With WordCamp Europe 2022 safely wrapped up behind us until next year, we take the time to go over the exciting things we’ve learned and shared over the last couple of days in sunny Porto.
Of course, WordPress isn’t new to any of us, so we all know there is always more we can do with it, as well as for it. Between attending the booth to shake hands with WordPress community members after such a long pause, we also took time to attend some of the talks. Here’s an outline of some of the workshops we visited at WCEU 2022.
Using WordPress as an API, by Nate Finch
Speaker: Nate Finch
Nate Finch is a senior WordPress engineer at Strattic.com with a continuous passion to help build serverless integrations for WP. WordPress is traditionally used to build websites, offering customers an easy to use building and editing experience. But what if you want to use the ease of creating content, to build your own application? Or what about linking a blog to an already existing platform?
WordPress can be easily used as an Application Programming Interface due to its strength in regards to speed, security, and scalability. You can furthermore combine WP with other APIs, adding even more flexibility on top. In the end, using WP as an API gives you more freedom to tailor your business from scratch, just the way you want it.
Security Lessons Learned from 2021
Speaker: Victor Santoyo
Victor Santoyo is a Senior Account Executive for Sucuri Security at GoDaddy. His workshop looked at how to tackle critical vulnerabilities (AnonymousFox, CC skimmers) that were detected within content management systems such as WordPress, plugins, API keys, etc. focused. As we are well aware, year after year, we are facing a wide range of critical vulnerabilities when wanting to keep our online business safe and up and running. 2021 has not been any different in that regard, yet luckily for us, the means to tackle vulnerabilities is also getting stronger going forward.
A tiny reminder – our WP Toolkit introduces an automated vulnerability scan. We’re using the Patchstack database to identify whether there’s a new vulnerability reported every hour. Once a vulnerability is detected, WP Toolkit will mark the site in the interface, letting site admins know they should take action.
WordPress and Web3 trends
Speaker: Dave Lockie
Dave Lockie has a keen interest in WordPress, open-source, and technology trends in general, especially web3. Most likely you have already heard of the Web3 as decentralized web, using cryptocurrencies, blockchains as well as NFTs. The vision of Web3 should authorize users to organize, connect and transact in new ways. Dave describes it as “decentralized digital technologies that give people new ways to organize and collaborate.” Based on these new possibilities, it unlocks a huge potential in how WordPress is used and developed. He also mentioned during his WCEU 2022 session: “Web3 gives us the freedom to transact…and tools for borderless coordination that we’ve never had before.” He is convinced that Web3 aligns with WordPress’s vision of democratizing publishing and commerce.
From his point of view, the Web3 will interfere Web2 to its core, providing us with a better understanding of the institutions we’ve created and how these should go forward.
Optimize Your WordPress
Speaker: Adam Silverstein, Justin Ahinon
Adam Silverstein is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google, as well as an image component maintainer and WordPress core committe. Justin Ahinon is an expert WordPress developer. On a daily basis, Justin works at Yoast, where he endeavors to offer valuable contributions to Open Source projects.
Regardless of the source, your homepage is probably the most visited page of your site. Make sure it does what it’s intended for: guide the visitor to the page they’re looking for asap. Not only the aspects of a positive user experience matter, the speed of your website is also important. You should thus consider the tools you can use to test and monitor your website, weigh performance when updating sites, and setting a certain performance budget.
At Plesk, we offer and highly recommend the 360 Monitoring suite, taking care of both site and server monitoring comprehensively. This is why we invested significant resources in the further development of individual functions and the integration of the Full Site Check. As a brand new feature, it offers another panel that crawls sites for errors and bugs. All websites, online stores, blogs, and other online assets can hide many potential issues. Integrated images, links, advertising, updates, third-party integrations, and much more – all these factors can damage your online presence if they do not function as expected.
Matt on WordPress
Last but not least, Matt’s closing speech on WordPress brought everyone together, as always.
Matt said that “maybe in 5 years there could be a converter that could convert the PHP that powers WordPress into another server-side language.” When a PHP developer asked if WordPress is on the way to JavaScript, Matt mentioned that he believes Gutenberg provides an improved interface with JavaScript over PHP, where a page refresh is usually required.
Additionally, Matt also stated that WordPress 6.0 is being adopted quickly. WordPress 6.0 was adopted “10% faster” than WordPress 5.9.”
There are many WordPress hosting offerings to choose from – we’re delighted to stand by them with our WP Toolkit. We simplify the lives of web professionals by giving you features like one-click staging, cloning, syncing, automated mass-management of multiple WordPress instances on your server, and more.
We’re Part of Global Communities, Meeting web professionals and industry leaders all over the world. To be up to date for upcoming events and further details in the future, visit our events page and take a look at past and future events we´re attending.
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One comment
It was very nice to see you guys in the WordCamp. I’ve shared a lot of insights about WordPress Toolkit that I thing will be very interesting to see in next versions!
Please be always in WCEU!