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Everything About WordCamp Sofia 2019

DevriX team at WCSOF 2019

Last weekend (November 9th and 10th) was WordCamp Sofia 2019. So far, it’s been the camp with the biggest number of DevriXians attending – a total of thirty! As tradition goes, DevriX sponsored the conference and we had an engaging booth with lots of interactive games. Also, one of our tech leads had a highly anticipated talk – his first one ever! Let’s recap the event and highlight the way it has made an impact on the local community.

What Was Different About #WCSOF 2019?

This time the conference day was on Sunday and Contributor Day on Saturday. The talks were in one track only, with a total of 10. Half of the speakers chose to present in Bulgarian. This was the 10th annual WordCamp for Sofia and the 3rd one for Bulgaria this year, with WordCamp Plovdiv in May and the WordCamp Retreat in Sinemoretz in September.

DevriX team planned and worked on the event for nearly a month in advance. We prepared our corner with a photo stand and table with swag and games. This year we had a memory game with an option to play online and on site.

All eyes on DevriX stand on WCSOF 2019

All eyes on DevriX stand at WCSOF 2019

The camp officially opened at 9:00am. Despite of the early hour on a Sunday morning and the mild rain, the hall was full. Throughout the day over 400 WordPress enthusiasts attended the talks and took part in the community’s initiatives.

full house WCSOF opening

The Talks on WordCamp Sofia 2019

Here is a short outline of all presentations with some tweet buzz and pictures:

[9:15am] Svetlana Tsoneva: 2020 Web Design Trends

Svetlana’s talk covered over 12 web design trends for the upcoming year. She spoke about traditional designer issues like colors, typography, icons and more advanced techniques like asymmetry, motions and augmented reality. In her talk, she also managed to include a quick video round-up with several top designers who were on the jury of a recent local competition.

[10:00am] Aleksandar Savkovic: Automatising or Humanising your e-commerce?

Aleks’s talk was provocative, full of real-life examples and quite valuable for eCommerce communication. With his bright sense of humor, he showcased how automation is being improperly over-used in online shops. We all hope that his final words: “People like to communicate with people” will reach all eCommerce owners and make online trade more human.

[11:00am] Stanimir Stoyanov: Headless WordPress – or how to use WordPress backend for our own web application

Stanimir show-cased SiteGround’s experience with migrating their twelve websites in three languages to a multisite network, with a headless WordPress solution. They have also integrated their own software for customer account management. Stay tuned as we will soon feature the whole project in more detail on our blog.

SiteGround was one of the camp’s organizers and a bronze sponsor, providing great coffee all-day in delicious waffle cups, so a big thank you, guys!


[11:45am] Bojidar Valchovski: WordPress Publishing Explained: Key Revenue Growth Techniques

For the whole DevrIX team that was one of the most exciting moments at the conference – a new star was born as our Junior Tech Lead Bojidar Valchovski premiered with his first camp talk! Bobi is responsible for some of our top publisher accounts that have generated hundreds of millions of page views monthly. He spoke about monetization and growth in large-scale digital advertising.

By the end of the month we’ll share Bojidar’s talk in a separate publication, including the recorded video.

[12:30pm] Martin Popov: Social Media content strategies

Martin’s talk was focused on his personal experience with social media as a digital agency owner while building his personal brand. Content creation, repurpose and distribution in social media – useful tips for non-marketing people.


[14:35pm] Diana Edreva: Having a slow site? Let’s find out why!

As a WordPress enthusiast, Diana shared several practical tips on how to measure and improve your site’s speed. She explained why that is important: for retaining visitors, for improving the site’s SEO and of course, for monetization. So far we have covered the website speed topic in numerous articles on our blog yet Diana made a good recap on the basic strategies.


[15:20pm] Petar Teodosiev: How to create an accessible podcast on WordPress for free?

Petar is the manager of a popular science platform and he shared his know-how on creating a podcast with one’s own content. We learned how to record podcast series, where to store the files and how to present them to users. Questions about podcast monetization were asked and Petar pointed out that good content and gaining popularity should come first then advertisers and sponsors will come by themselves.


[16:20pm] Daniel Ivanov: Get to know the loop and develop plugins

That was probably the most technical talk on the conference. Daniel addressed WordPress plugin developers and shared practical tips on how to use the loop.


[17:05pm] Diana Koshedzhyiska: Client onboarding – building successful partnerships with customers

Diana was one of the organizers of WordCamp Retreat Sinemoretz back in September – and promised to tell us more about that project. At this camp, she shared valuable good practices and insights on how to work with customers. She covered the whole onboarding process – from the very first contact to turning customers into salespeople for what you do.


[17:50pm] Stefan Sovrlić: Improving post-click experience using advanced tracking methods

Stefan’s talk covered a similar topic – the customer journey (the funnel) – but from a more technical, UX and analytics point of view. A smooth user-experience is what all websites need. Good web design comes down to an optimized customer funnel and high conversions which was a really good way to close the conference.

WordCamp Sofia 2019 Wrap-up

It’s been a seamless and immersive experience for us all. We want to thank everyone involved in making it happen!

Thank you, WordPress Sofia 2019 organizers!

Thank you, Bobi! You rock!

This is just a quick outline of our camp experience. We’ll update this article later with additional information – such as slides from the talks and useful resources links. We’ll also add the videos of the presentations as soon as WordPress.tv releases them. Use the contact form below to ping us with any questions you might have.

This year’s conference was an amazing and immersive experience for us all.