Off the back of WordSesh 2, Scott Basgaard was kind enough to offer me the opportunity to speak at WordCamp Norway 2014. Of course I jumped at the opportunity and on Friday night I found myself landing at a snowy Oslo airport with my speaking slot scheduled for 10am the next morning.
The talk I gave was an iteration of the WordSesh 2013 talk “WordPress can save the world” – the slides (including notes – just hit the ‘settings’ cog to see them) are below.
Here’s me, looking a bit nervous, waiting to talk!
Quite apart from speaking, #wcnorge was a great WordCamp. I came away with some really clear takeaways that I intend to integrate into what we do at Pragmatic over the coming months.
- Vagrant – a way of producing lightweight, reproducible and portable development environments. Basically it’s a way to set up a ready-for-WordPress development environment in a coded way. That means that the Pragmatic team can set up identical hosting environments for existing and new team members, and even roll the exact same development environment out to a web server. It’s a bit of a geeky one but it seems to be an emerging best practice, so I’m keen to adopt it.
- Customising the CMS – Noel Tock gave a fantastic talk about how to make sure that the WordPress admin area is as easy as possible for people to use. That process could be as simple as hiding unnecessary sections and tools, or as complicated as creating totally unique admin pages specific to a site’s requirements. We’re going to start doing this as much as possible.
- Get braver about integrations – Brain Messenlehner gave a talk about building Web Apps with WordPress. He showed examples of integrations with 3rd party platforms and APIs and even a new app creation plugin the team at Web Dev Studios has released. This talk inspired me to be braver with what we try to build for our clients. Whilst for many people, a standard WordPress site will be totally sufficient, larger and more complex projects involving other web platforms will be increasingly important to us.
So, all that remains is a massive thanks to the WordCamp Norway organisers. It was a great event and I really appreciate the opportunity to speak, listen, meet some great new WordPress folk and to catch up with others.
As always, if you’d like to talk to us about any kind of WordPress work, get in touch – we’ll be glad to hear from you.