WordPress has gone from being a blogging platform to a content management system

Posted on 21/11/2016 by jimmy_r

Can you tell us what your organisation does?

We’re an e-commerce focused WordPress agency from the forests of Värmland. Or Arvika to be exact. Most of our time is spent on developing, maintaining and supporting a number of WooCommerce extensions used by merchants in Scandinavia and other parts of the world.
We also do regular project work where we develop websites and e-commerce stores for clients in Sweden and Norway.

How does WordPress affect your business?

It’s extremely central. WordPress is the technical foundation that we build the majority of our business upon. The community around WordPress has also affected us greatly by being a hub for learning new stuff, making new friends and finding employees.

How can WordCamp Stockholm and its attendees help the Swedish WordPress community?

By making connections and building a stronger Swedish WordPress Community. This way we will hopefully see more future WordPress meetups being organized in different Swedish cities.

Where do you think WordPress is and where does it fit in 5 years from now?

WordPress has gone from being a blogging platform to a content management system. I think the usage of WordPress will keep growing but the largest difference in 5 years from now will be that we will see it used more as a headless CMS.

What opportunities are you hoping for at this WordCamp?

Meeting new WordPress geeks and reconnecting with friends that I’ve meet at previous WordCamps. Also, hoping to meet a WooCommerce developer that might be interested in working for a small company in the western parts of Värmland 🙂

Finally, the elevator pitch! Tell us why you’re great, in 140 characters or less?

Krokedil is an experienced e-commerce and WordPress agency. We love our job and we deliver good stuff. That’s it.

We value innovation & that’s one of the reasons to why we sponsor WordCamp

Posted on 21/11/2016 by jimmy_r

Can you tell us what your organisation does?

– Catena Media is a online lead generation company within the online gambling industry. We run a large number of websites like JohnSlots and NetEntCasino which are powered by WordPress where our visitors are able to make informed decisions on what online casino or sports book is best for them.

How does WordPress affect your business?

– Most of our websites run on the WordPress CMS and have done so from day 1 due to the WordPress platform allowing us to integrate smart tools and services through plugins developed by ourselves or third parties which allows us to make informed business decisions which in turn facilitate both traffic and revenue growth.

So for us WordPress is an important part of the success story that is Catena Media and that’s why we care so strongly about the WordPress CMS and it’s community so that we can have this fantastic CMS continuously evolve and create value for us and others.

How can WordCamp Stockholm and its attendees help the Swedish WordPress community?

– WordCamp Stockholm will be a great opportunity for Swedish WordPress users and developers to come together and talk about all things WordPress which without a doubt will lead to creating positive value for the Swedish WordPress community.

Where do you think WordPress is and where does it fit in 5 years from now?

– I believe that WordPress today is a fantastic framework to build whatever website or even web app that a person/business wants.

With the fantastic community that surrounds WordPress I believe that the CMS will continue to positively evolve just as it has been since its birth in 2013 and most likely become the go to framework for a lot more people and businesses – let’s keep this great momentum going.

What opportunities are you hoping for at this WordCamp?

– We are excited about the opportunity to connect with passionate WordPress developers and publishers that would be interested in pursuing a career within Catena Media. We are currently looking for talented individuals, interested in creating new WordPress powered websites and web applications and therefore we are hoping to meet with some great candidates, at this years WordCamp. That said, we really like the WordPress community and are looking forward to having a chat with anyone visiting our stand!

Finally, the elevator pitch! Tell us why you’re great, in 140 characters or less?

– We value innovation & that’s one of the reasons to why we sponsor WordCamp so that we can help innovate our CMS. Innovating Dev? Join Catena!

WordCamp Stockholm – Practical Information

Posted on 21/11/2016 by Olaf LindstrÃ¶m

When in Sweden

It’s good to know that most Swedes will speak and understand English at a good level.
In general you can use a credit card to buy things almost everywhere. Beware that cash is not always accepted, for example public transport usually won’t accept cash and you need to buy tickets in advance. Public transport in Stockholm is called SL. Train tickets can be bought at SJ, you can’t buy tickets for SJ’s train services onboard so do it before you enter the train.
Out time zone is UTC+1.

Registration

Registration on Tuesday starts at 8 am in the main lobby of the venue. There will be other tracks than WordCamp and registration will be combined with thoose tracks, as part of Internetdagarna.

