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Short updates from the WordPress community – links, stats, photos and quick thoughts. Every note is also a post on the Fediverse: reply, boost or like it from wherever you are.
WordCamp Europe 2024 in Turino Italy announced their official mascots. The Vespa Piaggio and Cinquecento Wapuu’s both combine hallmarks of Italian manufacturing with the adorable (don’t call it a Pokemon) WordPress mascot.
Illustration of a wapuu zooming around on a classic Vespa piaggio.
Illustration of a Wapuu peaking out of a classic Fiat Cinquecento.
Now on stage: contributors from Italy, Spain, Germany, France and Switzerland. And a special online guest: Patrick Lumumba from Nairobi.
The first session at #WPSCD at @wpswitzerland was all about meetups. Many meetups still struggle with attendance after the pandemic. The group in Barcelona, for example, fell from ~200 attendees to about 25.
Finding free venues is becoming increasingly difficult. However, there are still ways to source free venues. Universities, for example, are often happy to lend their space. Coworking spaces often serve the dual purpose of providing the venue and promoting the event in their community.
Sponsored venues (both in-kind and paid-for) are an alternative to free venues. Of course, WordPress Community Support can also pay for a venue if no free alternative is available.
Live streaming meetups/online seem not to be attractive for many organizers. It’s a question of personal prioritization: do you, as a meetup organizer, want to foster local connection or reach as many people as possible?
Bern follows a hybrid approach and tries to balance the in-person event and livestream.
Starting a new meetup is always
Ready for the Switzerland #WordPress Community Day 2024? @wpswitzerland
Elias Hackradt from @cloudron introduced us to their project “Hack the Hackathon” at the CloudFest Hackathon.
Simon:
What is your project called and what is it all about?
Elias:
Okay, our project is called Hack the Hackathon. The project is a creation.
It sounds like a meta project, actually.
Simon:
It does, yeah.
Elias:
Yeah. We had the idea of how do you do a hackathon?
What’s needed for it? What software do you need? What’s involved with everything?
So we’re from Cloud Run, and we have a platform that makes installation of force-based application on a single server very easy, like with domain management.
Elias:
Backup management, certificates and everything so there was also a very easy starting point like then we just wanted to template everything and then create a one-click installer so people can use it but our project escalated very much because as they do as they do because we have quite a big group of technical and non-technical people.
Elias:
And the one part is doing like the conceptual part they talked to like Carol and everyone else from the CloudFest and got everything that they need to know about like what do you have to do for hosting a hackathon what’s the pre-game what do you need to plan for and everything so there’s a lot of conception involved and now we have like I think maybe four or five A4 pages of like documentation on what you need to do for a hackathon how to get sponsors how to do like accessibility and diversity and everything and then catering with that we have the one-click installer platform that if you want to do a hackathon right now let’s say for example you are a small community of let’s say um a small linux distribution a small a small linux flavor there’s like so many and you want to do a hackathon so what you have to do you have to figure out okay how do we organize it how do we get people how do we get investors sponsors and everything then how do we do the hosting what tools can we use and what’s what needs to be be taken care of and now since we compiled everything from the cloud fest all the knowledge from all the past five six years you can actually just use the guidebook as a reference click the button and then you have all the tools you need you have the mailing client newsletters you have like the chat for everyone internal external and everything ready to go with a very comprehensive guidebook.
Simon:
So let’s let’s reiterate on that you’ve not only used this hackathon to build a tool to to run hackathons, but also compile all the additional information on top, like as you said, with accessibility, what you have to do, and so on.
Interesting.
Elias:
So the idea was that hackathons these days is not mainly 100% technical.
It can also be, for example, if you’re in the medical field or if you have a kindergarten or something like that, you can do something like that as well.
It can be a very social event and not techy at all.
So the hackathon term right now is more like a description on how you gather people together and work in groups together. So we wanted to provide a tool that is easy to use for everyone with like lower resources.
So everyone can benefit from the style of the hackathon.
And since we are the technical people here, our also goal in my mind was, if my mom can use it, it’s user friendly.
So if my mom can use it, read the guide and click the button, and then she can host the hackathon.
That would be perfect. So we tried that.
Simon:
Definitely make it sound easy to run a hackathon now.
I’m very curious where this whole project will lead to. So I’m looking forward to that. Thank you for taking the time.
Elias:
No problem. Thank you for having me.
Time flies when you enjoy CloudFest. It’s time for the final CF 2024 guide.
At 9:55, Automattic’s Jesse Friedman takes to the stage to discuss the pivotal role Automattic wants to play in helping hosting companies thrive.
It’s time for privacy, or, to be more precise, for the future of privacy. Don’t miss Christian Dawson’s talk at 12:40.
Before we finish the week, at 16:10, Steve Crocker, one of the key contributors to the ARPANET project, will take us on a journey to the early days in “The ARPANET: First steps toward the Internet“.
