I recently attended the first ever WordCamp Canada conference in Ottawa, Ontario, on July 12 and 13, 2024. This was my first in-person WordCamp since before the start of the global pandemic. It was awesome to attend in person and get to talk with many interesting people in the WordPress community. It was also my first time travelling to Ottawa in about 2 years, since we sold my late father’s house after his passing. I lived in Ottawa for more than a decade, and it was cool to see how the city’s infrastructure has improved since I last lived there, especially the public transit. It was very quick to get around via the O-Train and buses.
The conference was held in the south of Ottawa, at the Infinity Convention Centre. It was a great venue – the conference had the facility all to itself, with three large rooms, for three concurrent sessions in each time slot. Lunches and snacks were provided, and the quality of the food was a cut above what you would expect for such an event. It was nice to have some hearty and healthy food options on-site.
Keynote
The keynote address was titled Accessibility in Action: Indigenous Communities, and was delivered by Meggan Van Harten, Co-CEO of Design de Plume, an Indigenous and women-owned agency based in Sudbury, ON.
Meggan’s session dealt with the specific challenges faced by indigenous communities in terms of accessibility. It was an eye-opening talk, as she shared an often overlooked perspective. Some takeaways:
- There are over 70 different indigineous languages in Canada. Many of them do not have adequate support in our technology:
- Missing glyphs in most fonts for these languages
- There is generally also no screen reader support for these languages.
- No support in sotware (including WordPress) for mixing languages in one document, which is a scenario that is benefical to indigenous communities.
Session Highlights
Here are some of my favourite sessions that I attended over the course of the conference.
Your WordPress, Your Way: Curating the Editor Experience
Presented by Nick Diego
Nick gave a good overview of methods used to tailor the editor experience in WordPress. I learned about locked patterns, advanced theme.json configurations, and client-side filters. I learned a lot, and I will try to use some of these techniques. He provided a good list of resources mentioned in his talk on his website.
Creating Blocks Faster Than a Cat Video Goes Viral: The Magic of create-block
Presented by Ryan Welcher
This was a very cooldev talk, providing an overview of the create-block package, which can help quickly set up a block development environment following WordPress best practices. Ryan walked us through the interactive wizard mode, where the CLI tool asks you a series of questions about your block before auto generating the block plugin code. This can really help you save time, and get you started on the right track in native block development.
I came away from Ryan’s talk excited to start building blocks with this tool.
Ryan has some useful blocks published on his github profile, including an advanced query loop block which is much more powerful than the query loop block provided by core WordPress. He also has a YouTube channel covering WordPress development.
WordPress: Empowering the Underserved in Rural Ontario
Presented by Lucas Rodriguez
I wanted to make sure to attend more than just development talks, and Lucas’ talk was a good choice. Lucas is a young developer, a few years into his career. His talk centered arounf how he got started in WordPress development, and how he uses it for empowering his clients, mostly local small businesses and community groups. I found it inspiring to hear his story, and how WordPress can empower small town communities and businesses.
How to E-E-A-T Your Way to Better SEO
Presented by Natasha Burtenshaw-deVries
Before Natasha’s talk, I hadn’t heard of the E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) metric before. She walked us through the significance of this metric in SEO and how to craft our website content incorporating these ranking factors. It was not so much a checklist of “you need to do X, Y and Z”, but an approach to writing. She also stressed the importance of original content in the era of AI generated content.
Answers from Questions: Leveraging ChatGPT to Supercharge Your WordPress and Your Business
Presented by Michael Milette
This session gave an overview about how to best use AI chatbots to help with business and WordPress. Michael focused on having the AI ask you questions, so that it can better understand your background and needs, before asking specific questions. He gave examples of prompts (questions) to get better results out of ChatPGT, Meta AI, Google Gemini and Microsoft Copilot.
WordPress, WASM and Web Components, Oh My!
Presented by Simon MacDonald
Simon gave a detailed overview of WebAssembly (or WASM), and Web Components, which allow to you to create custom elements and components in a browser native fashion. He explained how this can make for more portable component libraries and increase performance. He demonstrated a project he has devloped, the Enhance library, which he described as a full-stack framweork based on WebAssembly. He has also developed a php extension for his Enhance, and a basic block editor integration plugin. Both projects are looking for contributors.
The power of web components was clear. It looks like a very promising project.
Beware: Your About Page May Be Costing You Clients!
Presented by Mark des Coates
This was perhaps my favourite session overall – Mark was a very good speaker. His talk was a practical guide of what an about page is for and how to structure an effective one. The biggest takeaway was that an About Page isn’t about you – it’s about your clients’ needs. Mark showed some simple steps to create an About page that serves the website visitor, quickly lets them know what it is that you can do for them, and in turn attracts clients.
He provided a link to his session’s slides on his website.
After Party
The after party was held at the confernece centre, and was themed as a “Canadian Dining Experience”.
The main course was a poutine bar, where you could build your own version of the classic Québecois dish comprised french fries topped with cheese curds and gravy. They also had many other toppings at the poutine bar, such as grilled onions and peppers, chorizo sausage, and more.
They also had a table set up for vegetarian / vegan meal, which included a meatless vegan take on the Wellington, which I believe was mushroom based.
For dessert, they had a BeaverTails cart. For those not familiar with BeaverTails, it is a local Ottawa treat that originated as a kiosk on the Rideau Canal in the winter when it is converted into the world’s longest skating rink. It is a strecthed flatbread dough that is fried, and then brushed with butter and dipped in a mixture of cinnamon and sugar. For the pièce de résistance, they had lemon wedges, to squeeze some fresh lemon juice on top of your beavertail, which the BeaverTails chain calls a ‘Killaloe Sunrise’. The lemon juice provides a nice acidity which balances the sweetness and richness of the fried dough.
During the after-party I got to talk with many interesting people, whom I hope to run into again at future WordPress community events.
Conclusion
It is always a bit of a whirlwind attending these types of tech conferences – so many sessions crammed into a couple of days, and so many learnings and best practises to integrate into my day to day workflows. However, I am always happy to attend, as there is no substitute for in-person networking, and sharing a sense of community among your peers.
I look forward to the next WordCamp Canada!
