Don’t miss the #WCEU focused track on WordPress Development for beginners

Posted on June 12, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

For the first time this year, WordCamp Europe will have more than two tracks. With the conference expanding almost twice since 2015, we decided to add more content and most of all – experiment with formats and topics.

Our third track is going to be in the beautiful Leopold Museum, just a 2 min walk from Halle E+G and it will host all our networking activities (link), three highly targeted, focused content tracks (development, business, and community) and for the first time for an event of this side – unconference (more information coming in the next few days).

Today we’d like to introduce the third and final of our three focused tracks: “WordPress Development for Beginners”. The speakers in this focused track are successful developers with tons of experience in all areas of WordPress. They’ll get you familiar with some important concepts in WordPress development – from theme and plugin development to setting up your dev environment and working with Multisite.

Please welcome Marcos Schratzenstaller, Jeremy Felt, Edmund Turbin, Aaron Campbell, Matt Geri and Ulrich Pogson.

Marcos Schratzenstaller

Aaron Campbell

Edmund Turbin

Jeremy Felt

Matt Geri

Ulrich Pogson

Marcos Schratzenstaller

Working at Rainmaker Digital as a SysAdmin focused on WordPress hosting, Marcos is a System administrator focused on WordPress hosting, developer in languages: Python, Bash, PHP, C/C++, Informix 4GL, Java, HTML, JavaScript, C#, Visual C++ (with large experience in this field) with large knowledge in databases (SQL and No-SQL).

WP-CLI for beginners

Jeremy Felt

Jeremy is a senior WordPress engineer with University Communications at Washington State University, where he helps power the web on an open source, multi-network, multisite platform.

He describes himself as an Open Source Student. Is a WordPress core committer. Maintainer of VVV. Thankful community member of all the above.

Multisite!

Edmund Turbin

Edmund Turbin is a London based Solutions Engineer at WP Engine originally from New York. He has been developing websites for over 10 years.

He’s worked with proprietary and open source CMS platforms at media, publishing and ad tech companies and is passionate about optimizing workflows.

When the laptop is closed, he enjoys producing tech house in the studio, cycling and spending time with his family.

Theming in WordPress: Where do I start?

Aaron Campbell

I’ve been doing web development professionally for over 16 years.

I’ve been a core contributor to WordPress since 2007 (WordPress 2.3), co-led the WordPress 3.6 release, am a part of the WordPress security team, and have commit access to WordPress core.

Website Security – The Big Picture w/ Simple Steps to Take

Matt Geri

My name is Matt, I’m a full time WordPress Engineer at XWP. I’ve been a WordPress developer since 2005 and have loved the platform ever since.

I run a WordPress development blog at http://mattgeri.com where I post daily articles and videos on WordPress development.

The ultimate WordPress development environment

Ulrich Pogson

Have been teaching myself web development with WordPress since January 2012. I moved from support to theme development to plugin development to developing a site with custom features. I would like to show what I have done as there are not many resources how to develop and deploy small/medium sites. Hopefully, this will start a discussion and sharing of other solutions.

Themes & Plugins in harmony

Welcome to Vienna – a public transport guide

Posted on June 11, 2016 by Alex Kirk

In two weeks Vienna will welcome more than 2200 WordPressers and according to our stats, 2000 of you are not Austrian! So in this post, we’ll try to give you some useful tips about getting around the town.

General information

Vienna is the capital of Austria, the main language spoken is (Austrian) German: “Wien” [vi:n] is the German name for Vienna. The local currency is the Euro. We have recently grown to almost 2 million inhabitants (Austria: 8.7mio) and rank top in the World’s most liveable cities. This is in part because Vienna is considered a very safe city (don’t push it, though), with good and affordable restaurants, and has an excellent public transport system.

Getting to Vienna

Airport

Vienna International Airport (IATA: VIE) is located about 16 km southeast of the city center.

