This year a few new events happened in the WordPress eco system – WordPress Day for Developers in Lisbon and Core Days in Rome. While we always have had developer talks at WordCamps, in many cases the deep tech topics and workshops are avoided, in order to make the content accessible to more people. On other hand this left the developers with the feeling they don’t get enough interesting tech talks. All that said, the two events mentioned above, were meant to fill that gap and I was lucky enough to visit the one in Lisbon! I really loved the format – smaller event, only development focused, interesting presentations and workshops. Here are my short takeways from it ( my flight was delayed, so I missed some ):
Uros Tasic showed us how to code and test with WordPress Playground – very handy platform that allows you to develop, test and explore ideas within WordPress with one click. For many years setting up local installs and trying to mimicic the real server environment in order to test new releases was a common struggle for many developers. Using Playground we can setup quick installs and spend more time to actually develop and test the project.
Shady Sharaf made a great introduction on using XDebug to investigate errors, complimented by showcases for JavaScript debugging and flamegraphs for performance tracking. While XDebug has been around for a very long time, setup and mapping is still an issue for many developers. The talk focused on showcasing how to setup the environment, explanation of the functionality and the different ways to debug issues plus remote debugging!
Sarah Norris shared her tips and tricks for beginners that are interested in contributing to Gutenberg in WordPress Core. For many newbies its quite scary and confusing how to select a ticket to contribute to. There are a lot of issues, comments and workflow to read and familiarise with. Getting smaller, clear to you tickets, asking for clarification and getting to know the process and the testing approach were amongst the ideas that the talk suggested.
And last but not least Micha? Czapli?ski introduced us to the way to use the Interactivity API to streamline WordPress front-end development. Interactivity API is included in WordPress core since version 6.5 and introduces an easier and more modern approach for developers to add interactions to the front end of their blocks. Examples for interactivity blocks in the core Michal mentioned are query loop block with enhanced pagination and the image block with on click option that opens a larger view for the image. Later I realised he did a similar session at WordCamp Europe 2024, so if you are interested in tips for using Interactivity API, here it is: https://europe.wordcamp.org/2024/session/interactivity-api-the-new-standard-way-to-build-modern-wordpress-frontends/
In conclusion, there is definitely a need for more development oriented events like this, smaller and with more focus. I got a lot of useful ideas, had the opportunity to meet new people and say hi to old friends. So much for this year and to many exciting events in 2025!
P.S. As I mentioned exiting events next year, we just launched the tickets for WordCamp Europe 2025 in Basel, Switzerland!
