Category Archives: General

Speaker: Mónica Guerra Leiria

monicaMónica is a Portuguese designer who loves nothing more than to deliver beautiful and functional websites tailored to her clients’ needs. She has been involved with design in one form or another since 1997 and has given up subdivisions in favor of simply considering herself a designer. Working with WordPress exclusively for designerblogs.com on the Genesis framework has allowed her to stretch her creative wings while learning something new every day.

A self-confessed geek, when she isn’t designing she can be found roleplaying, playing boardgames or reviewing videogames at www.rubberchickengames.com and she has a rather neglected blog at monicaguerraleiria.com.

Her presentation is “Between Glorified Computer Interface and Ultimate Narcissist: delivering what the client needs.”

When doing client work there is a fine line between what the client wants and what we, as designers, would like to deliver; balanced on that line is what the client truly needs, and achieving it takes more than talent – it takes self-restraint and great communication skills.

Every designer has, at some point, been faced with that client who has a need to micromanage every aspect of the design, who relentlessly attempts to relegate the designer to the same role one would a keyboard or a mouse. This is a talk about the design process, about the pitfalls that lie in bowing to the client’s wants instead of tirelessly seeking the answer to their needs, and about the other fine line in this equation – the one between subservience and ego.

Speaker: Adii Pienaar

adiiJoining us from South Africa is WooThemes co-founder and serial entrepreneur, Adii Pienaar. Adii first starting working with WordPress in 2006, when he was better known as “Adii Rockstar”. Thereafter he co-founded WooThemes, served as CEO and helped grow one of the biggest WordPress companies around. Since then, he’s retired from being a rockstar, become a father, and recently launched his latest venture; Public Beta.

Adii will be sharing some of the lessons he has learned from running one of the most popular theme shops around, in his presentation “Lessons Learned from Being First.”

Over the last 5 years, WooThemes have been early “pioneers” at many things that have happened within the WordPress ecosystem. Many times though, this also meant that Woo were the first to make some massive mistakes, because nobody else taught us which mistakes to avoid. This presentation shares some of the key learnings that have helped us navigate this rocky road in the last 5 years.

Speaker: Vladimir Prelovac

vprelovacVladimir Prelovac is an entrepreneur, pliot and a dad. Vladimir got involved with WordPress in 2007 and has since authored over 20 WordPress plugins, a book on WordPress plugin development and is the founder of ManageWP. He wants to change the world, but still doesn’t have the source code.

He’ll be presenting his session “From plugin developer to running a successful WordPress business: A ManageWP Case Study.”

Interested to learn what it took to cross the road between being a plugin developer to running a globally successful business using WordPress as an app platform, and all that from a country that only got PayPal this year? Learn about the difficulties, hard lessons learned, creativity, and the joys of success.

Speakers: Kirsten Schelper & Elisabeth Hölzl

kirsten-schelperKirsten Schelper is a web designer and passionate about all things WordPress.
In the beginning of 2011 she started the German speaking blog http://die-netzialisten.de where she writes about web design, WordPress and all things related to it.

In her talk she will be assisted by Elisabeth Hölzl web developer, Certified TYPO3 Integrator and slowly but surely feeling at home in the WordPress universe. Together they have built a number of web projects over the past few years.
elisabeth-hoelzl They both consider that the combination of a designer and a developer with all the different ways to approach a project has been very beneficial and productive.

Their talk will be about “Developing WordPress Themes with Git”


Implementing Git as our choice of version control was one of the most challenging tasks for us as a team. Making the developer understand what the designer (and developer of custom WordPress themes) really needs was pretty tough. Explaining the functionality of Git to the designer was comparably difficult.

Instead of throwing basic commands at you we want to invite you to explore the “Git Universe” with us in a kind of fireside chat between Kirsten, representing the web design world, and Elisabeth, who gained her first computer experience with Basic many years ago.

Our focus will be on how Git works, what those strange commands really mean and how you can benefit from integrating it into your theme development work flow.

WordCamp Europe Demographics and Selection Process

Some people have expressed interest in the overall demographics of the speakers at WordCamp Europe. Since all of the speakers are now confirmed it’s a great opportunity to share some of them with you. I’ve been coordinating the speaker submissions and selection process. I’ve also had a number of questions about the process which I’m happy to detail.

The Aim of WC Europe

When we started discussing WordCamp Europe, we had a number of aims in mind:
1. To showcase speakers from across Europe at a large-scale WordPress event
2. To bring in overseas speakers that people living in Europe would normally have to travel to the USA to see
3. To provide an environment for creating cross-European collaboration and collaboration with the wider international community.

