WCEU 2021: Talks & Highlights of This Year’s Event

Over 3,200 Registered Participants. 121 Countries. 13 Timezones. 29 Sessions. 18 Sponsor Interviews. 48 Speakers, Presenters, and Panelists.

WordCamp Europe 2021 has brought together the WordPress Community to share know-how, expectations, and ideas for the future of WP. It was a great pleasure to meet you there!

WCEU 2021 In Numbers

Let’s have a look at this year’s numbers and stats. It was a great event, and the statistics below just prove its success:

WordCamp Europe 2021: Talks & Highlights

As the most important WordPress event of the year, WordCamp Europe 2021 covered diverse WP-related topics from business-oriented talks to discussions focused on the more tech part of the WordPress world. There is always a lot to learn from WordCamp events, and the year’s conference was not any different.

Thanks to the great organization of the event, all participants, sponsors, and WordPress enthusiasts, WCEU 2021 has brought together WordPress beginners and experts alike. The program of the event offered diverse formats such as talks, interviews, workshops, and discussion panels.

Let’s take a closer look at the program and recall some of the main highlights:

Talks

Kartik Shukla – How Agile WordPress project management helps in improving productivity?

Kartik Shukla is a certified ScrumMaster & passionate Project Manager with 9.5 years of experience. Her talk was about the benefits of Agile WordPress project management and how it improves productivity.

Mario Peshev – Client management: transition from a vendor to a consultant

The session was led by our CEO, Mario Peshev, WordPress core contributor since WP 3.7. Aside from his tech endeavors, he consults businesses on digital transformation, operations, recruitment, and marketing through his advisory firm Growth Shuttle, publishes free management content on his blog, and as a guest contributor for Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc Magazine, and other digital journals.

https://twitter.com/wpdevrix/status/1401856213579702274?s=20

”As a consulting agency or as a consultant, you need to be the authority. You need to be the expert leading the way, not following the rules.” – Mario Peshev, CEO

April Callis – Ready, set, change! Simplify and accelerate organizational change

April Callis is an internationally known organizational change management expert that has implemented change for clients including the State of Michigan, Whirlpool, AAA, and the University of Michigan.

Fabian Kägy – Building great experiences in the new editor

Fabian has been working with WordPress for the majority of his life, with the introduction of the new editor he also started contributing back to core. Since early 2020 he is working as a Senior Frontend Engineer at the WordPress-focused agency 10up and spends most of his day coming up with editorial experiences for client projects.

Morgan Kay & Rian Rietveld – Enhancing the accessibility of a plugin, a use case

Morgan is a WordPress engineer in Bellingham, Washington, she currently works for Rocketgenius on the Gravity Forms product team. With more than 10 years of experience as a WordPress developer, Morgan has worked as a freelancer and at agencies such as range and wide eye creative, and has built a wide variety of WordPress themes and plugins.

Rain Rietveld is a Web accessibility specialist from the Netherlands. She works in Rotterdam for the digital agency Level Level as an accessibility consultant and is a trainer for the online learning platform The A11Y Collective.

Felix Arntz – Accessing APIs using OAuth on the Federated (WordPress) Web

Felix Arntz is a Developer Programs Engineer in the Content Experience team at Google and a WordPress core committer from Germany, currently residing in San Francisco, California. He is the lead engineer for the Site Kit plugin for WordPress and has been a regular contributor to WordPress for several years.

Katie Richards – Fostering community intentionally

Katie Richar is a Community Coordinator at Pantheon who spends her time working with and advocating for the amazing folk of the Pantheon Heroes project. She admits she is a type-A person who enjoys creating systems and structure and has decided to use those skills for the good of the open web. Katie can be found procrasti-cleaning when she needs a moment to get her thoughts in order.

Scott Fisk – Photography for websites

Scott is a Professor and Chair of the Art Department at Samford University in Birmingham AL teaching graphic and UX design. He served in Iraq as an Army Reserve photojournalist and communications specialist, often embedding as a photographer.

