If you’ve been following us for a while you’ll already know how much we LOVE WordCamp events— but if you’re new, let us quickly run down what they are:
WordCamp is a conference that focuses on everything WordPress. WordCamps are informal, community-organized events that are put together by WordPress users like you! Everyone from casual users to core developers participate, share ideas, and get to know each other.
WordCamp US is the annual meetup held (as the name suggests) in the US! There are also huge conferences for WordCamp Europe and WordCamp Asia, as well as 100s of regional WordCamp events around the globe.
What to expect from WordCamp:
- Networking opportunities
- Guided Workshops
- Discussion panels
- Informative talks
- Swag, prizes, and after-hour parties!
The Ride Out ✈️
For many of our in-person attendees, their WordCamp experience started in their local airport. We had XWPeople attend from Australia, Germany, and all over the US.
But with WordCamp US being such an exclusive event this year, much of our attendance came from our team of XWPeople around the world! Our team joined the fun remotely through Twitter and the official Livestream.
XWP Team Day: Surf’s Up 🏄♀️
Before we got into the craziness of WordCamp, our team took to the waves for a day of surfing and Mexican food to catch up, relax, and enjoy some time in the sun.
WordCamp Swag 👕
Anyone who’s attended an in-person WordCamp knows how amazing the swag can be. This time, we came along with our always-popular event tees and the coolest Astroperson coozies to keep everyone’s drinks cool in the San Diego sun.
But of course, we weren’t the only ones with goodies to share. Here’s a glimpse of some of the other amazing swag brought along by WCUS attendees:
Party on the Bay 🛳
That evening, a few of us also caught up with our friends at Pagely to take in some views of the San Diego bay!
Day 1 Highlights 🙌
Opening day kicked off as attendees checked in and scoped out the sponsor booths (including all that free swag we mentioned 😉) and Kathy Drewien opened the event with opening remarks, reminding us all how to be together in person again.
The arena was split into two talk tracks—the Sun track and the Palm track. You can find the footage from both stages along with timestamps for each talk below. All thanks to WordCamp Central.
WordCamp US 2022 Day One: Sun Track (Friday)
- 00:34:28 Taming the Whirlwind: Growing Your WordPress Business While You’re Busy with Client Work — Nathan Ingram
- 01:33:32 How Your Small Business Can Participate in Five for the Future — Chris Lubkert
- 02:34:34 Meeting Your Customers Where They Are – How Businesses Can Thrive in a Digital-First World — Keala Gaines
- 04:19:30 An Anthropologist, a WordPress Developer, and a Lawyer Walk into a Bar — Cassandra Decker
- 05:18:20 Your Technical Support Philosophy is Losing Money and Angering Customers — Ben Meredith
- 06:33:15 Where is WordPress’ Place in the Creator Economy? — Ben May
- 07:33:50 Extending WordPress using SlotFill — Ryan Welcher
WordCamp US 2022 Day One: Palm Track (Friday)
- 00:34:42 Best Design Practices to Create Website Engagement — Lee Levy
- 01:34:22 Embracing Minds of All Kinds — Christina Deemer
- 02:33:38 Blog to Video: Tapping into YouTube and Video SEO with Your Existing Content — Joey Daoud
- 04:18:44 Customizing Core Blocks for Clients — Alex Ball
- 04:36:10 Prepare for the cookie-less future with Google Analytics 4 — Sajid Islam
- 04:51:54 Improving Processes & Website Tracking with Google Tag Manager and WordPress — Stephanie Bernal
- 05:17:00 Let’s Build a Custom Block in 15 Minutes — Nick Diego
- 05:33:50 FSE For the Win — Evan Mullins
- 05:50:47 A Rookie’s Reflection – It is NEVER too late to learn! — Sally Thoun
- 06:33:27 Gamify Your Content — Ronnie Burt
- 07:34:00 Get Hooked! Using the right WP actions — Benjamin Kostenbader
XWP Workshops: Getting Started with WP-CLI: Alain Schlesser
Our Senior Engineer & Architect Alain Schlesser kicked off the workshop track by giving a beginner’s guide to WP-CLI (in front of a jam-packed audience ready to learn).
If you’re new to WP-CLI, it’s the command line interface for WordPress. A text-based tool that allows you to control WordPress at scale. It is useful for local development, for remote control of your servers, and for automating menial & not so menial tasks.
Alain ran through the basics of WP-CLI before diving deeper to understand how you can remotely control multiple servers with the push of a few keystrokes and how you can progress from manual tasks to fully automated scripts that let you shave minutes, or even hours, off of repetitive tasks.