Getting around at the venue

We have two tracks, “Main hall” will take place in room “A1”, 4th floor. “Secondary hall” will take place in the “Bar” area.

Schedule

Check out the schedule for the conference day.

Afterparty

There’ll be a afterparty combined with the other events taking place at Internetdagarna. It starts at 5pm.

Contributor Day

If you have signed up for the contributor day, The contributor day will take place at the Bonnier Tidskrifter office. Read more in this post about contributor day.

WordCamp staff

Our volunteers will be dressed in t-shirts with our logo on them. Don’t hesitate to ask any of them if you need help with finding your way around or have any questions about the event.

Venue address

Nils Ericsons Plan 4
111 64 Stockholm

Check out the venue website for detailed descriptions on how to get there.

What is a WordPress contributor day and why should I come?

Posted on 19/11/2016 by Peter Elmered

Contributor days gives you a special opportunity to work together and learn from some of the best contributors in the community. Together you can to contribute to the awesome CMS that runs about 27% of all the websites on the web. This day you have a perfect chance to and give something back to the community and you will definitely lean a lot in the process.

Everyone is welcome and you can contribute regardless of your skill level. If you never contributed before, this is a perfect time to get started. You will be guided by experienced contributors in a friendly and relaxed environment. So take the chance of taking both WordPress and yourself to the next level.

It’s really fun and rewarding and after a day of presentations you get a chance to learn by doing. You will also meet a lot of nice and interesting people to expand your network. A lot of people think the contributor days are more rewarding than the main WordCamp event, both in terms of knowledge and networking.

On this contributor day we will also have 4 very interesting presentations with workshops. The schedule looks like this:

Time	Contribution day
09:00	Contribution day opens
09:30	Theme review workshop Milan Ivanović Favorite session: Theme review workshop
11:00	Integrating Visual Composer and Advanced Custom Fields Kåre Mulvad Steffensen Favorite session: Integrating Visual Composer and Advanced Custom Fields
12:00	Lunch
13:00	Logging and monitoring with WordPress workshop Tobias Nyholm Favorite session: Logging and monitoring with WordPress workshop
15:00	Improving WordPress performance with XDebug and PHP profiling Otto Kekäläinen Favorite session: Improving WordPress performance with XDebug and PHP profiling
17:00	Contribution day closes

Don’t miss out on the opportunity to make a difference to WordPress community and learn from some of the best!

Here’s some pictures of last years contributor day:

To participate you need a ticket to the WordCamp Stockholm 2016 main event.

Venue

The contribution day will be in the office of Bonnier Tidskrifter AB. The address is:

Sveavägen 53
113 59, Stockholm
Directions (Google maps)

There is a phone on the door. Call and say that you are going to WordCamp Contributor day and they will let you in. We will start in the café on the first floor and for a short intro. After that we will be on the sixth floor for the rest of the day.

We are very exited, and we hope that you want to join us.

Don’t forget to signup.

Meet Jimmy and Toni – speakers with a passion for continous delivery

Posted on 14/11/2016 by Olaf LindstrÃ¶m

Meet Jimmy and Toni, both working in Norrköping, Östergötland, for clients using WordPress. They will share their knowledge on processes and continous delivery.

What are your current titles and roles?

Jimmy: I am the CEO of Angry Creative & Synotio. I oversee process and important projects at Angry Creative & Synotio.

Toni: I am the CTO at Synotio. I architect beautiful solutions and help clients scale their applications.

How did you first get started with WordPress?

Jimmy: I got in contact with it while designing and programming in my dorm room. Earliest contact was already in 2005, but I began working more professionally with WordPress 2007 and full-time in 2009 after I finished my masters degree.

Toni: I worked as a sysadmin, and it is pretty much impossible to do that without coming in contact with WordPress.

How do you work with WordPress today?

Jimmy: We do custom development, management and hosting. We’re very good with the technical aspects and our bureau partners and clients can rely that we deliver a rock-solid service where they don’t have to worry.

Toni: I mainly work with helping clients with very high amounts of visitors optimise their application and surrounding components for peak performance. I also help build process so that we maintain a very high level of security while developers get just the right amount of access for doing their job.

