My summary of WordCamp Europe 2023 in Athens

Last June I was at WordCamp Europe Athens. My second Wordcamp Europe. The WordCamps are professional congresses of 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 an organizer in the WordCamp Europe Oporto.

Organizer in the Sponsors Team

9 months of work, 40 meetings and we have reached this picture:

You learn a lot. You learn how to coordinate a multi-language-multidisciplinary team and volunteering. A lot of work. A lot of work to attract sponsorships, sign contracts (this year with a novelty for the signatures with Firmafy).

We have been nine people for a year and almost 40 meetings, we have raised almost 1.2 million euros that goes all to make possible the realization of the event.

In the end we have to work with the sponsors is a part that really makes possible the economic realization of the event, with many expenses: food, catering, production, etc..

I was leading several brands like SiteGround, GravityForms….

What we do is that we take the sale, sign the contract, we show them what their sponsorship package includes, where they have to go, the logos and the information they are going to put on the website.

Well, a series of information that during the whole year they are working on it and already, in our team the advantage is that the last week, as everything is already planned and done, it works very well.

The event

The truth is that it was a very interesting event, really impressive. I’ve been going to different WordCamps since 2016, in Europe the dimensions are brutal. You find very expert people, Directors and Project Managers, Senior Developers from big 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 in Gutenberg editor with END to END type of Playwright and also the tests based on WP-ENV. 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 to be able to, well, to be able to go deeper and share it with more people.

In addition, 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, that 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 him/her.

WordCamp Parties

The parties that take place around the event itself on the nights of the day before and during the event are amazing.

This year we have been to the Patch Stack and Elementor party which was on a terrace. It was also very good the Siteground one with Moncho who invited us and we could see the Acropolis from the rooftop. Impressive.

And there I was, I was with Matias Ventura talking for quite some time, about how the Gutenberg editor had evolved, the new WordPress editor, with a very interesting upcoming development 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 with his colleague Pablo, Director of Design at Automattic, so I spent quite a bit of time talking about how you could work and make web pages quickly with the new editor.

Contributor Day

The first day is Contributor Day, the day in which all the people who work with WordPress give 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 as I will advance in another post, I’m part of the Global Plugin Team Review team, that is, the team that is responsible for reviewing plugins for the official WordPress repository.

It is a very important team because it also touches sensitive information about security and a part of WordPress are the plugins. Little by little I will tell you about my work in 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 in the plugin table, we offered to those who volunteered there to the table, to review their own plugin and answer them about their issues.

We were there until lunch helping to review plugins, to help people to see how to work with plugins, how to make plugins, how to send them, and it was quite good.

Day 2: Lectures

Day 2 starts with the talks, and I attended several of them, in addition to visiting the sponsors, coordinating a bit that everything was fine, since the first day you have to be aware of details to be able to solve them on the fly.

This year, unlike Porto, the sponsors were in another place, more open, and the distribution was quite nice.

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Another one I attended was “Take your WordPress website to another level using a translation” which I didn’t really 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 will put the translation with Artificial Intelligence.

Another talk I attended was the Create ultimate blocks from spec by Pedro Crespo who was detailing how to assemble the different files that are necessary to create your own block in WordPress. Very interesting.

Day 3: Presentations

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.

If you don’t know, we are finishing phase 2 which is the phase of consolidating the editor for editing the site, phase 3 which is the next phase which is the collaborative phase and phase 4 which I hope to arrive 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. It showed how to make web pages with Gutenberg, which today has evolved a lot in design, and has improved a lot, it is very fast and very easy to use.

Acknowledgements

Then the closing was done communicating the site of the next WordCamp Europe that will be in Turin. And they called us on 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 bit about how they are organized, prices that they made at the time of budgeting, the truth is that some prices even called me that they were more expensive.

In Greece, for example, they were more economical and the price per hour, how they presented the proposals and well, it was a bit of a surprise that some countries are a bit more expensive than we could imagine.

And also, that day, we were lucky enough to have Matt Mullenveg greet him and take a picture.

Those of us who are groupies and geeks with this, we could 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, so very nice.

And finally, the trip I did with Jesus 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 them 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