From the airport to Vienna

Vienna Tourism has a good overview page but here is a quick list of the most useful options:

ÖBB

Take the regional train S7 (operator ÖBB) for 4.40 Euros (buy two single tickets at the machine, located directly on the platform – one to the city border plus one to any destination within Vienna). Make sure to validate the tickets before boarding the train! The train runs twice every hour at :18 and :48. At Wien Mitte – Landstraße station, 24 minutes later, change to the orange U3 (destination Ottakring) to get off at the venue at station Volkstheater.

City Airport Train (CAT)

The City Airport Train is more expensive but a bit quicker. It also runs twice every hour at :06 and :36 and will take you in 16 minutes non-stop for 11 Euros (17 return; buy at a machine upfront) to Wien Mitte – Landstraße station. Then buy a ticket (see below) and change to the orange subway U3 (destination Ottakring) to get off at the venue at station Volkstheater.

TAXI

A Taxi will cost you between 28 and 50 Euros and takes about 25 minutes. It can be cheaper to book it in advance.

UBER

Uber operates in Vienna and offers both UberX and Black Car services.

Train into Vienna

You will most likely travel with the ÖBB and arrive at the new central station, Hauptbahnhof Wien. Buy a ticket (see below) and take the tram line D (destination Nußdorf) and get off near the venue at stop Dr.-Karl-Renner-Ring (adjacent to Volkstheater).

Bus into Vienna

Most international buses stop at the Vienna International Busterminal (VIB) at Erdberg. Buy a ticket (see below) and take the orange subway U3 (destination Ottakring) to get off at the venue at station Volkstheater.

Getting around Vienna

Public Transport

The three main types of public transport in Vienna (the name of the operating transport company is Wiener Linien) are subway (“U-Bahn”), tram (“Straßenbahn”, colloquial “Bim”) and bus. They mostly run very often, with intervals of up to 5 minutes. One ticket is valid for all types of transport.

Last trains and busses leave around 1am, though there is a separate night bus network; subways run all night on Fri-Sat and Sat-Sun.

Be aware that for political reasons public transport routing is not included in Google maps, so consider to download the official app qando (Android alternative: Öffi). Web version Journey planner.

Tickets

You can buy tickets online (you will have to create an account, though) or at the multilingual ticket machines (at all subway stations). Single tickets are also available in trams and buses with a surcharge for 2.30 EUR (children: 1.20 EUR). They are valid for one ride including transfers.

On ticket machines, the area of Vienna is sometimes also called “Zone 100”, so apart from the airport, you’ll always be travelling within that zone.

One-way: 2.20 EUR (unlimited changes, also available as 4-strip version for 8.80 EUR)
24hr/48hr/72hr ticket: 7.60 / 13.30 / 16.50 EUR
Vienna weekly ticket (careful: only valid from Monday to Monday 9am): 16,20 EUR
8-day-ticket Vienna: 38.40 EUR (8 independent strips, invalidate one per person, valid all day until 1am), can be used as a 4-day ticket for 2 people always travelling together.
Trivia: a yearly ticket is only 365 Euros.

Children up to the age of 6 travel for free. Children up to fifteen years of age ride free on Sundays, holidays and during the Vienna school holidays.

Bike around Vienna

Vienna is also great to get around by bike! There are a lot of biking lanes and tracks and a convenient system to rent bikes: At 120 Citybike stations all around town, you can rent a bike (almost) for free, and ride from one station to the other. At the stations’ terminals, you can find out where other stations are and the number of available bikes or empty bike boxes.

Registration: Online at www.citybikewien.at (website optimized for mobile use!) or at a Citybike Terminal with a credit card (Master Card, Visa, JCB) or a Maestro Card (debit card) issued by an Austrian bank. One-time registration fee: 1 Euro.

Rental charges: The rental starts with the removal of a Citybike from the bike box and ends when the Citybike is returned to a bike box. Caution: Wait until the green lights come on, which signals the end of the rental. Per rental, the first hour is free, 2nd hour 1 Euro, 3rd hour 2 Euros, for every further hour 4 Euros.

