WordCamp Europe published its schedule today, to the delight of prospective attendees around the world. The three-day event will take place June 2-4, and will feature 29 talks, 18 workshops, and two panels spanning 11 different categories.
The two conference days have general themes, with Day 1 dedicated to “WordPress Now” and Day 2 to “The Future of WordPress.” A sample of the selected sessions include building block themes, accessibility for dyslexia, creating paid newsletter subscriptions, enhancing performance, and how headless WordPress benefits enterprises. The two panel topics are “Acquisitions in WordPress” and “Building Community through Meetups.”
Juliette Reinders Folmer, maintainer of the WordPress Coding Standards Sniffs for PHPCS, commented on Twitter about the notable lack of backend dev topics and how it’s difficult to “justify the (not insignificant) expenses involved just for the hallway track.”
“Seeing this schedule makes me very much doubt whether to bother going,” Reinders Folmer said. “A number of interesting talks for sure, but the lack of any significant back-end dev talks, makes me feel decidedly unwelcome and makes me doubt people like me are even part of the target community.”
While many of the workshops are more technical, they are mostly geared towards theme developers. Others in the Twitter discussion noted that WCEU has been moving more towards non-tech topics over the past few years and other major WordCamps like WCUS have also been part of this trend. They speculated about whether it’s because the organizers didn’t receive enough technical talks, whether the session reviewers do not represent a diverse array of skill sets, or whether this is a purposeful move to promote non-tech topics with fewer and fewer PHP-focused talks.
WordCamp Europe has scheduled built-in networking times before and after official start and end times, during sessions, and during lunchtime. Those who plan to attend the workshops will need to register for them during the event, as there are a limited number of spaces. Registration is free but attendees must have a ticket to WCEU before registering. An after party is scheduled for Saturday at the conclusion of the event.
“Others in the Twitter discussion noted that WCEU has been moving more towards non-tech topics over the past few years and other major WordCamps like WCUS have also been part of this trend.”
It’s not just WordCamps, but in general, WordPress has become unwelcoming (if not hostile) to PHP/backend devs within the last few years. All WP blogs out there are mostly covering Gutenberg stuff right now. If I need to get info about more advanced topics I have to resort to StackOverflow.