About what was my session at WordCamp Europe 2023?

A few days ago, the largest European event for the WordPress community took place – WordCamp Europe 2023. I am still trying to assimilate everything – from sessions and new acquaintances to all the news we learned during the conference.

According to official data from the organizing team, over 2500 people from 94 countries attended the event. A total of 42 sessions and 18 workshops were held over the course of 2 days – June 9th and 10th, 2023.

The conference venue – Megaron – Athens Concert Hall was divided into 3 tracks, with sessions taking place simultaneously in each track (and none of them were to be missed). Fortunately, all sessions were recorded and will be available on the official WordPress YouTube channel and soon on WordPress.tv.

Among the sponsors of the camp were Hostinger, Google, PayPal, Gravity Forms, WP Engine, Elementor, SiteGround, and many others.

What’s new in the WordPress community and project itself?

Each of the 42 sessions provided clear and specific takeaways for the attendees – insights, conclusions, and specifics related to their respective topics.

A significant percentage of them focused on Gutenberg – the default WordPress editor since version 5. There were also many sessions that highlighted the importance of block themes and how the CMS has evolved from a blogging platform to a software for full-site editing. AI (Artificial Intelligence) was also a topic of discussion, and numerous presentations had at least a few slides dedicated to it.

20 years of WordPress and the keynote talk by Matt Mullenweg, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Matías Ventura

On the last day of the camp, June 10th, a dedicated time and space were allocated for the closing session, led by WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

The discussion covered several topics, and questions from the attendees also led to new ones, such as Playground – creating WordPress installations on the go, in the browser, even via mobile phones, Openverse – a library with over 800 million resources, including images and videos, with an open license, the future of Gutenberg, and more.

My talk: WordPress Extended: build unique websites on top of WP

Since I strongly believe that the flexibility of WordPress, and specifically Gutenberg, allows us to create fully customized experiences, UX & UI, I decided to focus my session precisely on this aspect of project development.

Key points in the presentation:

➡️ How the large selection of ready-made themes and templates becomes a problem when developing a customized WordPress website, and why this is a problem for both clients and developers.

➡️ How the solution manifests itself in the form of WordPress.

➡️ What are the modern libraries for interactive and unique front-end development.

➡️ How to implement a ready-made front-end into a newly created custom WordPress theme.

➡️ How to structure the content and elements of the theme.

➡️ When and how to use custom post types and custom taxonomies.

➡️ Implementing front-end sections to Gutenberg blocks.

After the session and during the dedicated Q&A time, there were many insightful questions related to accessibility, optimizing loading speed considering the front-end technologies used, utilizing Advanced Custom Fields for creating Gutenberg blocks (see how here), and more.

What I will take away from this conference is the strength and inspiration of the WordPress community, the fact that this CMS is here to stay, and its continuous improvement thanks to all the contributors, ensuring its prominent place for many years to come.

Next stop – WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turin, Italy ??

Stay blond 😉