WordCamp Europe 2024 | Kanoppi recap and highlights

Summary

Here are our Kanoppi team’s highlights from the 2024 WordCamp Europe WordPress community event.

WordCamp Europe 2024 in Torino

The Kanoppi team was thrilled to attend WordCamp Europe in beautiful Torino, Italy in June. This event is an annual celebration of all the talented, hard-working people across Europe who make the WordPress community so special.

The event lasted three days (the contributor day and two conference days) and included a wealth of interesting talks, presentations, panel discussions, networking, and more.

It’s such a pleasure to meet up with so many friendly faces and brilliant minds from the community who are doing an incredible job of making WordPress the number-one website platform in the world.

Thursday, June 13 – Contributor day

Contributor Day is a celebration of the WordPress community spirit, designed to bring together people who want to contribute to the project.

Our Founder Louise, contributed to the sustainability table, working on developing a feature overview to guide the next steps in defining sustainability plugin requirements. One of the key points of discussion was finding a way to calculate the page size without calling third-party services. They also worked on a handbook to educate WordPress developers and users on how to make websites more sustainable.

Other contributors worked on the WordPress Sustainable Events Handbook with advice and guidance on how to make WordCamps and events more sustainable.

Friday, June 14 – Full event, day one

On the first day of the full event, we had a range of exciting talks and sessions to enjoy, including the keynote from Joost de Valk and Juliette Reinders Folmer.

Sustainability in open-source

Joost and Julietet highlighted that the Internet of Things (IoT) that we all rely on is 90% open source. There have been some critical security issues such as the XZ Backdoor which was caught accidentially in the nick of time.

They highlighted the problem of some critical open-source projects relying on volunteer maintainers who are not being paid for their time. This is exacerbated by the lack of new generations stepping up to take over and help.

So we need to help as a WordPress community by contributing and funding some of this work.

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

Another highlight from Friday was the talk about WordPress products by Katie Keith and Matt Cromwell.  We had some great takeaways that we can apply to Kanoppi.  These included:

• How to market a plugin and using a few channels well
• Video marketing and then repurposing content
• The importance of support and after purchase help
• Paying attention to users feedback and data from support channels
• Subscriptions and pricing

This has given us a lot to consider as we prepare our Kanoppi Carbon Footprint plugin for launch.

Saturday, June 14 – Full event, day two

Day one of the event was a tough act to follow, but the second day didn’t disappoint with a sustainabilty talk in the morning.

Practical Techniques for Sustainable Web Development with WordPress

Bjarne Oldrup spoke about how he started making sustainable websites as he was so concerned about the planet. He also kindly gave a shout-out to Louise’s talk about Digital Sustainability from last year.

Bjarne focussed on techniques such as optimising assets to reduce their size such as:

• Images
• Videos
• Fonts
• PDF files

He then gave a real world case of a website which he rebuilt to reduce the carbon footprint from 1600kg to 80kg per year.

Keynote Summer update

The conference ended with the Summer update from Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress. He spoke about the potential of WordPress Playground which runs WordPress in your browser and can be used for demos and testing new plugins and features. He also highlighted 11 things which will make WordPress sustainable in the future:

1. Simple things should be easy and intuitive, and complex things possible.
2. Blogs and dynamic sites are better.
3. Documentation should be wiki-easy to edit.
4. Forums should be front and center.
5. Plugins and themes with community infrastructure.
6. Great theme previews and diverse aesthetics.
7. We can’t over-index for guidelines and requirements.
8. Feedback loops are so important.
9. Core should be opinionated and quirky.
10. If you make WordPress, use WordPress.
11. Stay close to our end-users

Key themes and takeaways

We were so pleased to notice a growing interest in more sustainable, eco-friendly web design and development practices among WordCamp attendees this year; the sustainability table was really buzzing on contributor day. The conference also felt more sustainable with recyclable trays and cutlery for lunch.

Other highlights

Some other highlights of this year’s WordCamp Europe included the HumanMade / BigByte party, and of course, no WordCamp would be complete without an invite to the WP Engine party hosted by their amazing team.

What’s next on our calendar? 

The Kanoppi team is set for a very busy summer, with our product approaching release.  We’re excited to be testing with some initial users. Please get in touch if you’d like to be involved in that early preview of Kanoppi.

Louise is also going to be attending plenty of community events, including the monthly WordPress London Meetup and WordCamp Whitley Bay in July.

Next year Switzerland

If you’ve never attended WordCamp Europe before, we’d highly recommend putting it in your calendar for next year – Basel Switzerland on 5th to 7th June.

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