What do you like most about WordPress?

Jimmy: The community and that there are som many people willing to give and share their knowledge. Its a beautiful thing. Open source helps to build both micro and macro economies.

Toni: It has a very large community with a lot of pre-built components. It is pretty easy to fork and/or contribute, making development projects very fast compared to other solutions.

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

Jimmy: I think WordPress will have an even larger market share. I truly hope that more open source projects in the community ship tests with their plugins, and that a lot of the legacy code in strange architecture in core gets revamped. And I hope that we can help with that.

Toni: I think more enterprise clients will choose WordPress, and this will reflect the direction of core and the entire ecosystem.

Why did you decide to speak about “From cowboy coding to continuous delivery” this year?

Jimmy: Our community needs a greater understanding about process and why it is important. By telling about our mistakes over the last 10+ years I hope that we can help others.

Toni: What he said.

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Jimmy: A ton of them! Im excited to hear Niklas Högefjords talk on “Skyldig tills motsatsen bevisats – om support på open source-produkter”. A lot of people think of open source in the wrong way. The proper way is to think is free as in free speech, not free beer.

Toni: I mostly came for the free beer.

Meet Erik Bernskiöld – speaker and founder of Bernskiold Media

Posted on 11/11/2016 by Olaf LindstrÃ¶m

What is your current title and role?

I’m the Managing Director and Founder of boutique digital agency Bernskiold Media. I spend my days working primarily with web & digital strategy for our customers, but can’t really leave the hands-on development/design things behind either.

How did you first get started with WordPress?

I got into WordPress around version 2.1, which doesn’t feel that long ago, until I start looking back at the history and evolvement of WordPress since then. It’s matured in ways I could never see happen.

I’d recently started up my first small agency, XLD Studios, after having ran several community websites for a few years. WordPress started to get some good PR and after struggling with it for a while (everything has its learning curve), I got into building themes for it…and the rest is as they say, history.

How do you work with WordPress today?

There certainly are less boundaries for when WordPress is not a good fit today than there were even a few years ago. Not only are we building some incredible websites for customers, but we are able to be exploring it as a full backend system with the API as well.

While a lot has changed over the years, many things are the same. I still do a lot of UI development with WordPress.

What has changed most dramatically is how much more of my daily website development work is being done in PHP with plugins, functions and “nice coding structures” today, as opposed to how relatively lighweight-in-PHP themes in WordPress used to be. You could say I’ve in part had to learn PHP with WordPress.

What do you like most about WordPress?

I’ll admit this is not the first time I’ve gotten the question. I think the flexibility and how relatively compact it is out of the box attracts me to it. Compared to many other CMSes of the same relative caliber, WordPress is simple out of the box. I like that.

We could argue for days whether core should be reduced or expanded with more features. But in all fairness, I think we have a decent balance that we should be proud of, compared to other systems. Is it perfect? By no means. Is it still pretty darn good? You bet!

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

WordPress is going to be evolving with the web. We are just seeing the REST API enter service now in December and a lot of cool things are undoubtedly going to follow on with that.

I still want to see some advancements in core, or rather, as some sort of official core addons. Multilingual support I think is an area in dire need of an official framework or API for it to really be great. And I would love to see WordPress take a leaf out of some of the enterprise CMS’s book and keep working on both the media and post workflows. With the new API and modular world comes many challenges to the built-in UI workflow too. I want, and hope, to see changes happening there too.

Why did you decide to speak about “Content Marketing Done Right For Everybody” this year?

What is the web without content? Leaving the buzzword content marketing aside for the moment, we’ve always been focused at content when developing websites. Today though, we have so much we need to know about and apply to build successful websites.

From that point of view, I want to offer a workflow for content marketing. From answering the big question of how to find topics to write about, how to optimize them good-enough for SEO through to analyzing the analytics data to evaluate performance.

Too rarely do we combine the niche topics and give the full, broad picture and workflow. That’s why I’m doing my session this year.

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Short and sweet: Every session.

There’s just a lot of good things in the schedule. Hopefully I get to sit in on some topics that I might not necessarily deal with every day to pick up some new interesting tidbits and gain a better understanding.

