🇵🇹 WordCamp Europe 2020

WordPress has a native database caching system called the Transients API. This simple wrapper can be used for caching database queries, remote data, or other expensive routines.

In this technical talk you will discover how to best use the API and the pitfalls to avoid (content which is neither documented nor generally available, so this will be a genuine eye-opener for developers).

Prototyping is important for a number of reasons: it gives us the opportunity to not only visualise a product before we compromise too much time and effort, but also to identify potential flaws in user experience, accessibility, or even functionality.

Let’s understand how can we prototype websites and other products, considering the WordPress architecture. What should be our mindset when creating prototypes? When should we go for high or low fidelity? Anyssa’s session will take a look at some tools and techniques to create better prototypes that can really add value to your WordPress projects.

Merary will be hosting a practical session covering the most relevant considerations for developers, testers, designers and project managers in relation to accessibility best practices.

In this interactive session, attendees will be able to emulate people with disabilities in various scenarios, audit apps (Android/iOS), websites, digital documentation and design techniques using modern concepts and tools. We will cover all Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1), WAI-ARIA best practices and Inclusive Design methodologies.

Have you always wanted to make your company a place that’s welcoming and supportive to every member of your team? Always wanted to know why the underrepresented engineers you hire keep leaving… or maybe never apply in the first place?

Wondering what you’re missing when it comes to supporting your marginalised colleagues? Listen and learn, my friend. We’ll learn why it’s hard to be underrepresented at work and what you can do to be a better ally. Expect a mix of practical tips and broad direction, research-based claims, and personal experience. We’ll talk about the big picture, but we’ll also get into templates and other tools you can use to be more inclusive.

Lighting, audio and storytelling are all essential when creating video-based content on your website. However, captions are often forgotten, even though they benefit more people than you might think.

You might assume that they’re just for the d/Deaf and hard of hearing people, but there are many benefits that can apply to many different people.

From sharing his own personal experience as a deaf person, to his experience in digital marketing and content marketing, Ahmed will share stories on how you, as a content creator, can maximise the impact of your videos by making use of captions. But it’s not just about writing “whatever is said”. It is an art.

Are you a developer, designer, writer, or site builder? Did you start freelancing to have true work-life balance and follow your passions? Do you find yourself working really hard and not making enough money? This talk is for you.

Working harder is not the answer, changing a few thing in your business is. This story will encourage you to take a good look at your business model, work smarter not harder, and grow your business sustainably. Everything you need to live a happy freelance life.

As business owners, we have big goals and dreams. To build a team, to launch a new product, to craft a business that works for us vs us being a slave to it. Yet with all the noise of daily to-dos, the distraction of shiny objects, and the world telling us what we “should” be doing vs what we want to be doing it’s no wonder we stay stuck.

In this talk, Jocelyn will explore the habitual patterns that keep us stuck and self-sabotaging our success. You will learn how to determine what you really want in your business, how to chart a course to get there, how to stay laser-focussed, and, ultimately, create a business you love.

The early days of eCommerce were shaped by a paradigm of catalogs and carts. We grew up with eBay and Amazon shaping how we thought about eCommerce stores and the development of plugins for WordPress followed this trend.

Recently we’ve seen a shift of new merchants going direct to consumers (DTC). This change is more than a shift in distribution and not simply a cosmetic change. We’re moving away from tons of products and variations and towards single (and few) product options and stronger storytelling. Product pages have changed. And designers and developers working with new merchants will be invited to enter this new paradigm and develop a different kind of eCommerce project.

People aren’t interested in what you have to offer, your products or services; people want their own desires and thoughts responded to. Ivana will describe in detail what it is you need to do so that your content produces the exact thing people want.

How to know what it is people want, which tools to use and how to produce the most relevant, engaging and valuable content – both for your customers and yourselves? What makes the content really great, and truly stand out? These are some of the questions that will be answered during Ivana’s talk.

Performance matters. Doug’s talk will take a look at some tools and techniques that will boost your site’s speed. There are three main places where speed can be impacted when delivering a site to an end user, and we can have differing levels of impact on each of those places.

The first is the end user’s hardware and browser. The second is the infrastructure used to serve the site, and the third is the code for the site.

When we think about AI, it’s hard to tell hype from genuine utility. In reality, AI is a bundle of over 25 different technologies, ranging from the ‘everyday’ to the cutting edge.

This talk uses the blade of WordPress to slice through the hype and focus on practical, achievable ways to start leveraging AI technologies into your WordPress tech stack today. Today we see the primary use cases falling into three silos: AI Enhancement, Improved Productivity and Data, Analytics and Intelligence. In his session, David will break these silos down into three practical examples each – using a range of solutions and services.

CSS Grid has been around for over two years in major browsers. While it’s amazing to work with, there’s still room for improvement. Currently, only direct child elements of a container can be placed with CSS Grid.

