And Now, Some Speakers from WordCamp Europe

Fernado Tellado: Re-Humanizing the Web

Fernando: Hi, my name is Fernando Tellado with the blog Ayuda WordPress at ayudawp.com. I have been writing about WordPress for the last 15 years, dedicating my life to WordPress, collaborating with the Spanish community, and offering various services such as chat cleaning, pesticides, creating light stores, and web maintenance.

I’ll be a speaker at WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino with a talk on Saturday, June 15th at 12:15 PM called “Rehumanizing the Web.” The main point of this talk is to reflect together on the importance of technological tools and whether they make us better human beings or not. I don’t have the answers, but I think I do have the right questions to explore with you. I would love to see you and discuss the social aspects of technology and work. Thanks.

Camille Cunningham & Florie van Hummel: Keyword research 101: Uncover keywords that bring you digital success

Camille: Hey everyone. I’m Camille, and I work as a content specialist at Yoast.

Florie: And I’m Florie, the director of marketing at Yoast, the company behind the well-known Yoast SEO plugin.

Camille: During WordCamp Europe, we’ll be hosting the workshop “Keyword Research 101: Uncover Keywords That Bring You Digital Success,” and we’d love to tell you more about it.

Florie: During this workshop, we’ll quickly go through the basics and explain how keyword research can help you grow your online audience. We will share a lot of tools that you can use, explain how to use them, and get to work with them right away.

Camille: Plus, we’ll share a very easy formula that helps you decide which keywords have the most potential for your website right now.

Florie: At the end of this workshop, you’ll walk away with a list of keywords for your website and lots of inspiration for new content your audience will definitely love.

Camille: We would love to see you there and help you uncover the keywords that will bring you digital success. See you soon.

Francisco Torres: WordPress.org plugin repository, a year in review

Francisco: Hi everyone. I’m Francisco Torres, just a normal developer working with WordPress for many years. You might recognize me by my pequeño bigote, which is Spanish for “little mustache.”

I would like to invite you to my session called “WordPress.org Plugin Repository: A Year in Review.” In this session, I’m going to tell you a story about how the directory needed a new team of volunteers, how we got there, what we are doing to improve it, and what plugin authors can do to contribute to it.

One crucial aspect of developing WordPress plugins is ensuring they are secure. A significant number of WordPress vulnerabilities come from plugins, so it is essential to follow best security practices. The most common security issues we see are related to the absence of input sanitization, output escaping, and nonsense during user requests.

Please keep that in mind if you are developing or planning to develop a plugin. I will be sharing other best practices during the session along with stories of how the plugin industry has evolved over the years and how you can play a part in this journey.

Join me to learn more about the Plugin Review team, the challenges we face, and how you as a plugin author can contribute to making the WordPress plugin ecosystem safer and more reliable for everyone. Looking forward to seeing you there.

Irene Strikkers: How to leverage Analytics data to find out where you lose potential customers

Irene: Hi, my name is Irene Strikkers, and I’m a data insight expert at Online Dialogue. In my daily work, I help organizations optimize their websites by doing user research, data analysis, A/B testing, and all forms of experimentation.

At WordCamp, I’ll be doing a lightning session called “How to Leverage Analytics Data to Find Out Where You Lose Potential Customers.” As a website owner, you want to sell as many products as possible, gain newsletter subscribers, or have people read many of your blogs. However, people on your website might drop off somewhere before they buy, subscribe, or read.

In my session, I will show you how you can make funnels in Google Analytics or other analytics software to find out where they leave. That way, you know where on the website you might need to improve. One of the main takeaways of my talk will be to experiment with possible improvements before deciding to implement them. That way, you validate that the change is actually an improvement and won’t lead to extra drop-offs.

I’d love to invite you to my talk on Saturday afternoon to learn more practical tips on how to make funnels and how to experiment with solutions.

Matt Held: Think like a hacker: Attack your WordPress

Matt: Hey, welcome to WordCamp Europe 2024. This is Matt Held, and I’m super excited to be speaking in Torino this year. This time, I’m going to teach you how to hack a common WordPress site as well as properly defend it in my session, “Think Like a Hacker: Attack Your WordPress.”

Now you might be thinking, why would I want to learn how to attack a WordPress site? Know thy enemy—in understanding how hackers operate, you gain a huge advantage when it comes to defending your own sites. As you can imagine, knowing where hackers and bots might attack and what they can find makes you a much better defender, right?

During my talk, we’ll start by exploring the mindset of hackers and threat actors, it’s like stepping into the shoes of a digital profiler. Together we’ll discover how they spot vulnerabilities, exploit weaknesses, and wreak havoc if given the chance. This is where the fun begins.