Meet Niklas Högefjord – speaker and developer of WooCommerce extensions

Posted on 10/11/2016 by Olaf LindstrÃ¶m

In today’s speaker interview we’re talking with Niklas Högefjord, founder of e-commerce oriented Krokedil and organizer of the Arvika WordPress Meetup Group. He will talk at WordCamp Stockholm about supporting open source products.

What is your current title and role?

I’m the founder of Krokedil. My role is to do all the stuff that doesn’t get done by anyone else in the company. On a more serious note I spend my time switching between development, sales and managing staff and projects.

How did you first get started with WordPress?

I was a freelance web developer and around 2006 I realized that the CMS I had built from scratch probably wasn’t the best solution for my clients going forward. I started looking at available open source platforms and used several ones in different projects. But after I found WordPress and did my first project with it (probably around 2007) I never looked back.

How do you work with WordPress today?

Krokedil is an e-commerce focused WordPress agency and most of our time is spent on developing, maintaining and supporting extensions for WooCommerce used by merchants in Scandinavia and other parts of the world.

What do you like most about WordPress?

The ease of use and the open and friendly community.

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

Why did you decide to speak about “Skyldig tills motsatsen bevisats – om support på open source-produkter” this year?

Since we are plugin developers and handle support tickets every day at Krokedil I thought it would be a good idea to share some thoughts and experiences around this topic. Perhaps give a couple of tips on how to get the best possible support when you submit your next ticket.

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Since I’m into e-commerce I really look forward to listen to Ulrich Pogson and his talk Building multilingual e-commerce sites.

“WordPress helps lowering the threshold for new people to make great content online”

Posted on 09/11/2016 by Stanislav Khromov

This year WordCamp Stockholm is part of Internetdagarna – the largest IT conference in Sweden. We sat down with Niklas Serén, project manager at Internetdagarna to talk about their conference and WordPress.

Hello Niklas! Tell us a little bit about Internetdagarna and IIS!
IIS is a nonprofit organization that, besides managing the top level domain .SE (and .nu), invests in the development of the internet.

Actually, our main goal is to contribute to the “positive development of a free and open internet for all”. Internetdagarna is one way to serve the internet community with knowledge sharing, network and fun!

Why did Internetdagarna decide to host WordCamp Stockholm?
Mainly because WordPress contributes to the above, but also because the community is strong and have a great will to learn. Last year we had a full day of Drupal and we have hosted WordPress-tracks in the past.

How do you feel about WordPress as a CMS?
We use WordPress on all our sites and we have a predisposition for open source applications. For, instance our school competition “Webbstjärnan” revolves around pupils making sites in WP.

WordPress is a great CMS – and helps lowering the threshold for new people to make great content online – without taking away the opportunity for professional implementations. Just as it should be.

Internetdagarna.se – proudly running on WordPress

How do you see Internetdagarna evolving in the future?
We have been sold out for the last two years so we are quite confident we are giving the community a great service. But we always look at improvements and have no fear of reinventing ourselves.
Maybe we want to add an extra day of un-conference, workshops or hackathons…. We will see…

Thank you for taking the time to speak with us!

Thank you!

Don’t forget to join us on the official WordCamp Contribution day on November 23. See the schedule for more information.

“WordCamp Stockholm has the perfect opportunity of forging stronger bonds in the Swedish WordPress community.”

Posted on 08/11/2016 by jimmy_r

Let’s put the spotlight on one of our long time sponsor that also helps make this years WordCamp in Stockholm possible. We talked to the founder himself, Jack Oderland who helped sponsor last years event at WordCamp Norrköping 2015. We are grateful of having them as admin sponsors, let’s hear it from Jack himself of why they are sponsoring this years WordCamp.

Can you tell us what your organisation does?

The simple version? We’re a web hosting company. You’ll find both classic web hosting accounts, VPSes, a cloud offering, managed servers and dedicated servers with us. Plus, our “Premium” web hosting packages which have the resources of a smaller VPS with the support and service of a web hosting package.

We like technology and have some extra features in our web hosting accounts that you won’t find with the competition. From one-click SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt to Git on all hosting accounts. And as a WordPress developer, you might appreciate built-in support for wp-cli on all accounts too!

How does WordPress affect your business?

Being a web hosting company, WordPress obviously affects us greatly. There is no question about its popularity, as a majority of websites hosted with us are powered by WordPress.

