New Developments

I attended WordCamp Barcelona 2023 last weekend, and it was a high dose of inspiration, learning, and discovery.

In case you don’t know, WordCamps are conferences organised around WordPress, and organised locally — except for a few exceptions like WordCamp Europe, which happens once a year.

Beyond what I already expected from the WordPress community, like meeting awesome people and having a good time in an empowering environment, and so many awesome talks — and speakers — I could be talking about them for weeks, one thing I would like to highlight is passion. I know it has become kind of a buzzword, but let me explain what I mean.

Javier Casares talked about security in WordPress, specifically about vulnerabilities. He shared a useful classification of types of vulnerabilities and some figures on the vulnerabilities found on WordPress — including themes and plugins. But beyond that, he also talked about WPVulnerability, a free plugin to be aware of known vulnerabilities in our projects, but also a project to build a publicly available database on vulnerabilities around WordPress as an alternative to the private ones that already exist. This will allow, among other things, independent teams and developers to make new tools using this information.

Nahuai Badiola talked about sustainability, sharing a picture of the current use of energy in internet projects, and how we can work towards reducing the carbon footprint of the projects we develop. This has led to the creation of an initiative in the WordPress community. But beyond that, he also shared his efforts, among others, within W3C to create recommendation guidelines to make web projects more sustainable.

Marta Torre talked about diversity, what it means and why should we care. She also shared ways in which we can address our efforts to foster diversity, as well as her own experience doing it as part of the diversity initiative in the WordPress community team. Beyond that, she also organised the diversity table, the first one on a local WordCamp, where we discussed what diversity means and how we can help create a more diverse community and events. This happened in a WordCamp which made a deliberate effort to have a higher number of women speaking, resulting in 51% of women speakers and more women being speakers for the first time.

A big shout-out to the WordCamp Barcelona 2023 organisation for their work and the amazing event.