With Subgrid, you can bring the defined grid another level down. This enhances the feature of CSS Grid even further. In this talk, Jessica wants to show the possibilities that Subgrid creates.

Headless CMS architecture is gaining a lot of traction in the CMS ecosystem. WordPress has the potential to become the best headless solution in the market but, although it’s already a nice option, not all the challenges have been solved yet.

In this talk, Luis will walk through all of the available frameworks and explain what can be achieved with each of them. He will compare all the important aspects (SEO, performance, plugin compatibility, DX, UX…) with the PHP themes and the upcoming block-based templates. Finally, once the current status is clear, he will explore the remaining challenges we still need work on to be able to match, or even surpass, the sweet WordPress experience we know and love.

Miriam says that when she started with WordPress, it was a shiny, exciting product with endless functionality. But, as the years wore on, WordPress started to lose its lustre. The future of WordPress overall was in question.

She believes we are now seeing the beginning of a WordPress renaissance. JavaScript, headless, and JAMstack are making developers excited once again. This is a very promising shift for our community since products can live or die by the enthusiasm (or lack thereof) of developers. In this talk, Miriam will discuss what this evolution means for WordPress the platform, and the steps we can take to support and encourage this momentum, and ensure the future of our favorite CMS for many years to come.

Keeping your site secure is difficult, and often times knowing where to start is the hardest step. With terms and acronyms like cross site scripting (XSS), cross site request forgery (CSRF) and others, it’s hard to know just what to do to keep your site secure.

Sometimes the best way to know how to protect a site is to hack one yourself! In this talk we’ll all join forces and become hackers for a short time to hack a live site and learn just what these various attacks are. Most importantly, we’ll also discuss how to protect your site from being exploited.

Hristo gave his first talk about WordPress speed optimisations back in 2013 in London. Since then, a lot has changed – people have started caring more and spending more time optimising their websites.

In this talk, Hristo will go through the different parts of the WordPress loading process and share the latest must-use technologies in 2020 that will give you the best possible site performance. He will explore improvements that have been made within WordPress and how web services have evolved to allow us to achieve previously unimaginable results. Hristo will cover the latest caching mechanisms, improvements in PHP, new imaging formats, scripts, CSS optimisation and more.

WordPress is the most successful application that was ever written in PHP. As such, the two have a symbiotic relationship, where the proliferation of one benefits the other and vice versa.

In recent years, the introduction of PHP 7 helped make WordPress better and more competitive, allowing users to deploy high-performance sites with radically better response times and while using fewer resources than ever before – simply by upgrading the underlying platform. In this session, Zeev will tell the story of how PHP 7 came to be (and WordPress’s role in it), the impact it has on the PHP ecosystem, as well as provide a glimpse into some of the key upcoming features to look for in PHP 8.

Every website should ideally be built so that whoever visits it, for whichever possible reason, is able to navigate through it: we can describe this idea as “universal design”.

Obviously, in practice, it’s impossible to build the perfect website for everyone, but, if we want to take steps towards this ideal, three concepts can guide our choices: accessibility, usability and inclusion. In this talk, Stefano will explore these concepts, discussing what they are, what makes them different from one another (despite their overlappings) and how we can use them together to build the best possible experience for most of our users.

While working as a digital sales consultant (as a designer and developer) for several years, Sonja has been able to work with a variety of companies and helped them to increase their sales online. In this talk she will quickly go through the basics of growth hacking from a designer’s point of view.

She will open up the mindset of business-driven design, give tips on how to design for better conversion in digital channels and how to measure the impact of the designs via A/B testing. The talk will include some real-life design examples and A/B testing results.

Great websites don’t just happen. Exceptional user experiences are part of a rich study of psychological principles that are more than pretty pictures. By mastering a few design concepts we can create UI patterns that make it easier for users to navigate pages, consume information, make purchases and interact with our online brand.

With the evolution of WordPress, design will play an increasingly important role as decisions move into the hands of users.

This talk will explore how the key laws of UX can be applied to every aspect of our site, plugin, app or store, providing designers, developers and product managers with a framework of terms to create well-designed interfaces for editors and end-users.

‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.’ Things are inevitably going to break. And that’s stressful. If your triaging process involves manually seeking through log files or you only find out something is broken after a customer calls you, then you’re probably not fixing problems efficiently.

In this lightning talk Niels will discuss how to prevent, proactively detect and quickly react to issues. He will provide a short overview of tools that help with testing and preventing issues. The talk will cover logging frameworks and platforms that will actively alert you and help find out what’s going wrong. Finally, Niels will advise on adding metrics to your site in order to prevent future issues.

When done right, code review is a great tool for levelling up developers and sharing knowledge, but when done wrong it can have a hugely negative effect, causing stress, demoralisation and burn out.

In this talk, Sarah will explore some simple ways to ensure you get more from code review, how it can become a tool for good and can help improve developers’ knowledge and skills, instead of just fixing current code issues.

