WordCamp Lisboa alternates with WordCamp Porto and is the yearly gathering of the Portuguese WordPress community. I talked with organizer Nuno Morgadinho to find out more about the event happening next weekend at ISCTE.
How did you first get involved with WordPress?
I started as a blogger using one of the early versions (1.x) and then had the need to change the theme and plugins to make my blog look like I wanted. That led me to explore WordPress and mess about with several of its internals, breaking a lot of stuff on the way, but eventually knowing well how it works. Nowadays I feel privileged that I get to work only with WordPress since it’s well designed and architectured and has a higher purpose of moving the Web forward and democratizing publishing.
What are the main highlights of the upcoming WordCamp Lisboa?
WordCamp Lisbon 2017 will be the biggest to date in Portugal and our estimate points to 300+ attendees this year. The program will feature a mix of local speakers and international high profile WordPress people. Some of the international speakers lined up include:
- Konstantin Obenland – Chairman at Automattic, WordPress Contributor & previous Release Lead
- Milan Ivanovic – Web Developer GoDaddy Belgrade & ManageWP
- Noel Tock – Partner/Product at Human Made
I’m super excited for attending this year. It’s a fantastic opportunity to keep up with emerging trends in the WordPress community, network, learn and get better and better at building WordPress stuff.
Tell us a bit about the current state of WordPress in Portugal
I think we’re seeing more and more people using WordPress at a professional level, especially for CMS based website projects these days. Recently we’ve seen websites like gulbenkian.pt, eco.pt and arquivos.rtp.pt all using WordPress as the main engine to power those websites, and I have tremendous respect for the teams behind them, because of what a project like that entails. In regards to the community I also think it is growing and becoming much more organized and proactive. We’ve seen meetups happening almost every month in the last year and events like ‘Residência WordPress’ having a second edition.
What can the Portuguese community do to help spread the WP word?
Well that one is easy. First of all write about it, what projects are they working on, what obstacles are they running into, what would they like to see different in WordPress or in the community. Share their passion and their expertise. I know there are a lot of good people that fail to talk about themselves simply because they are digging too deep into working and doing other stuff, but it’s definitely one of the best ways to spread the word about WP.
Second apply to speak at WordCamps 🙂 This may seem daunting at first but it is highly rewarding once you do it.
Where do you see WordPress evolving to in the coming years?
We can’t really predict how things are going to evolve in this space, simply because the market tends to change much faster than we think. WordPress is a fascinating platform and its adoption worldwide is still on the rise, so one way it can evolve is to become more ubiquitous in the Web development arena. But my fear with WordPress is that people won’t stop adding more things to it. I like its smallness.
Another way it can evolve is to become more open – at the moment Automattic keeps control of the only official plugin repository and WordPress only works with it, but there is really no reason why WordPress e.g. can’t support multiple plugin repositories.
Give us a couple of reasons why people can’t miss WordCamp Lisboa.
I can think of 3 main reasons why people should attend WordCamp Lisboa:
Keep up with emerging trends — Attending WordCamps is a great way to get practical tips, keep up with emerging trends, and to meet other people doing amazing things.
Networking — You’ll probably find not just WordPress lovers but also Web geeks passionate about everything surrounding the Web. This is a great opportunity to meet new people.
Learn & Get Excited — Be introduced to various new concepts and techniques. Hopefully techniques that will help you leverage even more of WordPress. Working on the Web presents many challenges and is becoming increasing more complex. Discussion about what are the best tools and techniques to be used is always interesting.
And I think these reasons are more than enough!
Find out more about WordCamp Lisboa at https://2017.lisboa.wordcamp.org/
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