Unfortunately, there are no recordings of the workshop track (😢) but you can find Alain’s slides on his Github: https://schlessera.github.io/wcus-2022/#/
Day 2 Highlights 🌴
Day two was buzzing with excitement as attendees were treated to a huge range of talks, covering everything from design and commerce to sensitivity.
WordCamp US 2022 Day One: Sun Track (Saturday)
00:33:15 Developing Cultural Intelligence — Petya Raykovska
01:13:15 Designing for Accessibility — Sara Cannon
02:32:45 DEIB: Uncomfortable Truths of Belonging — Cami Kaos
04:16:41 A New Era of WordPress Themes is Here: Block Themes — Rich Tabor
05:16:00 The Future Of Themes: Designing for the Block Editor and Beyond — Michelle R Schulp
06:31:40 Empowering local stores; learn from the tech giants whilst staying local — Ronald Gijsel
06:46:00 Finding and Fixing the Six Most Common WCAG 2 Failures — Joe Dolson
07:02:14 WordPress for the Next Generation — Clemvio Hodge
WordCamp US 2022 Day One: Palm Track (Saturday)
00:34:55 Connected Commerce: Evolving to Multichannel Selling — Beka Rice
01:31:00 Tackling performance in the WordPress ecosystem at scale — Felix Arntz
02:31:50 Clue: A Detective’s Guide to Troubleshooting in WordPress — Micah Wood
04:16:10 Build Your Social Media Posting Application with WordPress and Zapier — George Woodard
04:31:38 How Live Streaming Can Level Up Your Career — Ebonie Butler
04:49:06 Images on the Web — past present and future — Adam Silverstein
05:16:10 WordPress Through The Terminal — Milana Cap
06:31:06 Content Creators Are Users, Too: The Crucial Importance of Carefully Crafted Editorial Experiences — Phil Crumm, Helen Hou-Sandí
XWP Talks: Through The Terminal With Milana Cap
On day 2, we had our fabulous WordPress Engineer Milana Cap take the stage for her talk “WordPress through the Terminal”
Remember the famous “5 minutes installation” process for installing WordPress? In Milana’s talk, she showed what the powerful WP-CLI that Alain introduced in his talk can do in 5 minutes—and everything else that can happen in the terminal in 40 minutes.
This wasn’t your usual presentation talk. It was a live terminal commanding and SSHing your WordPress administration and development, with plenty of jokes, cookies, and releasing a Kraken (or two).
Check out Milana’s full talk with this handy timestamp.
WordPress In Conversation: Matt Mullenweg Questions & Answers 📣
One of the main events of any WordCamp is undoubtedly the live Q&A session with Matt Mullenweg, the co-creator of WordPress and CEO of Automattic.
At the larger WordCamps Matt live-answers questions from the crowd, giving the community a chance to get answers to some of their burning questions. You can watch the full session in the video to see how Matt responded to thee following questions:
- “Can we get support from Meta to get ways to collaborate across teams in a more systematic way?” — @DjevaLoperka
- “What is the vision behind WordPress.com to provide more control and provide a better experience than Squarespace & Wix?” — @WilliamBay
- “Why is multi-language support the last priority in the Gutenberg phases?” – @mhanes
- “Could there be a toggle to install #WordPress in classic mode so we don’t need to remember to install the Classic Editor?”
- “Given we have no timeframe for multilingual support, can we have an alternative for the learn.wordpress.org platform?” – @courtneyr_dev
- “What is the future of blogging?”- @NathanBWeller
- “This community is so loving! But how can we be more intentional about providing access and fighting poverty?” – @CRDimpact
We even heard from the man himself over on Twitter, after he revealed some of his secret online aliases 🕵️
Contributor Day 💡
Contributor Day is a special day designated for contributing to WordPress. Collaborate with new and existing contributors, meet new people and learn about the different ways YOU can get involved in the project. Contributor Day is for everyone!
This year’s contributor day was HUGE, with more new faces than ever learning about how they can get involved in the WordPress project.
WordCamp US 2022 at a glance
Looking for a breakdown of this year’s events?
- How many contributors were there at WCUS 2022? There were around 300 people at contributor day (right around 50% of total attendees!)
- How many speakers were there at WordCamp US? There were over 40 speakers, including a couple of our XWPeople (and a whole lot more who volunteered).
- What kinds of sessions are there at WordCamp US? There are talks, workshops, and lightning sessions (in addition to all the sponsor booths, many of whom have brought info, games, and competitions).
- How many people attended WCUS 2022? This year’s sold-out event was capped at 650 tickets to create a more intimate atmosphere— and it sold out quickly.
- Where is WordCamp Europe 2023? National Harbor, Maryland