Naturally, this is different from a technical standpoint compared to for example just static HTML websites. WordPress, and any dynamic website requires its resources.

We are committed to delivering a great experience for site owners and developers alike, with extra support for WordPress features.

Of course WordPress helps us out in our business too. Last year we relaunched our website built using WordPress. A large reason for us choosing WordPress is its ease of use and flexibility for development.

How can WordCamp Stockholm and its attendees help the Swedish WordPress community?

With WordPress being a community driven product, WordCamp Stockholm has the perfect opportunity of forging stronger bonds in the Swedish WordPress community.

We’ve seen first hand how the community is growing stronger. Without us meeting, making friendships, sharing, learning and working together for the future of WordPress, it’s certainly more bright.

Where do you think WordPress is and where does it fit in 5 years from now?

We are clearly in a transition phase with WordPress right now. It’s been years since we referred to WordPress just as a blogging tool, but now we are taking the next big step to an application tool.

The inclusion of the REST Api in WordPress 4.7 marks the beginning of a trans-
formation towards a more flexible backend and component based system. In five years time, that’s where we’ll be. An even stronger, more flexible system that uniquely can power both smaller personal websites, to complex more application-like websites.

We look forward to being part of this journey!

What opportunities are you hoping for at this WordCamp?

Being at WordCamp Stockholm this year, we want two things. First, we want to be able to talk first-hand to our customers. Catch up on how things are going, see what kind of fun things they are building and chatting about their needs and how we can help.

Secondly, we want to talk to new customers about hosting. It’s kind of a thing we’re passionate about, you know? Come by, get some cool swag and chat with us for a while!

Oh, and we’d be lying if we weren’t hoping to go home with some great insights from the sessions too of course.

Finally, the elevator pitch! Tell us why you’re great, in 140 characters or less?

Want a stable website backed up by tech-savvy support? Give us a try! Do you enjoy things as git and wp-cli? We’ve got you covered!

We take care of performance, updates and security

Posted on 07/11/2016 by jimmy_r

Can you tell us what your organisation does?

Seravo is a Nordic cloud hosting company aimed at all WordPress solutions from company sites to online stores, blogs and digital publications. We offer WordPress as a service: we take care of performance, updates and security. We provide an out-of-the-box optimized WordPress and all the tools developers love (Git, WP-CLI, Composer, Gulp etc). For digital and advertising agencies we have good partnership opportunities.

How does WordPress affect your business?

Seravo as a company has a strong background in open source and Linux. When many of our clients started to have similar needs regarding WordPress upkeep, we created a service around it. By offering WordPress as a service we can provide all our customers well maintained sites for an affordable price. We want to offer our customers the best possible WordPress experience and make the world’s most popular content management system safer, faster and more flexible. We are passionate about WordPress and have participated in its development process by being an active member of the WordPress community both in Finland and abroad. Our staff has also contributed code to WordPress core, made translations and we’ve published multiple plugins as open source at WordPress.org. For more check out our GitHub account.

How can WordCamp Stockholm and its attendees help the Swedish WordPress community?

WordCamps are great opportunities to meet like-minded WordPress people, to learn and share ideas as well as get new business opportunities. WordCamp Stockholm will hopefully make the voice of the Swedish WordPress community heard even louder!

Where do you think WordPress is and where does it fit in 5 years from now?

We believe that in the coming years, WordPress will remain as the number one choice of content management systems. It will also be the base for even more complex websites, for global online stores and even app development thanks to the WP API. It is clear that WordPress is a credible choice for enterprise scale solutions as well as for public sector. Our job is to keep our WordPress sites running whatever happens. Being obsessed by quality and security, we are especially proud of our system of tested updates which has made the lives of our customers a lot easier.

What opportunities are you hoping for at this WordCamp?

Seravo has proven to be a great success in Finland growing by 10% every month. Now we are going international. By participating in WordCamp Stockholm we wish to get in contact with fellow Nordic WordPress makers, get a view on the Swedish web development market and of course also learn more about the latest trends and features in WordPress. We are especially hoping to meet Swedish digital agencies and show how we could help them in their daily work. We are looking forward to seeing you all at the sponsor stand – meanwhile you can follow @Seravocom on Twitter and visit Seravo.com to get a deeper insight of our services.