These were all kept in mind while carrying out the speaker selection.

The Data

Let’s start with a basic table. Below are the demographics of submissions alongside the number of speakers. Note that this is based on where people currently live, as WordCamp Europe constitutes a local WordCamp for anyone living in Europe.

Country Submitted Speaking
Non European
South Africa 3 1
USA 25 6
Israel 1 1
Japan 1 1
Australia 2
Canada 1
Zambia 1
European
Italy 2 2
The Netherlands 14 4
Belarus 1 1
Bulgaria 3 1
Switzerland 1 1
UK 11 6
Luxembourg 1 1
Norway 3 2
Germany 6 3
Serbia 1 1
Spain 6 2
Portugal 1 1
Austria 2 1
Ukraine 1 1
Belgium 1
Denmark 1
Estonia 1
France 3
Ireland 1
94 36

The figures work out as follows:

  • European speakers: 75%
  • Non-European speakers: 25%

spread_speakers

The WordCamp central guidelines around speakers states that “If you aim for at least 80% local/regional and no more than 20% visiting, you’re doing great”. WCEU is pretty close to that, which we’re happy with.

We can also compare the number of people speaking to the number of those applied:

  • European submissions: 64%
  • Non-European submissions: 36%

spread_submissions_simplified

Europe had a 64% submission rate and 75% of speakers are from Europe. This means that there is a higher success rate among Europeans as opposed to non-Europeans. This isn’t surprising since we heavily weighted the decision-making process to Europeans.

We did get a lot of submissions from outside of Europe, particularly from the USA. We had 25 submitted from the USA, the next highest was 14 from the Netherlands! It’s great to see that people from all over the world are supportive of WordCamp Europe, and willing to pay the high travel costs required to fly in for the event.

Decision Process

The decision process worked as follows:

  • the team constituted 11 people from the following countries: UK, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, France, The Netherlands, Italy
  • all members of the team voted anonymously, allocating a Yes, No, or Maybe
  • Points were allocated: 2 for yes, 1 for maybe, 0 for no
  • Points were tallied.
  • as a group we reviewed all of the applications. When two presentations were similar and the speakers of a similar quality, the European candidate was chosen.

Lots of talented people were turned down. It was a difficult process and there was lots of back and forth discussion to get it right.

We think, however, that in the end we’ve got a good balance of speakers, including demographics and topics.

I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments about process and overall demographics. However, it wouldn’t be fair to comment on individuals so please don’t single out speakers for discussion.

Speaker: Nikolay Bachiyski

nikolayNikolay is a long-time WordPress core contributor, lives in Bulgaria, works for Automattic, blogs at extrapolate.me, and has a bear.

Nikolay will be sharing his technical knowledge in his presentation “To OOP or not to OOP”.

Some love it, some hate it, few understand it. Some won’t develop with WordPress because it doesn’t use enough of it, some won’t develop with WordPress again if it did. Object-oriented programming is by far the most widely spread programming paradigm, WordPress is by far the mostly spread web publishing system. In this talk we will see how the values of the two align and what can be the place of OOP in the future of WordPress.

WordCamp Europe Speaker List

For the past few months we’ve been wrangling with a huge number of applications for WordCamp Europe. We’ve published bios and speaker presentations but now it’s time to share with you what you’ve all been waiting for: the complete WordCamp Europe speaker list. Watch out on the blog for more speaker profiles, but in the meantime, here are the WordCamp Europe speakers (bar, perhaps, one or two surprises):

  • Vitaly Friedman – Behind the Scenes at Smashing Magazine
  • Adii Pienaar – Lessons Learned from Being First
  • Sara Rosso – Why Big Brands Love WordPress
  • Sean Herron – WordPress as a Platform: Empowering Civic Change through Code
  • David Coveney – Unlocking Enterprise with WordPress
  • Tom Willmot, Remkus de Vries, Arnstein Larsen, Simon Dickson – Running a European WordPress Development Shop
  • Vladimir Prelovac – From plugin developer to running a successful WordPress business: A ManageWP Case Study
  • Frederick Townes – Business Optimization
  • Ptah Dunbar – Unit Testing like a Pirate
  • Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko – Better site stacks with Composer
  • Dre Armeda – Real WordPress Security – Kill the Noise!
  • Brad Williams – Writing Secure WordPress Code
  • Rocio Valdivia – BuddyPress and Multisite Case Study: El Club Express
  • Boone Gorges – Herding Cats with the BuddyPress Activity Component
  • Tammie Lister – The life of a theme
  • Mónica Guerra Leiria – Between Glorified Computer Interface and Ultimate Narcissist: delivering what the client needs
  • Nikolay Bachiyski – To OOP or not to OOP
  • Bram Duvigneau – Practical WordPress Accessibility
  • Hanni Ross – Contributing to WordPress
  • Q&A with Matt Mullenweg
  • Simon Wheatley, Amit Kvint, Frank Bültge – Multilingual plugin stand-off
  • Naoko Takano – Learnings from Growing Local WordPress Communities in Japan
  • Joost de Valk – The Victory of the Commons
  • Miriam Schwab – Learn from my mistakes, don’t make them: The Business of WordPress
  • Mike Schroder & Marko Heijnen – Perfect your Images using WordPress
  • Noel Tock – Less is more, bringing out the best in your websites
  • Scott Basgaard – Help Yourself by Helping Others
  • Kirsten Schelper & Elisabeth Hölzl – Developing WordPress Themes with Git
  • Floor Drees – Working towards great version control for content creators