17:00 marks the official end of CloudFest 2024.
But don’t worry. If you’ll stick around for another night, there’s a last party to attend. The BierFest will start at 19:00 at the Hotel Krønasår.
* beep beep beep * it’s time to get up, get some food, and get ready for another day of CloudFesting!
This is what I will take a closer look at today.
At 11:35, you can glimpse how Rob Seger explains how Malware works.
At 12:15, my friend Ronald Gijsel and his colleagues Roslyn Lavery and Matthias Reinholz are up with “Hosting Amazing Experiences: Fueling WordPress Success with Woo.
Are you ready for an hour of pitches and networking? Then you should head to PitchCamp, where Jonathan Wold and Tammie Lister will bring product creators and hosting providers together for some speed dating… eh, speed pitching.
My personal highlight of the day is at 17:30, when Eliot Higgins, the founder of the award-winning investigative collective Bellingcat, takes the stage to discuss misinformation and truth on the internet.
A pink cocktail in a Longdrink glass.
Rainbow in the Cloud truly was the most in demand party tonight. 🌈
📷 pic by @dennis
Photo of a room full of people looking at a projector screen.
This year, the CloudFest Hackathon once again collected funds to support Groundbreaker talents in their mission to provide education for young women in Uganda to become developers.
Learn more on groundbreaker.org
MariaDB’s Andrew Hutchings (@LinuxJedi) explained their Project: “Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Platforms” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Simon:
Andrew, what is your project called and what is it all about?
Andrew:
Okay, I’m going to try and get the full name of the title correct because we got…
Simon:
Everyone struggles with that.
Andrew:
I believe the title is Integrating MariaDB Catalogs with PHP Frameworks.
So really long, complicated title that probably doesn’t mean anything to most people. So MariaDB Catalogs is a way of containerizing collections of databases and users inside MariaDB Server.
And this means every catalog is isolated. And this means that you can do things such as have a single MariaDB Server for thousands of websites and have a single pool of memory rather than a thousand MariaDB Servers with one gig of RAM consuming lots of resources.
But also, you’ll be able to eventually do things like resource constraints per catalog.
So if you’ve got a low-tier customer, you can set a number of queries per second or something like that that they’re allowed to do versus a high-tier customer that can do a lot more.
So I think it’s great for cloud and web hosting where you’re sharing a lot of resources.
Now, to use it, you obviously need a way of being able to create the catalogs, administer them, looking at statistics of them and things like that.
App. And this is where this project comes in.
So it’s essentially a framework, a library, you can integrate with the admin systems of various CMSs.
So that when you create a new site off of that CMS.
Andrew:
Created it a new catalog, and you’ll be able to kind of drop the catalog with the site and everything like that.
So that’s essentially what this project is. Was that the whole question? I’ve lost track of it.
Simon:
That was the whole way you answered it perfectly. So was all of that in scope for your work this weekend at CloudFest Hackathon?
Andrew:
That was what was originally intended.
Oh, there’s a story here. There’s a story here, yeah.
And I’ll be telling the story at the final presentation. but so readdb catalogs has not been released yet it is a pre-alpha state we were using code ripped out of founder montewidinius’s basement um in finland to actually make it work so there was no binaries we had to actually kind of create a docker image just so we could actually build the thing and actually use it and then when the guys started using it they managed to break it in ways i wasn’t anticipating them so um we spent pretty much the first day just firefighting bugs and things like that so we could actually get the thing running so i spent the first day thinking we’re never going to get anywhere but even if we don’t then watching the team use it is still feedback we can use we can learn from it we can keep moving forward and use that you know it’s still really valuable as it happens in day two we completely knocked it out the park well i didn’t They did.
We got a foundation that worked. We managed to actually build the PHP framework.
We’ve actually got it working with WordPress single site, multi-site, WPCLI and Laravel.
Andrew:
Four GitHub repos so far and possibly a fifth coming.
And so we managed to get there, even though we really were not expecting it at the beginning.
And we’ve opened six tickets in the really big bug tracker for all the issues we found so far.
And I’ll be talking to the rest of the developers later this week to see what we can do to make the experience a little bit better in future for people who before we actually release this as a final project later this year.
Simon:
So it sounds like there’s like some follow up work to do still after the hackathon.
Andrew:
Oh, hell yes. Monty, Vicente, Eric and everyone else who develop it are actually going to be here this week.
So i’ll be meeting with them probably later today and going through with them how i observed it being used in reality compared to how we expect it to be used yeah and see if we can tweak things before we actually get a final release out of the of the really catalogs feature because it is actually a huge feature under it doesn’t it doesn’t look it on the outside but on the inside it’s a huge re-architecting of so many parts of marie db to make it work.
Simon:
This pretty much covers was it thank you for taking the time that was very insightful.
Simon:
Enjoy the rest of the hackathon …
Andrew:
Guess 45 minutes or so yes thank you thank you very much.