WordCamp Europe 2024: Recap and Highlights
WordPress enthusiasts from around the world converged in Torino from June 13-15, 2024, to celebrate and explore the world’s leading web platform. The Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre hosted a vibrant mix of sessions, workshops, and collaborative activities, all underscored by a spirit of community and innovation.
#WCEU: An Expanding Legacy
WordCamp Europe has grown significantly since its inception in 2013, with 750 attendees. This year, 2,584 attendees—including 42% first-timers—from 96 countries descended on the Lingotto Conference and Exhibition Centre for the three-day event. A dedicated team of 250 volunteers and 167 organizers, led by WordCamp veterans Wendie Huis in ‘t Veld, Juan Hernando, and Takis Bouyouris, organized and produced the event.
#WCEU: Collaborative Achievements
Contributor Day brought together 756 people working across 25 teams on everything from essential MIME-type fixes to launching new WordPress Playground projects. Their accomplishments included:
- Translations: Translating 79,059 strings for the WordPress user interface across 29 languages.
- Documentation: Updating documentation for the forthcoming 6.6 release.
- Support and Testing: Onboarding new contributors for the support forums and testing teams.
- Plugin Security: Identifying ways to improve plugin security.
- New Projects: Launching new projects for WordPress Playground, including an SQLite export with WP-CLI.
#WCEU: Community-Centric and Diverse Sessions
This year, the organizing team embraced a “less-is-more” philosophy, reducing the number of sessions by half compared to last year. Rather than inviting keynote speakers from outside the WordPress community, the team chose to spotlight prominent figures within the community. This approach aimed to deliver a more focused and manageable experience for attendees.
The team made a significant commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB) by providing training for all members. Consequently, the speaker lineup was the most diverse ever, representing various backgrounds and perspectives. Over Friday and Saturday, 60 presentations and workshops were conducted across three tracks, covering topics such as
WordPress development, accessibility, design, community, artificial intelligence, and more.
A standout moment was the “Speed Build Challenge,” during which attendees watched WordPress Jessica Lyschik and Richard Tabor build websites in real-time, showcasing tips, shortcuts, and best practices.
Here are some additional highlights from our team.
#WCEU: Mid-Year WordPress Project Update
WordPress Co-founder Matt Mullenweg shared a mid-year project update on WordPress, covering topics from Gutenberg Phases to the WordPress Playground. He highlighted the success of the contributor mentorship program and Contributor Day and shared an update on the Data Liberation initiative.
Matt also discussed the latest innovations with WordPress Playground, performance gains, and previewed features anticipated in future releases, like rollbacks for auto-updates and a zoomed-out view. He acknowledged the “speed build challenges” exciting trend in the WordPress community and even accepted an invitation to participate in one such challenge.
Reflecting on WordPress reaching its 21st anniversary, Matt shared 11 things to ensure its sustainability for decades to come:
– Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
– Blogs and dynamic sites are better.
– Documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
– Forums should be front and centre.
– Plugins and themes with community infrastructure.
– Great theme previews and diverse aesthetics.
– We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements.
– Feedback loops are so important.
– Core should be opinionated and quirky.
– If you make WordPress, use WordPress.
– Stay close to our end-users.
Watch Matt’s summer project update on the WordPress YouTube channel.
Looking Ahead
As WordCamp Europe 2024 concluded its vibrant three-day event, the anticipation for next year’s gathering was set in motion with the announcement that WordCamp Europe 2025 will be held in Basel, Switzerland, from June 5 to 7, 2025.
While we eagerly await the next #WCEU, here are some other exciting events to look forward to:
July 11-13, 2024: WordCamp Canada 2024 in Ottawa, ON, Canada
September 17-20, 2024: WordCamp US 2024 in Portland, Oregon
February 20-22, 2025: WordCamp Asia 2025 in Manila, Philippines
Let’s continue to innovate, collaborate, and drive WordPress forward together!
