2018 WordCamp San Diego
Written by Erick Olivares
This weekend I had the privilege to attend WordCamp San Diego. I’ll share with you the venue, the lectures, and the afterparty.
The Venue
WordCamp San Diego was held at the San Diego City College in the heart of downtown. The lectures were held in various locations including one which you had to cross the street to get to, but this did not seem to detour anyone from attending lectures there.
The Talks
At WCSD, the highlight of the event was the new WordPress content editor, Gutenberg which will be rolling out soon. There was an entire track dedicated to Gutenburg as theme and plugin developers anxiously are preparing to update their sites to adapt to the new functionality. Many popular plugins and themes will be rebuilding their codebases to be adapted to Gutenburg blocks.
While there is a lot of excitement in the community, many are choosing to avoid the update. Roy Sivan a speaker at WCSD and who is a software developer at Disney explained there is a plugin to preserve the current class editor at Gutenfree.com. I would not recommend trying to avoid Gutenberg–WordPress will most likely completely get rid of the classic editor and enforce Gutenberg in the long run. There is no release date yet, but the new feature will be rolled out with the WordPress 5.0 update.
In addition, several other tracks were dedicated to general WordPress development.
I learned that one of my favorite hosting dedicated WordPress platforms, Flywheel has created an application to build WordPress websites on your local machine. It’s called Local and supports once click WordPress installations, local SSL support, WP-CLI access, and it’s absolutely free! It’s definitely worth checking out.
WordPress developers do their best to follow PHP best practices. Grumphp is a quality control plugin which runs everytime you commit code. You will have to installed Composer to get this plugin configured which you can read more about on the Github repository.
GULP has been my favorite task runner for many years now. It provides minifying CSS, watching SCSS files, does live CSS reloading and even SCSS source mapping. WCSD speaker Johan Adams shared an alternate tool called Laravel Mix. The configuration for doing common tasks seems to be much easier which led to has over two million downloads.
The Afterparty
The afterparty was held at the San Diego Museum of Man! Open bar and complete freedom to roam the museum after hours was an unprecedented experience. The museum was filled with mummies, ancient Mayan ruins, and indigenous desert relics.
WCSD was an amazing event which served as a great weekend to get reacquainted with the city, learned a lot about WordPress and I was able to meet new people in the WordPress community. Turn7 thanks the sponsors and volunteers for making WordCamp San Diego such a great event!
