You know I am spontaneous, when it comes to WordCamps, right? So three weeks ago was WordCamp Berlin. On the Contributor Day on Friday, Jenny Wong asked the design team, if they could help WordCamp Copenhagen with their website. She was the mentor of the organizing team – the single one left! The organization didn’t went too well and they didn’t had a real website. So the awesome design team helped with that and when the Contribtutor Day ended, WordCamp Copenhage had a nice website.
Meeting new communities
I was not involed in this process, but I offered my help as a “experienced organizer” if the organizer of WordCamp Copenhagen or Jenny needed more help. So in the following week, only around 9 days before the WordCamp, I searched for flights to Copenhagen and found a really good deal. So, here I was, booking another WordCamp trip đ
Saturday: Conference Day
On Saturday around four in the morning I got up to catch a flight at 7:30, which is pretty early for me. But as the flight to Copenhagen only takes about 45min and the airpor was only 35min away from the venue, I managed to arrive just in time for the first session.
How to build a social network in WordPress from scratch with BuddyPress
The first talk was from RocĂo Valdivia about BuddyPress. Before she joined Automattic as a Community Wrangler, she focused on developing for BuddyPress. I still haven’t really used BuddyPress myself in a project, but I got some new insights on how it works and how flexible it is.
âBriefly in Englishâ â The user experience perspective of multilingual and multi-regional websites
The next talk was really very interresting. Thomas Hurd talked about multilingual website. But not only about website with multiple languages, we all heared lots on that topic. He talked about websites tageting multiple regions and some of them even with multiple languages. He showed us, which combinations are very common and how you deal with content on those pages as well as domains.
After those two talks, I did some volunteering. The talks were in Dansk anyways đ But I could at least make sure, no one falls asleep because the coffee was empty đ After lunch and some more coffee cooking, I joined another great English talk.
Advanced techniques for testing and updating WordPress core and plugins to avoid regressions
In his talk Otto KekÀlÀinen shared his experiences with automated testing in WordPress. He also talked about why and how people should make updates and backups. He also shared some example on how to do regression test and how to use Travis-CI to automate things.
WordPress development with Docker
My second last talk was the one from Peter Suhm about his workflow on using Docker in development. He gave a smal intorduction into Docker and the basic principles and then showed, how easy and fast you can get a development environment up and running with Docker. I use Docker myself a lot lately, but he used a simpler approach with the “official” WordPress Docker image that has almost everything bundled (except MySQL/MariaDB).
Will the new General Data Protection Regulation affect me and if so, how should I respond?
The last English talk from Nicolai Elberling was about the data protection regulation in the EU. Some regulations are put into national laws in different ways, but overall, they seem to be pretty much the same in Germany as well. I had to deal with this topic a lot in projects and it was interresting to see, how other countries handle those topics. In summary, it’s always best to collect as less information as possible and delete them, on user’s request.
After party
The after party was not really a party. But we’ve met in a nice CafĂ© and enjoyed the warm weather outside. It was a good opportunity to meet some more people. One attendee was originally from Germany but moved to Denmark many years ago.
Sunday: Workshop Day
Most two day WordCamps have either two conference days or a conference day and a Contributor Day. Not WordCamp Copenhagen. The second day’s program was filled with multiple workshops. But before I went to the with English session, I had to do some mandatory sight seeing đ
Contributing to WordPress
I’ve visited two workshops. The first one was in Dansk, though, which I couldn’t see from the title: Workshop â Polyglots. But that was fine đ The second one was from Jenny Wong about contributing to WordPress. Quite a big number of attendees said, that they have never contributed to WordPress brefore. I hope after this workshop, they now know, that everyone can contribute.
The “WordPress DK association”
After the workshops, some former WordCamp organizers and other active community members sat togther on a round table and talked about the state of the Danish WordPress community. Jenny Wong, Maja Benke and I joined this discussion, to give some insights from other communties. Jenny explained, why having a national association might introduce some problems and risks. But the Danish community could explain, how things are different in Denmark and which benefits an association would have (like being able to get some spaces cheaper or for free). I found the discussion really productive and I hope that it can be a starting point for a more active community, so we will have a WordCamp next year, with more than one organizer. Or even more than one WordCamp đ
Summary
Even tough I had to fly back on Sunday evening, I really enjoyed my short trip to Copenhagen. I even went swimming before I had to go to the airport. It was nice to meet new people and a new national community. I am looking forward to seeing some of them in Paris in two weeks.
Two years ago I attended 6 WordCamp, last year 8. I really didn’t meant to visit even more WordCamps, but I just couldn’t resist đ So far, I already have visited 4 WordCamps, and three more are booked (WordCamp Europe in Paris, WordCamp Brighton and WordCamp US in Nashville). I also want to go the WordCamp Zagreb. So it look like ending up with at least 8 WordCamps this year. I probably have to skip WordCamp Tokyo though đ Oh, I almost forgot the WordCamp in/near Cologne happening later this year. So my plan to visit less WordCamps just failed đ