Flashback
I’m writing this on my way back from WordCamp Lausanne, another inspiring two day WordPress community event which took place on Friday and Saturday at beautiful Lake Geneva in the French speaking part of Switzerland, also called Romandy. Last time I was in Lausanne was end of 2016 for the 25th Swiss Magento meetup. I’ve been organizing the Swiss Magento meetup since 2011 which takes place in different Swiss cities every couple of months. Our last meetup was in St. Gallen, the next one in November 2018 will be in Zürich.
At the end of 2016 I also started to organize the Zürich WooCommerce meetup, because the initiators were not able to continue after the first event. It also takes place every couple of months and has already more than 200 members. For the meetup itself we’re usually between 10 and 20 WooCommerce users and developers sharing short presentations about various WooCommerce related topics, exchanging ideas, asking and answering questions. WooCommerce is a popular ecommerce plugin for WordPress which meets all the requirements for building an ecommerce business based in Switzerland. At one of the meetups we e.g. invited representatives of 3 multi language plugin providers (WPML, MultilingualPress and Polylang) to present their approaches to support multiple languages in WordPress and WooCommerce. Having four official languages, many Swiss ecommerce websites need to support multiple languages even if they only sell to Swiss customers. Although WordPress is localized in many languages, WordPress core itself doesn’t come with a multi language feature out of the box.
I have been attending various open source community meetups in Zürich and other cities, but ever since I started building websites in 2004, I never saw myself fit to become organizer of any of those meetups. Nevertheless, I ended up as lead organizer of two meetups, because no one else would do it. It is also a great way of giving something back to the wonderful world of open source software and of course also to benefit from the networking opportunities that arise when meeting other like-minded users and developers from the community. All individuals and companies using free open source software should consider contributing something back in one way or another, either financially or through labor. We should not take WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento or any other open source software for granted. Although it’s available for free, it is worth thousands of Swiss francs considering the thousands of hours of development work that has been put into coding the software and building the communities.
WordCamp Lausanne 2018
I arrived at the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne on Friday around noon to join the ongoing Contributor Day. If you’ve never contributed your time to WordPress before, Contributor Day is a great place to start. There are plenty of opportunities for everyone to help projects like:
- Core – improve the main WordPress platform.
- Design – Help design and develop the user interface for WordPress; a home for designers and UXers alike.
- Theme Review – Join the team which is responsible for the high quality in the WordPress.org Themes Directory.
- Translations – make WordPress and its accompanying resources available in your language.
- Community – improve the WordCamp and meetup organization processes. Help getting a meetup started in your area. There are meetups in Geneva, Bern, Zürich, Luzern, Baden, Sion, and St. Gallen.
- WordPress.tv – reviews and approves every video submitted to WordPress.tv. They also help WordCamps with video post-production. They need help editing the videos of the talks so that they can be uploaded to WordPress.tv.
On Saturday, the actual WordCamp conference took place at La Maison de la Communication in Lausanne, a 15 minutes walk from the main station. The conference offered two simultaneous tracks with many presentations and two round tables, one about multi lingual WordPress and one about women in WordPress. Most of the talks were in English, some in French.
The Next Big Thing in Web Development
My two favorite presentations were from Nico Martin about Progressive Web Apps (PWA) and Silvan Hagen’s WordPress story from hobby to agency to pursuing his dream.
Here are Nico’s slides and the WordPress PWA feature plugin that he’s also been contributing to along with other developers from Google and the WordPress community. This feature plugin is an attempt to bring PWA capabilities to WordPress core.
Progressive Web Apps are user experiences that have the reach of the web, and are:
- Reliable – Load instantly and never show the downasaur, even in uncertain network conditions.
- Fast – Respond quickly to user interactions with silky smooth animations and no janky scrolling.
- Engaging – Feel like a natural app on the device, with an immersive user experience.
This new level of quality allows Progressive Web Apps to earn a place on the user’s home screen.
In general a PWA depends on the following technologies to be available:
Continue reading more about Progressive Web Apps (PWA) from Google.
WordCamp Zürich 2019
At the warm up party on Friday evening I spoke to Gerd Zimmermann who told me he would be interested in volunteering as a co-organizer for next year’s WordCamp in Zürich. There was no one yet to take on the role of lead organizer, though. Gerd has been also organizing the WordPress meetup in Bern very successfully and helped with coordinating sponsorships for WordCamp Lausanne 2018, as well as co-organizing last year’s WordCamp in the Swiss capital of Bern. The lead organizer of WordCamp Lausanne, Patricia Brun Torre, also kindly offered her help with sponorships in Romandy for WordCamp Zürich 2019.
Although I never thought about organizing a WordCamp myself, I spontaneously decided that I should accept this lovely challenge and so co-organizer Florian Blaser, during the closing remarks at WordCamp Lausanne announced, that Gerd and myself would be organizing WordCamp Zürich 2019 together. I already spoke to Ulrich Pogson who was lead organizer at last year’s WordCamp Bern and got some valuable insights and tips. I also started reading the WordCamp organizers handbook and will be applying officially as lead organizer 6 months prior to WordCamp Zürich, which is supposed to take place in September 2019. Watch out on WordCamp Central for the exact date and get in touch if you would like to be part of the organization team, a volunteer at the event or a speaker.
