Tag: events

WordCamp Europe announced the first batch of tickets on sale for the 2023 event that will be hosted in Athens, Greece, June 8-10. General tickets are € 50.00, a fraction of their true cost, which is heavily subsidized by sponsors. It includes admission to the two-day event, lunches, coffee, snacks, Contributor Day, a commemorative t-shirt, and an invitation to the After Party.

WCEU is also offering micro-sponsorship tickets at € 150.00, which organizers say is closer to the real cost of attendance.

Speaker applications are still open but will close soon in the first week of February. Applicants will be notified by the second week of March and organizers will announce the lineup in mid-April.

WCEU is also seeking a host city for 2024. The minimum requirements are considerably less stringent than in previous years. Hosting the event is open to any team that has organized at least one successful in-person WordCamp in a European city in the last four years with a community that has been active during 2022. Organizers have also published an update to the selection process:

For this year, we have tweaked the selection process to concentrate more on the local community and the city instead of deep knowledge about how to organise a successful WordCamp Europe.

The selection of the WordCamp Europe 2024 host city will be based on the overall evaluation of the application, instead of ranking different parts of it. We don’t ask your team to prepare a budget for the whole event, but estimated costs for the proposed venue(s) should be available.

Contributor Day registration for this year’s event is not yet open but will be free with the purchase of a conference ticket.

At the time of publishing, only 257 tickets remain in this first round, but more batches will be released in the future. Register now to lock in your spot or sign up for email updates on the registration page to be notified of future ticket releases.

Gutenberg Times will be hosting a live Q&A webinar titled “Layout, Layout, Layout” on January 11, 2023, at 05:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada) via Zoom. This event is open to WordPress users of all experience levels who are interested to learn more about how to use WordPress’ layout features when building sites with blocks.

Host Birgit Pauli-Haack will be joined by WordPress veterans Isabel Brison, Andrew Serong, and Justin Tadlock. Brison will be demonstrating different layout scenarios during the presentation, and attendees will be able to participate with questions.

Any user who has attempted to layout a design in WordPress has likely tried out container blocks that offer layout settings. These blocks include Columns, the Cover block, and the generic Group block.

The event will cover how to manipulate layouts by defining the width of post content, arranging blocks horizontally or vertically, right or left aligned, and inside container blocks.

“In terms of block styling, Layout is a complex feature because it affects child blocks in ways that go beyond CSS inheritance,” Pauli-Haack said.

WordPress 6.1 introduced more layout controls and flexibility in the block editor, but Pauli-Haack said the dev note on updated layout support was written more for developers.

“Feedback from users through the FSE program and other connections revealed that handling the layout settings for container blocks is not particularly intuitive and takes some trial and error to find the right combination,” she said. “The Live Q & A will bring a better understanding to users and #nocode site builders.”

When Pauli-Haack started the Live Q & A’s in 2018, she routinely brought in guests who were building the block editor, with the intention of having users meet them and discuss features like full-site editing, block themes, case studies, and discuss challenges.

“Since then, quite a few initiatives of the official WordPress project have come to life,” she said. “There is the highly successful Full Site Editing outreach program, spearheaded by Anne McCarthy, who now holds regular Hallway Hangouts with community members and contributors.”

People are also learning the ins and outs of site editing through the efforts of the training team, which began creating courses and lesson plans and hosting workshops on Meetup.com in 2021. These are also recorded and uploaded to WordPress.tv and YouTube. WordPress.org also launched a blog for developers in November 2022. With all these new learning opportunities, Pauli-Haack is changing the focus for her live events.

“For the Gutenberg Times Live Q & As, I am now looking at topics and discussions about more complex concepts, more case studies, and technology on the cutting edge,” she said. Most recently, the show featured the developers and digital strategies of the Pew Research Center, a high profile site that was built with a block-first approach.

“We are also in planning phase to hold a Live Q & A with the developers of GiveWP who are using Gutenberg as a framework to build the next generation of their popular donations plugin with the components and scripts that Gutenberg uses, but outside the post or site editor,” Pauli-Haack said.

She also has another Live Q & A planned with the WordPress VIP design team that works on design systems for companies that need a streamlined way to stay within their design standards. Pauli-Haack intends to talk with them about a plugin they created that lets designers automatically create a website’s theme.json file with all the styling pulled directly from Figma designs.

The upcoming Layouts webinar is free but attendees need to register to get the zoom link. An archive of all the past Live Q & A events is available on the Gutenberg Times website. The best way to stay informed about future events is to subscribe to Gutenberg Times’ Weekend Edition, as subscribers get an early invitation for the next Live Q & A’s.

WordCamp Europe 2023 is being hosted in Athens this year with two conference days scheduled for June 9 and 10. The first day’s theme is “WordPress Now” (Everything that can be currently achieved with WordPress) and the second day is “WordPress Tomorrow.”

Organizers have opened the call for speakers and are especially interested in scheduling talks that “empower people to feel more comfortable using WordPress.” They are soliciting new voices this year with fresh perspectives.

After reviewing attendee feedback from the previous year, organizers have identified more than three dozen requested topics across the development, business, community, and design categories. These include many more development topics, such as security, CI/CD, headless CMS, ReactJS for PHP Developers / Building Blocks, and more. Attendees are also eager to hear about content monetization, recurring revenue, GDPR compliance, brand identity, and designing for accessibility, to list a few examples.

Presentation formats will include traditional talks, hands-on workshops, expert panels, and lightning talks. Organizers are encouraging speakers to add activities to sessions that will get the audience involved and avoid the afternoon slump. They cited a few examples, including a WordCamp in the Czech Republic where a security researcher installed a Wi-Fi honeypot in the venue and demonstrated how dangerous public wi-fi is when logging into a WordPress site that doesn’t have SSL.

WCEU has launched a Speaker’s support program to help fund selected speakers with financial barriers to attending. Organizers arrange for speakers and the sponsoring companies to connect but are not involved in selecting who receives the funds.

The call for speakers will close the first week of February and applicants will receive a response by the second week of March. Speakers will be announced in the second week of April.