Warning: If the bike is not returned after 5 days, a flat rate of 600 Euros is charged.

If you want to use a journey planner for biking around Vienna, we recommend the website AnachB or their app .

Whether it’s by bike, foot or tram – have fun exploring Vienna!

Oh no! #WCEU tickets are sold out again? Here are a few options

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

We hate to be telling you “We told you so”, but… we told you so!

And since we really like you, we’d love to see you in Vienna on June 24th and 25th for that tiny conference which will gather 2200 people from 68 countries and will have more than 70 amazing speakers covering a wide range of WordPress topics.

So if, by any chance, you missed the very last batch of WordCamp Europe tickets, here are a few things you can do to join us at the MuseumQuartier:

Find a ticket on the Facebook tickets exchange

We started a ticket exchange in the WordCamp Europe Facebook event where everyone who won’t be able to make the conference, can post their tickets and you can contact them and exchange details. PayPal works great for transactions and all you need to do is ask whoever is transferring the ticket to you, to change their details using the edit link in their confirmation email, with yours. Some people are even offering their spare tickets for free.

Depending on when you acquire the ticket, you might not be able to have a printed badge (you still get one, we’ll just write your name on it) and a t-shirt that’s your size. Your dietary requirements might not be met as well, but you will be there, so it’s all worth it!

Go to the WordCamp Europe Facebook event

Ask on Twitter

Earlier in the day, we asked people who had spare tickets, to tweet about them using the official conference hashtag #WCEU. Check the hashtag or the official WCEU Twitter account, we try to retweet every post about a spare ticket.

If you have a ticket for #wceu you don't need, post @wceurope, we'll retweet it. Let's help people looking for a ticket to come to Vienna.

— WordCamp Europe (@WCEurope) April 11, 2016

Some people found tickets that way! Maybe you can too.

Yes! we've got our 2 tickets now! Thanks for your help and see ya next month o/ @WCEurope #WCEU

— Jb Audras (@AudrasJb) May 23, 2016

No luck? Grab a Live stream ticket

Outside of #WCMIA, it’s still rare to see WordCamps do livestream. Not easy. But #WCEU doing it again this year: https://t.co/G6aSAlg2H7

— David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) May 25, 2016

And if none of this works, you can still grab a Live Stream ticket completely free and enjoy the talks from your sofa or chilling in the park. Then join the social media fun by commenting and posting your thoughts about WordCamp Europe using the official #WCEU hashtag. It won’t be the same, but you will feel included. Because the WordPress community is awesome like that.

Get your free live stream ticket

We hope this helps!

Love,

The WCEU org team

Watch #WCEU wherever you are: get a free live stream ticket!

Posted on May 25, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

We know you wish you could be with us on June 24th, but whatever the reason you can’t join us in Vienna is, we understand! Life happens, but that doesn’t mean we’ll let you miss out on all the fun!

All #WCEU sessions will be live streamed for free

We’re extremely happy to be able to offer live streaming for free for a second consecutive year. So on June 24th and 25th just sit back, relax, and tune into the live streaming from Vienna. All three tracks of our schedule will be streamed, giving you a way to switch between talks faster than people who’ll actually be in the MuseumQuartier!

Grab your live streaming ticket for free today

Last chance to get a #WCEU ticket

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

If you still don’t have a ticket and are desperately looking for one, we have good news! Very very good news!

Thanks to some of our amazing sponsors, speakers, and volunteers, who bought their tickets despite the fact they’re getting a free one, we can now release the last available 64 tickets for #WCEU 2016.

Don’t wait up – we can’t possibly understand why you still don’t have a #WCEU ticket, but if you want one, this is the last opportunity you’ll have.

