Myself and Ed recently represented Mixd at WordCamp Europe 2024 (WCEU 24), in the magnificent city of Turin, Italy. WordPress is one of the core building blocks on which we build our client’s websites and WCEU is the flagship European conference for WordPress and its vast, ever-growing community.
This offered a great opportunity to:
- Engage with core suppliers and partners who were in attendance
- Gain insights from key figures in the WordPress community
- Learn about new features coming down the line for future versions of WordPress
- Get inspired about innovative ways in which we can evolve our products
The core WordPress experience
I’ve lost count of the amount of times now that I’ve heard glowing feedback from clients on the use of the block editor within WordPress. The editorial flow has improved over the last few years, and we’ve been able to bring out the best of it with a tailored experience for our clients.
One of our highlight sessions at the conference was watching a “speed build” contest between 2 WordPress experts where they were tasked with recreating a particular website using only the core features available to them in block editor. How much of the front page of a website can you build in 30 minutes using a vanilla version of WordPress? Quite a bit as it turns out!
We were suitably impressed having watched this pressure cooker demo with WordPress core being put through its paces. It really shows how much you can achieve with the basic fundamentals. The site, and the build process was of course far removed from all the polish and craft we put into delivering our work, but it provided some great food for thought.
What can we achieve by integrating more core features and how can we empower our client editors to go further with WordPress and their Mixd sites?
Adventures at the bleeding edge
Throughout the conference (including the speed build contest), there were new (as yet unreleased) WordPress features being mentioned.
Typically new WordPress features that get released are the result of many collaborators working together across many disciplines and subject to plenty of internal and external scrutiny. Despite that, you can’t really emulate the many different use cases for how these new features will be applied and as such, when these features go out into the wild, they don’t have the level of maturity and stability that we require. However, the community feed that back and help reshape features until they meet Mixd standards!
One thing that’s reassuring attending these conferences, is that the ideas we’ve recently being bouncing around internally, are on the minds of the WordPress core team and other community members. When these features reach the point at which we can guarantee the level of quality that we need, we will be at the front of the line to deliver them for our clients.
Wrapping up
Sat here in the conference building, which happens to be the former factory and headquarters of car manufacturer Fiat, it seems only appropriate to use a car analogy! If you’re going to build an engine for a car, it helps to understand as much as you can about all the parts you’re using to build it. That way you can extract the best performance out of that engine and provide the best driving experience.
At Mixd, we strive for delivering quality and we can only do that by continually educating ourselves, innovating our work, and keeping our clients at the forefront of our minds. There’s definitely a buzz amongst the team about what we’re planning for the future and I can’t wait to bring you on that journey with us!
Until then…. arrivederci!
