Drawing over 2,500 WordPress enthusiasts, this year’s WordCamp Europe – our favourite annual event – took place in the historic city of Torino in Northern Italy. Designed to explore and celebrate the world’s most popular web platform, the June conference featured a jam-packed agenda, with plenty of hands-on workshops, expert talks and insightful presentations centred around the CMS that now powers more than 43% of the internet.
Contributor day
A firm fixture in the WordCamp schedule, Contributor Day brought together 726 contributors working across 25 teams to support the WordPress project. This year, five members of the Big Bite team took part in the event across three tables – Design, Coding Standards and Core.
Design
The design table concentrated on the next iteration of the default WordPress theme – Twenty Twenty Five. We spent the morning gathering inspiration from various online sources for the new theme, and afterwards, collaboratively explored different ideas for the theme’s layout, blocks, and patterns.
Coding Standards
Jay, a Lead Engineer at Big Bite, joined the Coding Standards team at WCEU run by Juliette Reinders Folmer. Having already contributed to an open-source project maintained by Juliette, Jay used this opportunity to work with her directly and apply their expertise to the WordPress Coding Standards. As well as engaging in discussions around coding standards and the future of PHP within a WordPress context, participants also looked at ways to make WordPress software more inclusive.
Core
Three members of our engineering team also joined the core table, which involved onboarding onto the WordPress platform and focusing on the priority items for the upcoming 6.6 release in GitHub.
The session shared valuable insights from Automattic on how we can best contribute our time and skills to the platform, giving our team a deeper understanding of the processes behind core contribution along with a renewed enthusiasm to get involved.
“The most important tech initiative of the last 10 years”
Joined by our friends and colleagues from other WP VIP agencies, we also attended the Enterprise WordPress event held by WordPress VIP, which showcased our recent work for The Times and The Sunday Times.
Delivered by News UK Principal Engineer, Mohan Raj Pachaiyappan, and Senior Product Manager Mariana Dias Pereira, the talk focused on the 18 month journey of replatforming onto a WordPress based CMS, built by Big Bite. As a result of the transformative project, newsrooms across the two leading titles can now create and publish content much faster than ever before, with an average speed improvement of 34% when compared to Methode, the legacy print-based CMS.
The Times
Transforming digital publishing for one of the UK’s largest publishers
Summer update
The final talk of the week was delivered by WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg, who discussed the upcoming Gutenberg phases, the importance of contributing back to WordPress – in particular highlighting the success of the Contributor Mentorship Program – as well as fielding questions from the audience.
“Playground is going to change everything”
The main takeaway from Matt’s talk was his enthusiasm and excitement for the development of the WordPress Playground, which makes it possible to run WordPress instantly on any device without a host.
As Playground was first introduced at last year’s WordCamp US, we’ve already tried it out on a number of internal projects. As a result, we share Matt’s enthusiasm for the future of this tool, from being able to showcase our work to streamlining our QA process on client and internal projects.
Ensuring future success
Matt went on to share 11 opinions that will ensure WordPress remains sustainable for decades to come, which we’ve summarised here:
- 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 center.
- 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
To close out the conference, the organising team also announced that WordCamp Europe 2025 will take place next June, located in the scenic surroundings of Basel, Switzerland. For any agencies or individuals interested in shaping the next event, the call for organisers is now open until August 31st.
We look forward to seeing you there!
