Author Archives: Siobhan

About Siobhan

Siobhan is the lead organiser of WordCamp Whitley Bay, her hometown in the North-East of England where she spends a lot of time on the beach with her dog and kids. When she's not organising WC Whitley Bay she's the COO of Human Made and runs WP Includes.

Q&A With Matt Mullenweg

matt-mullenwegIt’s a pleasure to have the co-founder of WordPress join us for the very first WordCamp Europe. As well as being the co-founder of WordPress, Matt is the founder of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and Jetpack, and a principal and founder of Audrey Capital, an investment and research company.

Matt will be doing an hour long question and answer session with the audience. Got a question for him? Now’s your chance to ask. Want to know about the future of WordPress? Want to know what why a specific decision was made? Want to know why 3.6 took so long? Interested in what people are doing with WordPress worldwide? Want to know Matt’s favourite type of BBQ? Bring your questions along and put them to the man himself.

Speaker: Dre Armeda

dreYou must have been living under a Drupal stone if you’re in the WordPress community and haven’t heard of Dre Armeda. The hat-wearing, taco-eating, (actual) ninja, is the CEO and Co-Founder of Sucuri Security and joins us all the way from San Diego. Dre is also the host of The DradCast, the WordPress podcast that hosts with partner-in-crime Brad Williams.

He’ll be sharing his knowledge of WordPress security in a presentation called “Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!”

Ever wonder if your site, your visitors, or business is safe on the internet? In this session I will show a demo on how quickly your site can be hacked, and your reputation put on the line. I’ll cover various scenarios that can affect your website like Pharma Hack, SEO Poisoning, and malicious redirects. I’ll then aid you by providing some tips to help reduce risk now and forever. Information Security is everyone’s responsibility, and should be a consideration on any web project, beginning to end.

Awesome! And remember to ask Dre to show you his WordPress tattoo.

Speaker: Rocío Valdivia

rocioWe’d like to welcome Rocío Valdivia to WordCamp Europe. Rocío is a developer at the Spanish development and consultancy, Mecus. Along with the rest of the team, she’s a WordPress Consultant, part of the Spanish translation team at GlotPress, organises the WordPress Sevilla meetup and WordCamp. She has extensive experience with WordPress and BuddyPress plugins, themes development and improvement, and is one of the authors of “WordPress para Dummies”, the Spanish version of “WordPress for Dummies”, published November 2012. She’s currently a consultant and a lecturer at conferences and seminars on WordPress and BuddyPress.

In her presentation, Rocío will be sharing a case study of the Spanish WordPress + Multisite installation El Club Express:

I’ll be sharing a WP Multisite + BuddyPress Case Study on a what’s on guide and magazine for cultural events. I’ll highlight a few of the most interesting features, demonstrating the potential that WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress has. I’ll talk about our successes and lessons learned and how you might apply these in a real world context.

Speaker: Vitaly Friedman

vitaly_friedmanVitaly Friedman is co-founder and editor-in-chief of the inimitable Smashing Magazine. Based out of Freiburg, Germany, Smashing Magazine is one of the most popular web design magazine out there, featuring high quality articles from the brightest star in web design and development. Vitaly wrangles the whole team, seeking out new authors, attending and speaking at conferences, and by being a beacon in the web design community.

We’re delighted that Vitaly is joining us for his very first WordCamp, where he’ll share his experiences of running one of the most popular blogs around in his presentation “Behind the Scenes at Smashing Magazine“:

Smashing Magazine started in September 2006 as an almost unstyled WordPress-powered blog. Over the course of years, a simple blog evolved into a professional online publication with a thorough editorial process and numerous quality reviews. How did it happen? What lessons were learned along the way? In this talk, I’ll be speaking about the experiences, mistakes and failures of Smashing Magazine and how recovering from them helped make the magazine better, stronger and more successful.

If you want to know what it takes to run a large-scale, multi-author WordPress blog, this is the presentation for you.

 

Speaker: Boone Gorges

booneJoining us from Queens, New York, is one of BuddyPress’ lead developers, the talented Boone Gorges. As well as working on the core BuddyPress project, Boone is a prolific plugin developer, and oversees the Commons in a Box, Anthologize, and Participad projects. Boone is a former academic, and most of his clients are universities and other non-profit institutions. In his spare time, he is a competitive crossword solver, a jazz pianist, and an afficianado of pizza and barbecue.

Boone will be getting technical with BuddyPress in his presentation “Herding Cats with the BuddyPress Activity Component.”