Get your WordCamp Europe ticket today

Say hello to our next group of WCEU speakers

Posted on May 12, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

The full schedule is online and in the next couple of weeks we’ll continue to introduce our amazing lineup. Today we’re extremely happy to welcome eight new speakers – Rian Rietveld, Marcos Schratzenstaller, Thomas Kräftner, Gary Pendergast, Ivelina Dimova, Lucijan Blagonic, Joe Hoyle and Mika Epstein.

Rian Rietveld

Marcos Schratzenstaller

Thomas Kräftner

Gary Pendergast

Ivelina Dimova

Lucijan Blagonic

Joe Hoyle

Mika Epstein

Rian Rietveld

Rian Rietveld is a self employed WordPress front and backend developer, specialized in web accessibility. She is also part of the Make WordPress Accessible Team.

Marcos Schratzenstaller

Thomas Kräftner

Thomas Kräftner is an interactive developer with a degree in Information Design. While having a clear focus on web development, he always keeps his mind open and has a good understanding of a lot of surrounding fields.

Gary Pendergast

Gary is a WordPress, web and music geek who writes poetry with Automattic. He’s been know to commit random things to WordPress Core, just to see what would happen.

Ivelina Dimova

WordPress developer working at CrowdFavorite where we create web solutions for big enterprise companies. I am more focused on back-end development and passionate about version control systems, deployment and server administration tools.

Lucijan Blagonić

Lucijan has 12 years of experience working on the web, including planning, prototyping, designing and coding standards–compliant — semantic websites and interfaces. He is a strong advocate of responsive design, building mobile–first interfaces with usability and accessibility in mind.

Joe Hoyle

Joe Hoyle is the co-founder of Human Made where he heads up their development efforts. He’s been working on the WordPress REST API team for almost a year, and is dedicated to getting it shipped in WordPress Core.

Mika Epstein

Mika (実佳) Ariela Epstein is better known as Ipstenu, the Half-Elf Rogue. Working for DreamHost, specializing in WordPress hosting (aka ‘WordPress Guru’), Mika helps make WordPress and hosting better for everyone.

A warm welcome and a big thank you to our #WCEU Editor sponsors

Posted on May 9, 2016 by Emanuel Blagonic

Please join us in saying thank you to our Editor level sponsors! WordCamp Europe wouldn’t be possible without them, so make sure you go to their booths during the event and show them your gratitude! Thank you, Editor sponsors, for supporting the European WordPress community!

AMIMOTO

AMIMOTO is a High-Performance WordPress Cloud Hosting.
AMIMOTO WordPress Stack greatly simplifies the development and management of WordPress hosting.AMIMOTO Stack includes ready-to-run versions of WordPress. It is completely integrated and configured, so you’ll be ready to start developing your WordPress as soon as the AMI is launched onto Amazon EC2.
● High Performance. AMIMOTO runs on NINJA speed for its performance tuning, NGINX, and HHVM.
● Fast. Available in 9 Global Regions, uses CDN and S3 for media uploads.
● Easy. For users of all tech levels and WordPress developer-friendly.
● Highly Scalable. AMIMOTO is easy to scale up and down to meet high traffic demands.
Follow them on Twitter | Facebook

WP Engine

WP Engine powers amazing digital experiences for websites and applications built on WordPress. The company’s premium managed hosting platform provides the performance, reliability and security required by the biggest brands in the world while remaining affordable and intuitive for smaller businesses and individuals. Companies of all sizes rely on WP Engine’s award-winning customer service team to quickly solve technical problems and create a world-class customer experience. Founded in 2010, WP Engine is headquartered in Austin, Texas and has offices in San Francisco, California, San Antonio, Texas, and more recently in London, England.

Graphcomment

For over 30 years, the discussion on screen has not evolved. It is a chronological and confusing stack of messages.

