version, the prospect here is not very bright. The fact is that plugins and themes are supported by the community and individual companies, and not all of them, to put it mildly, are in a hurry to implement support for PHP7.

What else surprised at the conference in Vienna was the maturity of the European community and a serious attitude towards WP. We are sure that WordPress has a great future with such a large, active and talented community.

Next WCEU 2017 in Paris

At the end of the conference, according to tradition, the next city of WordCamp Europe was announced, it became the capital of France. See you in Paris!