We will have ourselves some good old live demonstrations of real hacking techniques—a live hack. You’ll see exactly how a hacker can compromise a WordPress site from weak passwords and outdated themes and plugins to sneaky SQL injections, cross-site scripting, and much more. And here’s the best part. You’ll be able to follow along and try these techniques yourself. Think of it as a hands-on workshop where you get to play the role of both the villain and the hero.

Before you start getting any funny ideas, remember, this is all about learning how to protect your site. So after we’ve had our fun breaking things, we’ll switch gears and focus on defense. I’ll show you practical steps to safeguard your site against the very attacks we just discussed and why a security-first mindset will save you lots of headaches and hours.

By the end of my session, you’ll have a toolkit of strategies to keep your WordPress site safe and sound. To give you a sneak peek, here’s a quick tip. When was the last time you checked if you have a WP-config backup in your WordPress file system? Check it now, and if you have it, delete it. And please rotate all your credentials, including database user passwords as well as WordPress salts.

I promise this session will be packed with valuable insights, practical tips, and maybe even a few laughs. Whether you are a WordPress novice or a seasoned pro, there’s something for everyone. So come join me at “Think Like a Hacker: Attack Your WordPress” and let’s learn how to be an attacker to become better defenders. The session will be on Saturday, June 15th at 12:15 PM on Track 2. See you there.

Jessica Lyschik: Twenty Twenty-Four: Pushing Default Themes Forward

Jessica: Hey everyone. My name is Jessica Lyschik, and my talk at WordCamp Europe in Torino is called “Twenty Twenty-Four: Pushing Default Themes Forward.” As I was the co-lead for the 2024 theme, I will share with you not only the vision behind the theme but also what features it offers, including how we made it accessibility-ready and much more.

Together, we will first take a look at the previous default themes, and maybe you will see what all of them have in common. For making it accessibility-ready, we had to ensure sufficient color contrasts throughout all style variations, created a screen reader-friendly headline style with an icon, and made sure all page templates have a correct semantic headline structure.

I have also picked various websites that I will show you as an inspiration, which are all using the 2024 theme under the hood. This was a sneak peek of my talk, and if you want to learn more, join me on the first conference day on Friday, June 14th at 11:15 AM on the main stage in Track 1. See you there.

Adam Zieliński: WordPress Playground – use WordPress without a server

Adam: Hi, my name is Adam Zieliński, and my talk is “WordPress Playground – Use WordPress Without a Server.” Playground is a groundbreaking new technology that brings the workforce to all devices and ecosystems at the click of a mouse.

One of the many things I’ll show you during the presentation is how to build things and even sites with nothing but a phone—no internet connection, no hosting plan. Come and join the presentation in Torino and also say hi afterward. I can’t wait to meet you there.

Katie Keith: We spoke with over 50 different WordPress product owners. Here’s what we learned.

Katie: Hi, I’m Katie Keith, founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins. I’m doing a talk at WordCamp Europe with Matt Cromwell from StellarWP, and the title will be, “We Spoke with Over 50 Different WordPress Product Owners. Here’s What We Learned.”

We will be sharing the best advice that we have received from all the WordPress product owners we’ve interviewed on our WP Product Talk podcast. A major theme of the talk will be listening to your customers. This is essential to building a successful WordPress product or indeed any type of product because, without knowing what your customers want, it’s practically impossible to create something that meets people’s needs and that they will want to pay for and use.

Listening to customers cuts across literally every part of running a WordPress product business. First, you should use it as an opportunity to get ideas for products in the first place. For example, if you are currently providing WordPress development services for clients, then listening to their pain points is an excellent way to find gaps in the market. Perhaps you can even use a plugin you have built for a client as a starting point for a commercial plugin.

When you start building your product, it’s also important that your users can input into the design of the software. This

might involve things like user acceptance testing, which could be formal or simply mean asking a few friends or clients to test your plugin. This is a great way to make sure it’s intuitive to use.

Once the product is launched, your customers are an excellent source of marketing ideas. At Barn2, we send feedback request emails to all customers a few days after they make a purchase. These emails ask them where they heard about the plugin and even what they typed into Google to find it. I get very excited when they mention a keyword that I haven’t optimized for yet.

Finally, you need to listen to your users to make sure they’re receiving good customer experience. Think about the customer’s journey at each point of using your product and consider what they need in order to be successful with it. This can lead to all sorts of new ideas, such as better documentation, onboarding emails, intuitive setup wizards, regular webinars where they can ask questions, and offering different types of support to meet different needs, such as live chat or even phone support.

So as you can see, putting customers first is an excellent way to plan a successful WordPress product business and should inform everything you do. We’ll be talking about this in more detail and lots more at WordCamp Europe, so don’t miss the talk.

Lourens Schep & Damián Suárez: Ready to try the new WooCommerce product editor?