GraphComment finally makes clear and high-quality discussions with a large number of people. This service is for all Internet communities. The solution can be installed in a few clicks on any website worldwide. Our business model is freemium (monthly subscription volume / features)
Please visit the official page of Graphcomment Plugin for WordPress
https://wordpress.org/plugins/graphcomment-comment-system/

GoDaddy

Nearly as old as the Internet itself, GoDaddy was born to give people an easy, affordable way to get their ideas online. Today, we have more than 13 million customers around the world, but our goal is much the same. We’re here to help people easily start, confidently grow and successfully run their own ventures. In short, to help them kick ass, online and off!

Bluehost

Bluehost has been a WordPress partner since 2005 and powers over 1 million WordPress sites worldwide. Their objective is to help customers, whether novice or pro, create a thriving online presence at an affordable price. With a team of in-house tech experts available 24/7, Bluehost dedicates time and resources to providing the best support and services in the industry. Join millions of other site owners and see what Bluehost can do for you and your online presence.

Straker Translations

Straker Translations is a cloud-enabled translation services provider and are one of the world’s fastest growing translation companies. Out of over 27,000 vendors globally, it is ranked in the top 100 translation vendors by the industry’s leading research organization. Over the last 5 years, it has built a technology platform that enables human translators to deliver faster and more accurate translations, lowering the cost and time to deliver translations.

Introducing the WordCamp Europe 2016 schedule

Posted on May 5, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

Seven weeks to WordCamp Europe 2016! We can’t wait to meet you all in Vienna for three days of everything WordPress!

The Schedule

Today, we’re excited to share the full schedule for WordCamp Europe 2016 and some interesting speaker demographics. During the next several weeks we’ll keep introducing our speakers so you get a chance to know them better before meeting them in Vienna.

The applications and the selection process

We received 227 applications from 33 countries

The overwhelming number of applications we received this year are making us extremely happy because they show a trend of more and more people stepping up to share their experience with others, and on a bigger stage.

We received 227 applications from 33 countries in 5 continents (121 from Europe, 85 from North and South America, 12 from Asia, 9 from Australia and NZ). We also received twice the number of applications from women compared to WordCamp Europe 2014 and 2015.

Our selection process included internal voting within the 18-person WordCamp Europe team followed by a careful selection of the final speakers shortlist with topic, gender, and location diversity in mind.

The final selection

We are proud that we will have 73 speakers from all over the world on the WordCamp Europe stage covering topics from beginner to advanced development, design, accessibility, business, big media, hiring, community and personal growth.

Our final speaker demographics: 73 speakers from 20 countries. 43 from Europe, 21 from North America, 1 from South America, 5 from Australia & NZ, 2 from Asia, 1 from Africa.

There will be 22 women and 51 men on stage in three tracks in Halle E, Halle G and the Leopold Museum at the Vienna Museum Quartier.

Focused tracks in the Leopold Museum

There will be three thematic tracks in the big hall at the Leopold museum, dedicating half a day each to “Introduction to WordPress development”, “Running a WordPress business” and “Running a local WordPress community”.

Unconference

On Saturday, after lunch, the Leopold’s big hall will host a Barcamp – a format which we’re excited to experiment with and which will give you the opportunity to get on the #WCEU stage for a flash talk.

Networking events

Last year we gave networking events during the conference a try. Based on the feedback, attendees enjoyed those a lot, so we’re bringing them back in 2016. There are many scheduled networking events around the official schedule to let you connect with others – we will have tribe meetups and speed networking in the Leopold museum. Stay tuned for the specific announcement.

To keep up with the most recent updates from the WCEU team, don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, Facebook and to subscribe to receive news by email!

Love,

The Organising team

Give a warm welcome to Sucuri as a #WCEU Administrator sponsor

Posted on April 29, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

Please welcome our next Administrator sponsor – Sucuri, and join us in saying a huge thank you to the Sucuri team for their continuous support of the WordPress community in Europe.

Sucuri builds the best and most affordable cloud-based security technologies and service that every website, regardless of platform, can employ. They offer to website owners the most concise security resource on the web for the security of their website[s].

Don’t miss their booth in Vienna, drop by, check out their awesome services or just say hello to their team.