BuddyPress is great for building niche community sites. But, in the hands of the right developer, BP can power much more than just social networks. The Activity component is a prime example of this flexibility. bp-activity provides a rich API for storing, retrieving, and displaying a wide variety of transactional data. BP itself uses this API for tracking events of a social nature – “Boone and John became friends”, “Boone updated his profile”, etc. But bp-activity is flexible enough to store metadata about, say, e-commerce transactions or RSS items. In this way, the Activity stream defines a standardized schema and set of API functions for querying various types of data that may itself be stored in mutually incompatible ways.

This presentation will give developers an overview of the Activity component, including its data schema, the CRUD methods provided by the bp-activity API, and the activity metadata functions. We’ll talk about how any WordPress plugin can support the Activity stream as a progressive enhancement. And we’ll discuss one or two real-life examples of Activity being used in innovative ways.

Speaker: Sara Rosso

SaraRosso_2013We’re excited to welcome VIP Global Services Manager, Sara Rosso, from Automattic to speak at WordCamp Europe. Originally from California, Sara has spent the past 10 years living in Italy so she’s intimately familiar with the WordPress world on both sides of the Atlantic. Part of her job at Automattic is discovering VIP success stories and sharing them with the world, which is exactly what she’ll be doing at WordCamp Europe in her presentation, Why Big Brands Love WordPress.

WordPress now powers more than 18% of the top 10 million sites in the world, and some of the brands and enterprises using WordPress might surprise you! We’ll take a look at the latest sites which are pushing WordPress to new heights, the compelling reasons they decided to go with WordPress, and what they learned along the way. We’ll spend some time busting myths about WordPress as well as provide some great examples of powerful and beautiful sites using WordPress that will be interesting and useful for developers, designers, and users alike.

Panel: Running a WordPress Development Shop

WordPress development shops are big business and the number of them is growing all of the time. Agencies are hiring freelancers and absorbing talent from all over the WordPress community.  From the challenges of working in open source, to bidding for huge projects, from competition to collaboration, this panel will discuss what it’s like to run a WordPress development agency in Europe.

The panelists are:

Announcing our First Speaker: Joost de Valk

joost-de-valkOur first speaker needs little introduction which makes us even more excited to introduce him.

Joost de Valk is the guy behind Yoast.com, the original source for SEO expertise and WordPress. He’s also the author of the hugely popular WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.

A Netherlands native, Joost will be joining us to share his presentation “The Triumph of the Commons“.

Here’s what he’ll be talking about:

If you’re running a business based on open-source software like WordPress, that business depends on the prosperity of the open-source project; its demise could result in the demise of your business, while the project’s growth can result in your business flourishing.

As your business and the project grow, you’ll find them becoming more and more entwined. This may be an unusual situation for a business but it’s also a fortuitous one. In this presentation I’ll explore what it means for your business to be involved with an open source project, and how, by supporting it, you can be part of the triumph of the commons.

If your business is built on WordPress, come along to listen to what Joost has to say and to join in with the discussion afterwards.

Speaker Applications Close!

Speaker applications for WordCamp Europe are now closed. We have almost 80 applications and around 20 speaking slots available. That means there’s some fierce competition for those slots.

We would love to be able to accept everyone but of course we’re not going to be able to. However, here are some of the things we’ll be looking for when we put together the final schedule:

  • diversity of subject matter. We’ve got to have content that appeals to developers, designers, bloggers, business owners, and everyone in between.
  • diversity of geographical location and gender. The final schedule will represent the WordPress community worldwide, while particularly showcasing WordPressers in Europe.
  • novelty – is the presentation saying something new? Or saying something old in a new way?
  • relevance – is the content relevant to WordPress and WordPress users today?

We’ll also be looking at videos, checking out past slides, and generally scrutinising each application to make sure that the programme for WordCamp Europe is as good as it can be.

Thank you to everyone who applied. You’ll be hearing from us in a couple of weeks!

Ticket Sales Open for WordCamp Europe

Get them while they’re hot – WordCamp Europe tickets now on sale. 60 Euros for 2 days of the most WordPress fun you can have this side of the Atlantic. What you’ll get for your euros:

  • 2 days of presentations on WordPress from internationally renowned speakers and up-and-coming WordPressers
  • face time with WordPress people from all over the world
  • a limited edition, beautifully designed t-shirt
  • a lanyard (w00t!)
  • access to the Saturday night after party
  • lunch (yum!)
  • wi-fi (cool!)
  • more fun than you can imagine

Buy your ticket, jump down the rabbit hole, and join us for the most cosmopolitan WordPress event ever.

Tip: if you’ve applied to speak or volunteer, don’t buy your ticket just yet. Volunteers and speakers won’t be charged, and we’re holding enough aside so people who aren’t selected can still buy tickets.