After our more informal meetup in January we gathered at Liip Arena yesterday for our second meetup of the year. Close to 40 people showed up, which is pretty cool! Thank you all for attending!
At this point, I also want to thank our sponsors, Liip and Haptiq, for making this event possible!
An hour or so before the meetup there was a power outage here in Zurich, so we were initially a bit worried that we would have to cancel the event. However, luck was on our side and power came back just in time.
Note: Our next meetup is most likely to happen at the end of May. Let us know if you would like to present something or help us with organizing a meetup.
Announcements
To kick things off, we highlighted how there are now 11 WordPress meetups in total in all of Switzerland, which is quite impressive. Just a few years ago, this number was much lower. We also did a small announcement regarding WordCamp Zurich 2019, which is an entire conference around WordPress:
There’s a tentative date set, and we are happy to announce that WordCamp Zurich will take place on September 14, 2019. More information is yet to come, but we’ll let you know here and on our @wpzurich Twitter account once we have more things to share. You can also subscribe for updates on the WordCamp Zurich website.
If you’d be interested in helping out with organizing the conference, please let us know! You can also check our community page with information about the WordPress Switzerland Slack channel (chat) and more.
WordPress vs Website Builders
In our first talk of the evening, Andreas Feuz, self-employed WordPress consultant & author, took a look at website builders like Wix, Duda, and Squarespace. He tried to answer the question “Is WordPress doomed?”
The presentation sparked an interesting discussion about website builders, but also page builders and all-in-one themes like Divi. We could probably do an entire meetup about these 🙂
In case you are interested to learn more, here are his slides:
Web Policies and Reporting
Our second speaker of the night, Felix Arntz, provided an introduction to a couple of new web technologies — Feature Policy and Reporting API — and how you can use them in WordPress.
Felix is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google, where he has been working on two WordPress plugins that allow you to use Feature Policy and Reporting API already today, despite them being still under development.
If you want to learn more about them, I recommend you to check out his introductory blog post to the whole topic.