Jessica Thiefels – 5 non-sales metrics to measure the performance of your blog

Author of 10 Questions That Answer Life’s Biggest Questions, podcast host of Mindset Reset Radio, and founder and CEO of Jessica Thiefels Consulting, an organic content marketing agency. She’s been writing for more than 10 years and has been featured in top publications including Forbes and Entrepreneur.

Mitko Kochkovski – WooCommerce data hub

Two years ago Mitko founded WebPigment a WordPress Agency where we specialize in WooCommerce themes and plugins. He is giving back to the WordPress community by adding plugins and helping with core updates.

Paul Tobey – 4 case studies: Making self-hosted CRM work for your client portfolio

In early 2000, in an effort to earn a living at something new, he became very good at selling sheet music online. As an early pioneer of internet marketing, he saw the opportunity to train on the subject. He became a Certified Trainer and founded an award-winning training company. Since then he built and deployed hundreds of WordPress sites for our portfolio of clients.

Michelle Forsyth – Master your productivity today

A bestselling author, speaker, and author/productivity coach who teaches women how to get back time in their day and finish their projects, whether it’s writing their authority book, creating a course, or simply managing their business without feeling so overwhelmed.

Radost Dacheva – Effective tips to establishing and maintaining successful partnerships

As a Key Partnership Manager at SiteGround, Radost enjoys working on establishing long-lasting relations among businesses and is a firm believer that people are the key factor in the success of any venture. Before working in the web industry, she built a career in international business consultancy and finance being a part of the team of the largest program for Entrepreneurial Excellence in Bulgaria, providing startups with an early-stage funding.

Shanjidah Afroz – End-to-end testing using CodeceptJS

Working as a QA Engineer at weDevs, currently working on Dokan plugin. Shanjidah describes herself as a hardworking person & a person who loves to take new challenges, analyze new concepts & explore the new scenarios of software.

Alfredo Navas – Headless WordPress, Gatsby or NextJS

Being a Web artisan and WordPress wrangler, Alfredo has been working with WordPress as his publishing software for the last 12 years. Alfredo is also a Co-founder of the WordPress Costa Rica community, organizer, speaker, and volunteer on several cities WordCamps such as Rome, Miami, Nashville, Managua, CDMX, and San José.

Sarah Pantry – All code is legacy code

Currently, a developer at WordPress VIP a part of the Automattic family, prior to this she has spent 20 years as a developer, engineering team lead, or manager at several companies and web agencies sometimes as a WordPress specialist and other times using alternative frameworks and platforms.

Robert Jacobi – Invisible CMS

With 20 years of experience as an open-source executive (President Joomla), entrepreneur, and evangelist, he works with small to Fortune 500 companies as a Global Strategist and Solution Ambassador to increase revenue and market awareness. He ran 3.5% of the internet. Robert is an international, well-known, and respected speaker/contributor to open source, hosting, and infrastructure communities.

Conversation with Matt Mullenweg

Matt Mullenweg is co-founder of the open-source publishing platform WordPress, which now powers over 40% of all sites on the web. He is the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, WooCommerce, Tumblr, WordPress VIP, and Jetpack. Additionally, Matt runs Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

"In 2003 @WordPress was way worse than all those others… [Blogger, Yahoo…], like remarkably worse in every way, except giving people freedom.
And that freedom is the killer feature of Open source."@photomatt at @WCEurope pic.twitter.com/19xUDtxBhI

— DevriX (@wpdevrix) June 9, 2021

Interviews

The interview format of WordCamp Europe 2021 has offered to its attendees the possibility to meet the Sponsors of this year’s event and learn more about their main motivation to contribute back to the WordPress Community. It was truly inspirational.

Track 1: The last interview of the day is with @metodiew from @WPDevriX and it is happening right now!#WCEU #WCEU2021 pic.twitter.com/J1JrddtNH3

— DevotePress (@devotepress) June 7, 2021

”..it’s actually important to give back to the community and not just use WordPress for projects and internal products.” – Stanko Metodiev

Watch the full interview with our CTO, Stanko Metodiev.