Lawrence: Hello everyone, I’m Lawrence, and this is Damien.

Damien: Hello, I’m Damien. The both of us are excited to be leading a workshop at this upcoming WordCamp around the new product editor.

Lawrence: Yes, we are. I just came from WordCamp where we also led a session about Gutenberg.

Damien: Exactly. Yeah. Damien, do you want to tell a little bit about yourself?

Damien: Yes, sure. I consider myself a simple man who, among many things, has worked as an independent web developer for a long time. Long enough not to mention it here so as not to give away my age, but let’s say I’ve been part of the Automattic company for over 10 years. Like almost everyone else, I like to do all kinds of things except paperwork and end-to-end tests.

Lawrence: And where do you live?

Damien: Oh, sorry, I forgot to mention it. I was born in Argentina but recently moved to Portugal. How about you?

Lawrence: Yeah, I currently live in the Netherlands. I recently moved from Canada, where I lived for the past 17 years, but originally I was born in the Netherlands. I’ve been a developer with WooCommerce for just shy of four years now.

I had the privilege to work on the new product editor over the last year and a half or so, and for the rest, I tend to be a pretty active guy. I enjoy playing sports, volleyball, bouldering, things like that, and staying fit while at the gym and enjoying watching a bit of soccer too. So I’m excited that Euros is kicking off the same weekend as this WordCamp. Go Netherlands.

Damien: Nice. Talking about football, do you want to compare the number of stars or maybe actually let’s stay on track. What is next?

Lawrence: Yeah, let’s definitely stay on track. I prefer not to talk about that and I’m rather glad that the Netherlands doesn’t have to play Argentina in, but anyway, we’ll try not to make too many soccer references during our workshop. Bob asked us to share a useful tip or a tease for our workshop. So what is your statement?

Damien: Oh, yeah. Here’s a tip for the workshop. One could be how to extend this product application, for instance, part of the user interface using the Gutenberg API, because in the end, we are using Gutenberg as a framework. What do you think?

Lawrence: Oh, shoot. That was going to be mine, but yeah, I guess my tip would be for anyone that’s curious about making use of input components like a select control that Gutenberg provides, this workshop will show you how to use them and bring you one step closer.

Damien: Yeah, that sounds great. All right. See you there then.

Lawrence: Yeah, come in. Okay, bye. Bye. See you.

Vraja Das: The Power of WordPress Testing and Automation: Test Types and When to Use Them

Vraja: Hello everyone. My name is Vraja Das, and I’m a plugin developer at Yoast. The name of my presentation is “The Power of WordPress Testing and Automation: Test Types and When to Use Them.” In my presentation, you will learn what automated tests are, the different types of automated tests, and automated tests in WordPress core.

Writing automated tests has benefits beyond just verifying software requirements. Automated tests serve as living documentation of the codebase, help prevent regressions and bugs, and facilitate safer refactoring. They also foster a culture of quality and collaboration within development teams.

I will share practical tips on how to start writing tests in JavaScript and PHP, drawing from my personal experience in the field. Whether you’re new to testing or looking to refine your skills, this session will equip you with the knowledge and confidence to integrate testing into your development routine, ultimately leading to more reliable and maintainable code.

Benjamin Evans: Introducing Learning Pathways on a brand new Learn.WordPress.org

Ben: I’m Ben Evans. I’m a community education manager at Automattic, and I work as a full-time sponsor contributor to the WordPress project. Currently, I’m a training team representative focusing on keeping the administration of the team running smoothly.

At WordCamp Europe this year, I’ll be presenting a talk titled “Introducing Learning Pathways on the Brand New Learn.WordPress.org.” There are three big topics I’ll be sharing in this talk.

First of all, have you ever visited the WordPress Project’s official educational website? The site is located at learn.wordpress.org, and we like to call the site Learn WordPress. Learn WordPress launched during the COVID pandemic when there were a lot of changes happening in the WordPress community.

This year, the WordPress project is relaunching the site with fresh content and a new design. In my talk, I’ll be sharing what exciting things await on the new site when it relaunches, currently scheduled for July.

The second point of my talk will be introducing the new type of content Learn WordPress will be producing. We’re calling them Learning Pathways. Learning Pathways are curated sets of lessons for learners of different levels, roles, and use cases. The training team is currently working on learning pathways for users and developers, with more pathways for designers and contributors coming next.

We’re on track to publish the beginner user, intermediate user, beginner developer, and intermediate theme developer learning pathways in time for the site relaunch. I can’t wait to share more about Learning Pathways in my talk.

And finally, the training team is looking for more contributors to help us make Learn WordPress the most effective educational website it can be. Come to my talk to learn how you can get involved with the Learn WordPress project. We have a world to reach with effective WordPress education, and we need your help to achieve that. I’ll see you there.