It’s been already 14 months since I was in Berlin for EventHorizon in April 2018, a global summit on blockchain technology in the energy sector. Although this amazing event came back to Berlin in June 2019 and re:publica took place the month before, I felt obliged to skip those two events in favor of WordCamp Europe.
WordCamp Europe 2019 was the biggest international WordPress conference so far, with 3260 tickets sold and 2734 attendees. I skipped last years WordCamp Europe in Belgrade/Serbia, but if you don’t even have to take a plane to meet your favourite Open Source community, it leaves you with almost no choice other than to attend, as well as stay a couple of days longer to explore one of Europe’s technological and cultural melting pots.
Fairytale Ferry
I took the night bus to Berlin already last Monday evening, unexpectedly crossing Lake Constance by ferry via Meersburg and Friedrichshafen. It’s only a 15 minute ride, but I left the bus on the ferry to admire the moon, the lake and the fairytale atmosphere. Although it’s not possible to capture this beautiful moment with a smartphone camera, here’s a small glimpse:
I was joined in Berlin by 3 other Openstream team members who arrived a little later last week and also met many old friends and interesting new people, both conference attendees and locals, one of whom is the founder of SatoshiPay, a fast and easy micropayment solution, that also provides a WordPress plugin.
SatoshiPay
SatoshiPay is a cross-website, 1-click micropayment service based on blockchain technology. To use SatoshiPay readers of your WordPress blog or website don’t need to sign up anywhere or download any additional software. If they come to your site with a pre-filled wallet, they will be able to pay for your content with just a single click. Your payout arrives in your own wallet within seconds. As a publisher you only need to install the plugin, register at SatoshiPay Dashboard, create a blockchain wallet for your earnings, and you are ready to go.
Fête de la Musique
I didn’t do any sight seeing in the traditional sense, so I almost felt like telling people «Ick bin ein Berliner». On Thursday evening, we joined the Fête de la Musique in Friedrichshain, a music festival spread over 670 (!) locations all over Berlin, organized by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe. In our location at Frankfurter Allee they played trancelike electro music and many people of all ages were dancing on the sidewalk.
WordCamp Europe
On Friday and Saturday, the WordCamp conference took place in Neukölln, at the same location where I visited the K5 Future Retail conference in 2017. One of the highlights was WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg’s summer update keynote with the usual Q&A session which is similar to the «State of the Word» address during WordCamp US.
Pascal Birchler also gave an interesting talk about WordPress multilingual support (in WordPress core) which will be introduced in phase 4 (2020 or later) of the new Gutenberg block editor. This means that in the future, you probably won’t need a plugin to create a WordPress site in multiple languages. We’re currently in phase 2 of Gutenberg development and it’s interesting to note that the Gutenberg editor is not only used by WordPress, but also by Drupal, another popular open source CMS (content management system).
WordProof
«From WordPress to blockchain: The future is 100% open source» was the last presentation I attended on the second conference day, also one of my favourite ones. Sebastiaan van der Lans has been researching the intersection between WordPress and blockchain since 2013, and he’s the founder of WordProof, a way to timestamp your WordPress content on the blockchain.
You can find Sebastiaan’s full presentation on YouTube and his slides on SlideShare. Also, here’s Matt Mullenweg’s response to Sebastiaan’s question regarding the intersection between WordPress and blockchain in general during the summer update Q&A session:
We definitely had a blast in Berlin and I’m looking forward to joining WordCamp Europe 2020 in Porto/Portugal.
If you know of any other WordPress related blockchain plugins or projects, please leave a comment. If you also wrote a recap, please also let us know, so that we can add it to the following list.
WordCamp Europe 2019 Recaps
- Michael Hörnlimann: WordCamp Europe in Berlin
- Dwayne McDaniel: Spending the longest day of the year during the briefest week I can recall
- Kevin Ume: WordCamp Europe Berlin 2019, my experiences and thoughts.
- Sabine Polegek: WCEU 2019 Berlin: Gutenberg News und Entwicklungen
Pictures
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