CSS is incredibly powerful for styling, but did you know it can also dramatically affect how accessible and inclusive your website is as well? Many operating systems now have advanced settings to allow users to customise and personalise their digital experiences.

By using newly introduced standards, we can also honour these visual preferences in our web pages using CSS.

In this talk, Kirsty will show you how to honour a user’s visual preferences and how simple changes can affect the overall user experience for everyone, not just those with specific accessibility requirements.

About 90% of start-ups fail. What if better project and benefits management could lower that number? Vili’s presentation will discuss how benefits realisation through good project management can increase success.

Each project starts with a business case and a benefits management plan – i.e. the reason why a project is undertaken, or a product is being built. However, many projects may last up to a few years and they may end up providing a product or service that no longer delivers the sought-after benefits, thus wasting time and resource. Benefits realisation management is the key to successful business-driven projects and products.

The New York Times release of Snowfall in 2012 took the web industry by storm. Media-rich and captivating, its design evoked wonder, fear, and desperation in the face of an avalanche. Snowfall was one of the first great art-directed digital experiences in this era of the modern web.

Art direction isn’t a new concept, though. Look at any magazine or print publication—designers have long been creating evocative media experiences. Recent web technologies have made the dream of unconstrained art-directed experiences on the web possible. In this talk, Mel will explore how we can use the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, to create gorgeous art-directed websites.

After spending enough time working with WordPress, you end up developing a sixth sense of what works and what doesn’t work. For example, experience allows us to distinguish good ideas from bad ones, or a professional web design from a poor quality one.

However, if you want to build a profitable WordPress site, why rely solely on your instincts when you could rely on objective measures implementing an A/B test? In this talk Ruth will present why A/B tests are important and the types of tests you might want to do on your own websites. She will spend some time reviewing an A/B checklist to discover what things to test and will provide some implemented test examples and their results.

While WordPress does need to be more open to youths and the next generation, it’s also vital to realise that the next generation needs to embrace WordPress. Otherwise, WordPress will become another relic like MySpace, AOL, and even Facebook. Why are these platforms relics? David’s talk will explain all.

The audience will be quickly shown why it’s important to pay as much attention to the “next adopters” as it is to advancing technologies like Gutenberg, REST API, and accessibility. The talk will explore what the community can do to be more open and receptive – from organisers to developers.

Mary will be sharing her experience of building the WordPress community in Nigeria, detailing how the Lagos community went from 147 members to 2,300+ and grew from one event in two years to monthly events for the past three years.

She will tell the story of how the community expanded from being in only two cities with Meetup groups in Nigeria, to involving people across 21 cities and all within the past three years. When she started, Mary says she was just a blogger using WordPress.com and she was new to self-hosted WordPress technologies. She says she made a lot of mistakes, but also learnt a ton on this journey, and is still learning, as she looks forward to hosting a WordCamp Nigeria, West Africa, or Africa in the future.

If you want your link building strategy to drive measurable growth as a vital tactic in your SEO strategy and help you outrank your competitors in 2020, you need to be earning links that give you a competitive advantage.

James will share actionable insights into how marketers can leverage PR tactics to earn links which contribute towards accelerated organic growth; understanding what journalists are looking for in pitches and how to use data-driven content marketing to create newsworthy headlines to tell exciting stories to top-tier press, which result in high authority, topically relevant links at scale and which engage readers and spark conversations.

While working as a plurilingual developer for many years, Amit gained insights into what makes the difference between a successful multilingual website and a failed project.

As WPML CCO, he has many thousands of hours of experience with real cases of multilingual websites and the challenges their owners, developers, and content writers face.

In his session, Amit will present an anonymised study of what multilingual site owners find most challenging and what works for them, as well as what works well for professional translation services. This is not a “which WordPress multilingual solution is the best” kind of talk.

An overview (followed by actionable steps) for WordPress users in complying with EU data protection law and cookie law.

Suzanne’s session will briefly look at which businesses around the world the GDPR applies to, before going through the principles of the GDPR and how these relate to WordPress sites and online marketing.

She will explore how EU cookie law impacts on WordPress sites and online marketing and how the future changes to this law (expected in the next year or so) will potentially revolutionise online marketing.

Finally, Suzanne will share 5 actionable steps that every WordPress user (no matter how small the business) needs to take to comply with the GDPR and EU cookie laws.

This talk is intended to show how AI is used to crawl the Internet to find WordPress sites with vulnerabilities and recruit them for cyberterrorist botnets in the ‘Hacking World War’, which is currently running underground.

AI is an invaluable resource to help the actors of this story, which also involves net spiders, the Dark Net and a one-click hacking software.

Nestor’s talk will help you get inside the mind of a cyberterrorist, and in turn, you will learn what they are searching for, and why and how they hack sites. Your journey will start when you receive a job offer to hack a competitor…