Meet the third group of #WCEU speakers!

Posted on April 27, 2016 by Petya Raykovska

There are less than 9 weeks left to WordCamp Europe and we’re excited to welcome our next group of WordCamp Speakers – Gábor Hojtsy, Lesley Molecke, Anna Ladoshkina, Pascal Birchler, Morten Rand-Hendriksen and Maurizio Pelizzone.

Gábor Hojtsy

The #WCEU team is extremely happy to welcome Gábor Hojtsy, one of the lead Drupal developers, to the WordCamp Europe 2016 stage.

Gábor is an open source enthusiast and contributor, most active as a Drupal developer, working with and on the open source project itself at Acquia. He was the release maintainer for Drupal 6, the initiator and lead of localize.drupal.org, Drupal’s software localization site and lead to the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative.

He started off contributing to Open Source in 2000 when he became an active contributor to the PHP Documentation team and became the lead to that team and the lead to the PHP.net website team for years. He is the technical editor of the first Hungarian PHP developer book, he’s led courses on web technologies and co-organized various PHP and generic web development conferences in Hungary.

He started working with and on Drupal in 2003, and became devoted to the multilingual functionality and sometimes the lack thereof. He is an active contributor ever since and has co-organizer of DrupalCon Szeged 2008 and Drupal Dev Days 2014.

He’s a father of an amazing boy, loves reading non-fiction and is very passionate about singing, music and amateur acting, especially when these three are all combined.

Lesley Molecke

Lesley is the co-founder of boutique WordPress agency, Cornershop Creative, which focuses on helping nonprofit and small business customers set and meet their goals online. She’s been working on the web since she was in high school and ran her own small web design shop before she could drive.

Prior to founding Cornershop Creative, she managed enterprise-level CMS rollouts for both the City of Albuquerque and the Albuquerque Public Schools (one of the largest districts in the US) in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Lesley and her co-founders have turned a pipe dream of a business into a reality that employs 10 remote employees and helps more than 100 nonprofit customers each year.

Pascal Birchler

Pascal is a 22-year-old student and web developer from Switzerland. He contributes to WordPress whether it is by organising local events, or through direct core contributions.

His passion is to help other people, whether it’s by cooking, building awesome websites, or by blogging. He’s been working with WordPress for years and he’s involved with both the German-speaking and the international community.

Pascal received commit access to WordPress core after leading the embeds feature plugin included in WordPress 4.4.

He had a great time at WordCamp Europe 2015 and is coming back in 2016 to share his experience about contributing to WordPress with others and inspire people to do the same.

Anna Ladoshkina

Anna has been developing websites on WordPress for NGOs in Russia since 2006 as a freelancer.

Apart from that, Anna is working with te-st.ru team (that’s open educational project for NGOs) to promote web-technologies and WordPress in particular for NGOs in Russia. Her team creates events and educational materials to help Russian charities become more efficient on the web.

Anna is a self-educated specialist and used to adopt new techniques and tools on her own.

Anna will share her experience on how to start using modern tools when you are developing websites (not themes of plugins), how to manage such projects and how they are different.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen

Morten Rand Hendriksen

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a senior staff author at Lynda.com, a LinkedIn Company, with 60+ courses published.

When not creating training materials for Lynda.com, Morten teaches Instructional Design at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, co-organizes the Vancouver WordPress Meetup Group, and contributes to WordPress core and community projects.

In his spare time, he reads sci-fi and philosophy, tries to find time to play guitar, and wears out his dance shoes on the ballroom floor.

Maurizio Pelizzone

Maurizio Pelizzone is a WordPress Developer from Italy. He discovered WordPress ten years ago and since then he’s used if for a wide range of personal and professional projects.

Today his web agency archives a lot of beautiful WordPress sites, made in collaboration with many freelancers, designers and communication agencies.

His free time is dedicated to his wife and son, he loves taking shots with his reflex camera and playing board games with his friends.

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