Last weekend, I was lucky to join around 3000 people in what is the largest WordPress conference in the world: the WordCamp Europe 2024, which took place in Turin, in the north of Italy.
WordCamps are a three-day conference around WordPress, the open source platform to create your blog, business website, online store, donation page or anything you can imagine. This blog is actually (em)powered by WordPress.
Contributing together
The first day is called Contributor Day, and it’s a day when everyone gets together in small teams to contribute to the open source WordPress project. The variety of these contributions ranges from writing documentation and answering support tickets, to string translation and software development, to design and marketing. The results are always amazing, like in this year, when the translation team announced they had translated more than 21,000 strings during the day.
The tickets for the Contributor Day are very sought after because they’re much more limited than the ones for the general conference, due to the fact that everyone must have enough room to work and space is limited.
Conference days
The second day, the registration began very early, followed shortly by the talks, and it was non-stop until the evening of the third day. There were talks specifically about WordPress, like Twenty Twenty-Four: Pushing Default Themes Forward, by Jessica Lyschik from Greyd, which revealed the magic behind WordPress’s latest default theme, Twenty Twenty-Four, highlighting its innovative features, its stance of being a default theme which is not a blog, and its appeal to a diverse range of users.
Another compelling one was Digital and Linguistic Accessibility Techniques and Strategies for Deaf People by Elena Panciera & Chiara Pennetta. Addressing misconceptions about deafness, this talk went through various strategies to make content accessible for all, emphasizing the importance of inclusive communication methods.
Starting on this day, you could also visit the booth of the many sponsors. Many of them give away cool prizes ranging from LEGO sets to iPads and even VR Glasses! I was blown away by the Kubio Builder which uses AI to configure the theme and generate content, all based on user’s input.
The so-called “family photo” was taken on the third and last day, and it was such a great moment.
It’s so inspiring to spend three days with so many people doing amazing things not only with WordPress, but also in diverse areas going from linguistics accessibility to product ideation.
The most refreshing thing is that the people here trust in making an impactful change in the world. I talked to many people who have an NGO to help others, to improve communities, to just make things better. And to top all this, at the end of the second day, Matt delivered his traditional keynote with so many cool things to come!
He even announced, after a question from one of the attendees, that each WordPress Meetup will receive a Creator plan hosted in WordPress.com for free! You can watch Matt’s keynote at the WordCamp 2024 below:
Around Turin
On the day I was flying back to Hamburg, I got the chance to see some of Turin and wasn’t disappointed: the ancient area around the Piazza Castello looks really beautiful!
The Porta Palatina deserves a special mention, since it’s a city gate straight from the times of the Roman Empire. Right in front of it has two statues of remarkable Romans: Julius Caesar and Augustus.
WordCamp Europe 2025: Basel
The next WordCamp Europe 2025 will take place in Basel, Switzerland. Hopefully I will be able to present some talk. My last time talking in a WordCamp was in the WordCamp Europe in Berlin 2019.
I’m already looking forward to it!
