Making History within the Historic Athens

Our team just returned from WordCamp Europe 2023, which took place in Athens, Greece, from 8 to 10 June 2023. 2,545 people from 94 countries attended the event – proof of WordPress’ wide reach!

It was Hostinger’s second time sponsoring WordCamp Europe, and this 12 months we’re proud to have supported the event as a Super Admin Sponsor.

All talks and workshops were recorded and can soon be available for watching on WordPress.television. Within the meantime, you may also watch the recorded live streams on WordCamp Europe’s official YouTube channel.

We took notes of a number of the event’s highlights – read on to seek out out in regards to the fun we had at WordCamp Europe 2023 and what’s coming at the subsequent WordCamp Europe.

Watch Our WordCamp 2023 Highlight

20 Years of WordPress and Its Future

WordPress turned 20 on May 27, 2023, so a celebratory spirit was still very much apparent during WordCamp Europe 2023. A few of the sessions reflected on how far the content management system has come.

One such was Aaron Reimann‘s Where did we come from?, which went through a few of WordPress’s major features through the years, including WordPress version 0.71 and search feature version 1.0. It showed attendees the gradual development of the CMS while WordPress community members could see how their contributions had helped along the way in which.

Meanwhile, the Variations on a theme: 20 years of WordPress session had WordPress’ Co-founder and Project Leader Matt Mullenweg, WordPress’ Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy, and Automattic’s Product Architect Matías Ventura come together and review the 12 months’s accomplishments and learnings.

This session was followed by a live Q&A, during which Matt shared his reflections on open-source innovation and disruption up to now 20 years.

As a substitute of retrospection, other sessions covered the chances for the long run of WordPress.

For instance, Let’s make WordPress & its community sustainable today invited attendees to examine sustainable practices within the WordPress ecosystem. The Women and non-binary folx of WordPress panel discussion examined underrepresented people’s involvement within the open source project, including suggestions to participate within the initiative. This was especially vital since the upcoming WordPress 6.4 release is led by an all-women and non-binary release squad. It can be the second release version with such a team formation.

As a member of the WordPress community, Hostinger joined the anniversary celebration as well.

Besides an anniversary blog post and a podcast with Tammie Lister, we also arrange a WordCamp Europe booth highlighting our WordPress clients. This manner, we could engage with WordCamp visitors on a more personal level.

The event finished with a bang – the WordPress Twentieth Anniversary after-party allowed everyone to chill out and mingle after hard and rewarding work.

Artificial Intelligence in WordPress

It comes as no surprise that the Artificial Intelligence topic was a high traffic one at WordCamp Europe. Most sessions had at the very least one AI-related query in the course of the Q&A. Many professionals from various industries, especially IT, were in search of ways to integrate AI into their workflows to advertise smarter work.

It’s only natural then that there have been several AI-themed sessions at WordCamp Europe 2023. They covered a broad ground – from much sought-after AI-assisted content creation to lesser-known areas like AI for accessibility.

Some sessions specifically talked about AI uses for WordPress, reminiscent of AI translation. One other panel discussion explored the energetic use cases of AI as an accelerator.

For those still unsure whether AI was price their while, there was a session called How I learnt to stop worrying & love our AI rulers that discussed AI’s pros and cons and forecast the near future.

As veteran WordPress contributor Birgit Pauli-Haack identified in an interview with us, “The one constant is change itself.” Being open to any recent technology while questioning it appears to be the perfect decision.

Contributors’ Team in Highlight: the Polyglots Team

Last 12 months at WCEU22, the WordPress Community team highlighted the Performance Team. This 12 months, the community booth highlighted the Polyglots Team.

Booth visitors could discover more in regards to the team. They might also meet members of assorted local communities and learn what they do and the right way to become involved. That is one in every of the ways the WordPress community appreciates the worldwide network of teams and contributors who construct the project.

Polyglots Team is accountable for localizing WordPress’ core software, themes, plugins, and other components like support documentation. Half of WordPress installs use a localized version of the CMS, so Polyglots help lessen the communication gaps by making WordPress more accessible to users worldwide.

The team features translators, who suggest translations in local languages, and translation editors, who review the suggestions and make sure the quality. The team also works to set and maintain translation guidelines to make sure consistency.

WordPress currently supports greater than 200 locales, with only around 70 fully translated. There’s at all times room to make this platform more inclusive, so multilingual contributors are at all times welcome to join the team.

Our WordCamp Europe 2023 Experience

The event began with Contributor Day. The attending Hostingerians contributed to the Support and Community table on the venue, while one in every of us joined the Training Team online from Indonesia.

Contributors explored WordPress Playground – a version of WordPress that runs entirely in your browser. It’s a handy sandbox for experimentation, like trying a theme, testing a plugin, and even constructing a site.

Contributor Day also hosted a variety of cross-team collaboration. Meeting other contributors in person and becoming immersed in an all-hands-on-deck experience are a number of the perks of joining an offline WordPress event.

At the tip of Contributor Day, an official announcement unveiled the addition of a brand new team to the WordPress ecosystem – the Sustainability Team. This team will deal with finding ways to make each WordCamps and WordPress more sustainable.

The second and third days of the event were conference days, allowing attendees to take part in various sessions and workshops. Emma Young, our Content Lead, volunteered because the event’s MC. She could mostly be found on Track 2’s stage.

“I volunteered as an interviewer in WordCamp Asia 2023, and that was fun, but I desired to try something recent. I also desired to see how comfortable I could be on stage because I would love to be a speaker someday,” said Emma. “If public speaking excites you, definitely do it at your local WordCamps!” she added.

Meanwhile, visitors to Hostinger’s booth could view special videos with our clients who successfully developed businesses using WordPress. We also ran a personality quiz that may tell you which ones WordPress theme you were.

As connecting with fellow WordPress enthusiasts is the essence of WordCamps, we used the possibility to fulfill our clients and customers. As at all times, we were after candid feedback to enhance our services. We also introduced them to our newest product updates, reminiscent of our in-house Hostinger Blog Theme and AI Content Generator.

Our client, digital business card company Doup, supported us in the course of the event by providing NFC cards to activate newly-signed hosting plans.

Nevertheless, WordCamps are only complete with signature swag. That’s why we brought our Block and Roll-themed merchandise – a homage to WordPress’s very own Block Editor celebrating the Twentieth-anniversary. Inside 3.5 hours, we had given out 500 T-shirts – we were pleased people found them cool!

What’s Next

At the tip of this three-day event, Torino, Italy, was announced because the host city of WordCamp Europe 2024.

Until then, there are lots of upcoming local WordCamps which you can attend. WordPress Community Summit and WordCamp US 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland, are the subsequent flagship events.

Hostinger may also be sponsoring WCUS 2023, so we’re looking forward to meeting you there and geeking out over WordPress together. Block and Roll!