When you come back from an event, it’s important to review its most relevant aspects. And that’s what we’re about to do with WordCamp Lisboa 2019, the most important WordPress event in Portugal this year.
WordCamp Lisboa 2019 took place the 18th and 19th of May. This year David and I participated as speakers.
We landed in the Portuguese capital and took advantage of the fact that we arrived a day early to do some sightseeing around the city. It’s always good to know a little more about locals and see some of the most important points of interest in the city.
That afternoon we were invited to the speakers and organizers dinner. Who could say no to free food and the company of interesting people?
Regarding the food during WordCamp Lisboa, I think we can not complain about anything. You just have to see the following tweet to get an idea of how good it was ?
On Saturday 17th the event officially began with the day of talks. But there were not only talks, since there were also very detailed workshops on how to create an online store and how to optimize it.
As for the talks, they were divided into two parallel tracks. It’s difficult to choose which session you end up going to, but from the presentations that we saw, these are some I really enjoyed:
- Jesús Amieiro explained how to integrate Laravel and WordPress through the REST API. This was the first time that a talk was made in Galician in a WordCamp of Portugal, and the truth is that it was interesting.
- Jorge Costa from Automattic talked about nested blocks within Gutenberg and the possibilities they provide to the new editor. We always appreciate this type of technical talks.
- Pedro Fonseca presented a topic that I want to highlight because of its originality. He explained how the card game Magic The Gathering can help us become better professionals.
David explained how we have transformed our web to adapt it to the new block editor of WordPress, and I did an introduction to the technologies behind Gutenberg for programmers.
Even though having our sessions after dinner has an effect on the amount of public you get in the room –always somewhat lower than in the morning–, the thing was not that bad and we were satisfied with how our presentations went. If you did not go see them, they’ll be soon in WordPress.tv.
Contributor Day
The Contributor Day was on Sunday. David and I went there with the batteries fully charged to contribute to WordPress.
Personally, I prefer contributor days on the first day of the event as they allow me to have a more direct contact with the participants. This allows me to get to know new people before the day of talks.
If I had to criticize something, I think there was a lack of organization in terms of establishing the contribution tables and knowing what contribution groups were there and what were they doing.
In the end this was not a blocker to contribute to the project. David was working all day on the Catalan translations and I made a lot of progress in the programming of a PWA application for the upcoming WordCamp Europe 2019.
In parallel to this there were a lot of talks on different topics, but I only paid attention to that of Alain Schlesser who presented a new boilerplate for WordPress plugins with advanced aspects of PHP.
We even had the opportunity to briefly chatw with Alain, and we discovered some interesting and curious command-line tools (staff related to ponies and aquariums ?). This is what I like most about a Contributor Day, to discover interesting things thanks to other members of the WordPress community.
Nelio Forms
A fantastic contact plugin using the block editor. In its simplicity lies the true power of this plugin. I love it, very versatile and it worked perfectly for me.
Wajari Velasquez
Final Remarks
It is always interesting to discover a new WordPress community, and the Portuguese one welcomed us very kindly. We thank the organization and the volunteers for their work.
We already want to return to Portugal in 2020, although it will not be in Lisbon this time, but in Oporto ?.
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