The Future of WordPress

This past weekend, I attended WordCamp 2019 in Miami. WordCamp is a conference covering everything related to WordPress and is a 3-day conference. There are multiple events like this one held all over the US, but since is Miami just down the road, we attended this WordCamp at Florida International University.

Speakers from all over the world came to give presentations on various areas of WordPress.  There were workshops for developers, freelancers, and even children (which we think is awesome). The conference really showed the size of the WordPress community and how powerful WordPress is becoming.

The new Gutenberg editor is built with React, which is a powerful JavaScript library. With WordPress now harnessing the power of React, the possibilities are endless. Also, PHP which is the language WordPress is written in, has just gone through a major update and is much faster than its previous versions.

This conference really got me even more excited about WordPress than I already was! There were quite a few companies at WordCamp, all which have some sore of ties to the WordPress Community.

WP Engine, a hosting platform for WordPress, has a developer toolkit currently in beta. One of the speakers showed how to properly secure your WordPress website and some of the vulnerabilities there can be if your site is not secured properly. We built custom plugins for the new Gutenberg WordPress editor. There was quite a good presentation about Webpack, which is primarily a JavaScript Bundler. Bundling your assets can greatly increase the speed of your website, and with WordPress going heavily towards JavaScript.  Webpack will be a great addition to add into any development flow for custom themes and plugins.

Accessibility was another important topic presented at WordCamp. There has been quite a bit of talk in this area recently and making sure your website is ADA compliant is something you want to include into your development process. There are many websites out there that will run a quick audit and tell you what errors need to be corrected to make sure you are compliant.

WordPress is getting larger and larger every day.  The amount of support and tools utilized is amazing.  WordPress is such a robust content management system and there is just so much it can do.  With WordPress having a heavier dependency on JavaScript, we will probably start to see a lot of single page applications using React and some other cool sites.

This was my first WordCamp experience and I hope to be back next year. I learned a ton and met a lot of really great people. The WordPress community is a great community to be a part of and there is so much to look forward to!