WCEU blew us away this year, in so many positive ways.
In Athens, last year, we thought the immense amount of attention and interactions we had was due to clearly being “The new kid on the block”. But this year that great experience was repeated and exceeded.
Choosing which highlights to describe is a challenge this year!
There are so many, we hardly know where to start. We met with old friends, made new friends, immersed in the community, talked shop and partnerships, and our team bonded even more. Like last year, we planned the days before the event for team building and meeting with some of the friends we had made last year. Exploring and experiencing Torino was a joyous experience.
Jessica rocked the WCEU stage more than once
Jessica Lyschik, who joined our team end of last year, rocked it by taking the stage to speak about the Twenty Twenty-Four default theme where she was the Theme Lead.
Then she went heads on with Rich Tabor in Jamie Marsland’s Gutenberg Speed Build Challenge, in which they had 30 minutes to recreate a famous website that they only got to see 5 minutes before, solely using the WordPress Block Editor.
And then, at the closing remarks on the second day, she took the microphone and challenged Matt Mullenweg to a future Speed Build Challenge, which he graciously accepted. Keep an eye out for updates about this.
Thomas and Jakob gave dozens of demos of Greyd.Suite
We had a big rush at our booth last year in Athens, which deeply impressed us. But we did not expect that to happen again this year. Our assumption was that last year’s rush was related to the the fact that there we were “The new kid on the block”.
It turns out we were wrong. We had an overwhelming number of visitors, again. Many of them got a direct demo of our Suite, and some opted to book a personal demo at a later time. We even had some people buy our Suite on the spot!
Contributor Day Core contribution
The beauty of WordPress is that you have a voice in the process, if you want to. You can go on Trac and GitHub and propose changes, add feature requests, report bugs, and you can help solving bugs or actively contribute code to create and extend features. Participating in Contributor Day gives that an extra dimension. Jakob created a design proposal and prepared a way to integrate it (that’s called a PR) and Jessica discussed the new Style Presets that are planned, and shared our insights.
Anne’s Full Site Editing workshop in the days before
She’s our first Product Ambassador, and given that she is in touch with all of us regularly both as our accessibility mentor and as our customer, we were happy that she accepted our invitation to tag along with us the entire week.
She surprised us all by spontaneously organizing a workshop about Full Site Editing in the days before the event at a co-working space, and then invited Thomas and Jakob to join. It was a great moment to meet more people from the community. She announced to start organizing more of these in the future, both online and in person.
Talks and reflections
We’re grateful for again having the opportunity to talk to peers, partners and potential partners in person. Sure, we all know that we can call each other and have video meetings. But nothing beats face to face interaction.
Learnings
I think many a software maker can relate, some of the aspects of our Suite are so natural to us, that we forget to highlight them on our website. The fact that we are compatible with WooCommerce, and the fact that we are taking accessibility very seriously are two of these. We learned that we should start highlighting these. And we will.
A word of thanks to the organizers
We think team WordCamp Europe put together a great event again this year. We are aware that a volunteer based event with close to 3000 attendees, talks and workshops in different tracks and dozens of sponsors is a massive endeavour to organize. It was an honour to sponsor part of Anne’s time dedicated to working on this event in the Sponsors Team, and we hope many in the ecosystem will follow suit. Like many parts of the WordPress eco-system, WordCamps are essential for the growth of that beautiful open source software that we all built our business upon.
WordCamp Europe 2025
Like Mark, our CEO recently wrote on LinkedIn: “For companies like Greyd, WordCamp Europe is a fixed date in the calendar when we plan new releases, publish features and generally want to show what (new) things we can do. In other words, we want to surprise the community, and then convince them.”
We are already looking forward to next year’s edition, in Basel.
Did you miss the opportunity for a personal demo at WordCamp Europe, and would you like to see how Greyd.Suite works?
