WordCamp Europe was the first WordCamp that I have been to and it was great. After reading the great post “WordCamp Europe 2013 – A Welshman’s Thoughts” I thought I would write my own as I visited different sessions to Rhys.
First Day
Unit Testing like a Pirate – Ptah Dunbar
Ptah had his eye patch on and had red and white striped t-shirt on. Here are his slides.
Better Site Stacks with Composer by Andrey “Rarst” Savchenko
It was great to have Rarst explained how to use composer for deployment and user testing. For me it was really nice to see a developer use Windows. His slides can be seen on his site.
The Life of a Theme by Tammie Lister
An interesting take on building themes from a designers perspective.
Developing WordPress Themes with Git by Kirsten Schelper & Elisabeth Hölzl
The German developer and designer duo explained the git process using diagrams for beginners.
Perfect Your Images Using WordPress by Marko Heijnen & Mike Schroder
This was nice see what type of tools are coming into WordPress and how it getting easier for developers to manipulate images. I only found out after the talk that GD and IMAGICK are php image manipulation tools.
Writing Secure WordPress Code by Brad Williams
This was one of my favourite talks as I was able to understand a few things I was a bit unsure of before.
Second Day
Practical WordPress Accessibility by Bram Duvigneau
This session did not have any slides. Bram is blind and he showed us how it is like to use WordPress for a blind person with a live demo. He showed the issues with page structure and took the event site as an example. Bram also showed some issues in WordPress how functionality should work with just keyboard.
To OOP or not to OOP by Nikolay Bachiyski
The main principle here is that OOP is perceived difficult and we just need to work at it.
Learnings from Growing Local WordPress Communities in Japan by Naoko Takano
This was a really interesting talk as what can be achieved by a community and how important translations are. Naoko wrote a post on it.
On Internationalization: Plugins and themes for the whole world by Samuel “Otto” Wood
This presentation is a must see. Otto covers on common mistakes and explains why translations are so important. English WordPress 3.5.2 downloads contributed only 60% of the total downloads. 40% of WordPress 3.5.2 were downloaded in other languages.
The State of Multilingual WordPress by Simon Wheatley, Frank Bültge & Amir Helzer
We have a new plugin in town. Code For The People released their new multilingual plugin Babble.
The presentation for Multilingual Press. MarketPress also wrote a roundup on the different solutions.
This is what I understood from the presentations and my experience with the plugins.
- WPML, a very popular WordPress plugin that has a lot of functionality and they provide support in multiple languages
- Babble, a rather new plugin focussed on meeting WordPress.com VIP hosting standards but with reduced functionality
- Multilingual Press, based upon the default WordPress Multisite feature, great for having different language sites