Watch out for more speaker profiles over the coming weeks!

Speaker: Tammie Lister

P1090730Hot on the heels of WordCamp San Francisco, Tammie Lister will be joining us from rainy England. Tammie is a designer who specialises in creating communities. She’s passionate about community design and mixing in psychology with design and development to create sites that make sense to humans. Over the years she’s been lucky enough to create varied projects with great clients under her company logicalbinary.com. She is a contributor to both BuddyPress and WordPress. Tammie spends most of her time living in themes and has a book due out soon about BuddyPress theme development.

Tammie will be sharing her knowledge of themes in her presentation “The Life of a Theme.”

This is a tale of a theme, from its early stages of research through to the first steps into wireframes and the move into a prototype. It’s a tale of joy, sadness and a dash of danger as browsers are fought and code tamed. This is a story that doesn’t include Photoshop but that does include designing in code. It’s a story we all know variations of and this is my version. This is the story of my design process and how I create themes.

Speaker: Frederick Townes

Frederick Townes Frederick Townes was the Founding Chief Technical Officer of Mashable, one of the top independent media sites worldwide and is currently the Senior Technical Advisor.

As a search / social media marketer and WordPress consultant, Frederick’s projects typically include WordPress as a core element. One of his largest contributions to the WordPress community was his web performance optimization framework W3 Total Cache.

Since 2003 his agency W3 EDGE has assisted startups and well-known brands like: ASOS, Adorama, AIGA, AT&T, Brian Solis, Center for Disease Control, Constant Contact, CVS Pharmacy, Envato, Hyatt, Jonathan Snook, Kodak, Hubspot, Lord & Taylor, Mashable, Microsoft, Neil Patel, Pearsonified, R.E.I., Sanyo, Sherwin Williams, Smashing Magazine, Southwest Airlines, Staples, Sony, Weight Watchers, Yahoo, Yoast and others.

He is also a serial web entrepreneur and technologist. One of his recent projects, W3 MARKUP, launched in 2007, was acquired after only 11 short months prior to his moving to Florence, Italy in 2008. Frederick currently splits time in Boston still where he focuses on his latest project Placester as a co-founder.

Frederick will be talking about business particularly “Business Optimization”

If you’ve ever wanted to make your WordPress passions a full time job you’re not alone. It’s a long journey to go from idea, to a documented, commented, socially mentioned, commonly installed and productive project. In this talk, Frederick reviews many of the tough lessons learned in trying to both build a team, community and movement around a WordPress plugin. He will share tips, best practices and pitfalls and most importantly how to address them once identified. Expect the talk to be highly interactive, the more questions and interruptions you provide the more valuable it will be.

Speaker: Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko

rarstRarst is cynical, sleepy, and much into computers. He remembers DOS and the days when the Internet came in nightly dial-up packages. He has brushed through several industries (from airplane engineering to helpdesk systems), many programming languages, and circled back to web development. This time on WordPress platform. You can often find him on WordPress Stack Exchange where he helps out with all sorts of questions related to WordPress.

Rarst will be talking about “Better Site Stacks with Composer.”

This presentation explore gaps in WordPress tool chain for code dependencies, technical organization of whole-site projects, hosting and consuming PHP code. See why Composer dependency manager caught on like wildfire for these tasks in PHP ecosystem and how it can empower more robust and professional approaches to WordPress development.

Keep a better history of a project’s state, manage and easily share different contexts (production or development, stable or unstable), integrate multiple version control repositories with trivial ease, run and own your code hosting infrastructure. Composer all the things!