WordCamp US, the national WordPress conference, was back in Nashville for a second year on December 7-9, 2018. Jodie and Scott from LTDS attended — here are some highlights.
Jodie:
I attended several great sessions on topics such as project management for developers, ARIA/accessibility, and code review. Tracy Apps gave a very compelling talk on diversity and inclusion, and how that must play a huge role in user experience work. Lara Schenck hand-drew her slide deck for her talk on CSS algorithms — they’re worth a glance, even if you don’t understand the content! 🙂 I felt right at home in a lightning talk from a former Drupal developer comparing Drupal with WordPress — in the end, he asked us to just all get along, since both are great platforms with their own strengths. John Blackbourn introduced us to Git Bisect, a debugging tool that uses a binary search to help you pinpoint where a bug was introduced into your codebase.
Scott:
The sessions that I attended had some interesting topics. I went to two sessions that dealt with WordPress’ new block editor, Gutenberg, which will be replacing the classic text editor for creating posts in new versions.┬á Gary Pendergast talked about how the flexibility of Gutenberg’s block system will help users create more exciting sites and posts without the use of custom code.┬á In Jason Bahl’s session, he demonstrated how Gutenberg was used in an innovative way on a state government WordPress site he helped build. I also enjoyed Dwayne McDaniel’s talk “Nobody Wants a Website. They Want Results!“. Among other things, he discussed the importance of ensuring that a website keeps true to the reason it was made, and that that doesn’t get overshadowed by the design and building of the website. Basically, he maintains, a cool website is no good if it doesn’t lead to the results that were intended.