Here are the rest of the Sponsors’ interviews that took part in WCEU 2021:

• Marieke van de Rakt of Yoast
• Neha Naik Raval of Radix
• Matthias Pfefferle of Ionos
• Allen Smith of WooCommerce
• Adam Warner of GoDaddy Pro
• Hristo Pandjarov of SiteGround
• James Giroux of RocketGenius
• Drew Gorton of Pantheon
• Evangelia Pappa of WPMU DEV
• Caspar Hübinger of RaidBoxes
• Mariya Moeva of Google
• Tammie Lister of Extendify
• Hugo Prinse of Mollie Payments
• David Vogelpohl of WPEngine
• Jeremy Herve of Jetpack

Meet our Admin Sponsor: @wpdevrix

"The WordPress Retainers Agency. We don't outsource people, we build teams for you."

Thank you for supporting #WCEU2021!https://t.co/sL6tm3jXxx#WCEU pic.twitter.com/UPyXq5xyYR

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) June 3, 2021

Discussion Panels

Full Site Editing – Danielle Zarcaro, Grzegorz Ziółkowsk, Koen Van den Wijngaert, and Milana Cap

The Full Site Editing discussion was about the present and future of WordPress with Full Site Editing. The panelists, highly involved in this new feature, discussed many topics about FSE and how it is going to be a new revolution in the WordPress ecosystem.

Why contributing could be for you – Pedro Fonseca, Abha Thakor

This session introduced the major benefits of contributing to the WordPress project. You will meet a few of the thousands of contributors across the globe who ‘make’ the software and are part of its thriving community. These contributors will share what inspires them to be involved and highlight why and how you could too.

The panel was chaired by WordCamp Europe’s Contributing Team members Abha Thakor and Pedro Fonseca.

The future of WordPress themes – Ben Dwyer, Daisy Olsen, Imran Sayed, and Raitis Sevelis

Our panelists, highly familiar with the new kind of WordPress themes share information and tips about this new WordPress revolution and all the opportunities that bring to the ecosystem.

How contributors make WordPress – Abha Thakor and Christopher Churchill

The panel was about contributors who have been involved in major releases and projects within WordPress.org. The panelists have been exploring the panel members’ favorite aspects of taking part, the impact it is possible to make, and what contributing has taught them.

Workshops

WP-CLI, how to manage WordPress from the command-line – Marcel Tannich

Aimed at beginner & advanced WordPress users who are not familiar with the command line yet and are looking for an easy way to get started, this workshop was a useful and practical experience for all participants.

10 ice-breakers and energizers for online events – Taco Verdonschot, Angela Jin

Practical tips to make your WordPress online events more engaging and welcoming. Many of these tips can apply or be adapted for Meetups, WordCamps or team meetings.

How to start designing for WordPress – Javier Arce

Attendants will learn how to begin contributing to the project, how is the WordPress Design Library organized, and how to structure their Figma files so that their work can shine and follow the WordPress design conventions.

Getting started translating WordPress, themes, and plugins into different languages – Tor-Bjorn Fjellner, Theodoros Gkitsos

Introducing new Polyglots contributors to translate.wordpress.org. Participants learned how to find a suitable translation project, how to suggest a translation, and where to find information about standards and glossaries for your locale.

Are your customers looking for you? How to do keyword research – David Zimmerman

Focused on how your customers are looking in Google and some SEO best practices in this workshop, David teaches participants his process to determine whether or not your customers are looking for you in Google.

A walkthrough of Full Site Editing – Herb Miller

Herb Miller gave a short tour of Full Site Editing (FSE) from his perspective as a contributor to the outreach experiment for this major development in WordPress.

Blazing fast block development – Lee Shadle

Lee has been obsessed with building blocks since before Gutenberg was released. He built a bunch of custom block plugins over the years. The workshop presented a framework for quickly building custom block plugins for WordPress.

Help shape content on Learn WordPress – Courtney Robertson; Hari Shanker; Hauwa Abashiya

Following the workshop, there has been a breakout session where you can plan out topics or help map existing content on Learn WordPress to the roadmap.

WordPress Community Bond

WordCamp Europe 2021 was an amazing experience for everyone involved. The WordPress Community spirit was contagious, even online for a second year. Thank you, everyone! Hope this article will help you to find and recall your favorite talks and discussions.

See you again next year!