🇺🇸 WordCamp US 2021

At 42% of the web, WordPress is no stranger to expansive growth, and 2021 illustrated that we as a global community grow alongside it. In this talk, WordPress’s Executive Director, Josepha Haden Chomphosy, reflects on the trends seeded in 2020 and invites you to look forward into the future growth opportunities we have together.

The current and next generation of WordPress creators need a clear learning journey, one that results in demonstrated competency. Learn.WordPress.org is a new resource available to anyone interested in learning about, building, or contributing to WordPress. In addition to offering on demand education, it also will become an invaluable resource to employers who care about continuing professional development and meeting the evolving needs of clients. To make this happen, organizations are being invited to contribute as advisors or subject matter experts, to help create Learn WordPress content or offer feedback on what skills they hope to see from future employees. Join the WordPress Training team in this talk to hear all about the upcoming changes to Learn WordPress, where your support can make an impact, and how one day, simply visiting a WordPress.org profile will become a key part of your hiring process.

Sometimes website accessibility can feel overwhelming with so many details to manage. That’s when hearing from other developers and site owners a little further down the accessibility journey can be helpful. Bet will share some of the accessibility journey of her agency (which started with one client), along with some insights about rationales for making websites accessible and practical tips like accessibility insurance and tax credits.

The current and next generation of WordPress creators need a clear learning journey, one that results in demonstrated competency. Learn.WordPress.org is a new resource available to anyone interested in learning about, building, or contributing to WordPress. In addition to offering on demand education, it also will become an invaluable resource to employers who care about continuing professional development and meeting the evolving needs of clients. To make this happen, organizations are being invited to contribute as advisors or subject matter experts, to help create Learn WordPress content or offer feedback on what skills they hope to see from future employees. Join the WordPress Training team in this talk to hear all about the upcoming changes to Learn WordPress, where your support can make an impact, and how one day, simply visiting a WordPress.org profile will become a key part of your hiring process.

The Japanese WordPress community hosted WordCamp Japan 2021 in June 2021. I will share the successes and difficulties faced during the preparation of the event and the challenges we solved in how we communicated to overcome them. At the end to this talk, you will see how community organizers and community members can improve their interactions.

This talk is in part a celebration of Jill Binder’s 10-year anniversary with WordPress, and in part an “if I can do it, you can do it” moving, inspirational, and sometimes funny set of four short stories.

Many people know Jill as the Leader of the Diverse Speaker Training Group (#WPDiversity), but what people don’t know is this was not overnight.

She will tell the stories of how she went from: 1. Poverty and hopelessness to WordPress developer; 2. to Local WordCamp organizer; 3. to Global Community contributor; 4. and finally, to Leader of the first Community working group.

Jill will show how WordPress has been an empowering space to gain skills, try new things, get mentorship, and grow to become a leader…. all for free, and all one little step at a time. And how you can do this, too.

We all really felt the COVID pandemic when WordCamp Asia, the new flagship event, was canceled just a few days before the event. Since then, early in 2020, most events have been online.

I’m the kind of person who needs to regularly recharge their social battery by meeting friends in the WordPress community. In this lighting talk, I will share a few ways I used to recharge my social battery to inspire you. Because we all know what happens when your battery drains…

How to even begin? What would I even create? And what tools should I use to create it? For a developer who hasn’t spent much time with JavaScript beyond tweaking a few jQuery scripts, approaching Gutenberg development can feel like an impenetrable fortress reserved for only the best and brightest frontend engineers. The barriers to entry are increasingly daunting, with tools like React, JSX, Node, NPM, and Webpack evolving faster than ever.

But it doesn’t have to be intimidating. Cory Webb guides you through the maze as he breaks down Gutenberg to make it easier than ever to start developing custom blocks for your clients.

Let’s look towards the horizon of modern website development with core WordPress tooling and paint a picture of how blocks, patterns and theme.json interplay with the new Full Site Editing experience — empowering creators to design and build beautiful websites.

The internet uses a massive amount of energy, from servers, network equipment, and cooling to our own display devices, and every website that’s built contributes to it.

Tackling climate change in a meaningful way can feel daunting and insurmountable for an individual. In this session, we provide actionable, specific recommendations for practitioners concerned with sustainability — designers, developers, and key players involved in website creation — for what they can do with certain plugins and approaches on WordPress to design and build a greener website. We’ll also show how a greener website benefits not only the planet but also website performance, accessibility, and user experience.

For too long, themes have had to be everything and forced to become what they never suited. With the new tools and experience created, they can return to their essence. To start, we will look at how we got into problems, why the approach now is essential, and the future. Themes can return to being about style, embrace artistic expression- free from having to be everything. As this happens, opportunities will grow beyond themes for art direction. There are so many possibilities when we let themes be themes.

Block Styles are a great way to creatively customize blocks using (mostly) CSS. In this presentation, I’ll talk about how Gutenberg can be a conduit for art and design, and share examples of Block Styles that turn standard blocks into works of art.

Make friends with early customers and the WordPress community as a key strategy for growth, providing better support and creating a clearer product roadmap.

With only 6 weeks to go before inauguration, the hardest of hard stops for launch, we embarked on a whirlwind journey to give the incoming White House administration its online voice. Each US presidential administration has its own White House site, meaning a fresh launch, not a full migration or revamp of the previous site. In this talk I will take a look at how we broke down the needs for the block editor and showcase some of the truly visual editing experience we created to give the administration a fast and intuitive way to get its message across.

The current and next generation of WordPress creators need a clear learning journey, one that results in demonstrated competency. Learn.WordPress.org is a new resource available to anyone interested in learning about, building, or contributing to WordPress. In addition to offering on demand education, it also will become an invaluable resource to employers who care about continuing professional development and meeting the evolving needs of clients. To make this happen, organizations are being invited to contribute as advisors or subject matter experts, to help create Learn WordPress content or offer feedback on what skills they hope to see from future employees. Join the WordPress Training team in this talk to hear all about the upcoming changes to Learn WordPress, where your support can make an impact, and how one day, simply visiting a WordPress.org profile will become a key part of your hiring process.

Are you selling something online or planning to start an eCommerce business? It is really easy to woo your customers and increase sales with easy-to-follow tips that any WooCommerce store owner can implement today.

Open Source thrives on community contributions in the form of event organization, marketing, communications, volunteering, and yes, even code. This helps the projects move forward and stay relevant.

Not everyone who works on open source projects is a coder or developer. Smaller tasks help people increase confidence and gain experience, which, in turn, leads to more contributions. Code is very important and so are all the other parts. Contributing back to Open Source helps folks to feel connected with their community. A more polished project leads to a better overall experience.

But how does one become a contributor? Together we’ll discuss what we can do as a community to help foster new contributors and keep the ones we already have.