When in Sweden

• It’s good to know that most Swedes will speak and understand English at a good level.
• In general you can use a credit card to buy things almost everywhere. Beware that cash is not always accepted, for example public transport usually won’t accept cash and you need to buy tickets in advance. Public transport in Stockholm is called SL. Train tickets can be bought at SJ, you can’t buy tickets for SJ’s train services onboard so do it before you enter the train.
• Out time zone is UTC+1.

Registration

Registration on Tuesday starts at 8 am in the main lobby of the venue. There will be other tracks than WordCamp and registration will be combined with thoose tracks, as part of Internetdagarna.

Getting around at the venue

We have two tracks, “Main hall” will take place in room “A1”, 4th floor. “Secondary hall” will take place in the “Bar” area.

 Schedule

Check out the schedule for the conference day.

Afterparty

There’ll be a afterparty combined with the other events taking place at Internetdagarna. It starts at 5pm.

Contributor Day

If you have signed up for the contributor day, The contributor day will take place at the Bonnier Tidskrifter office. Read more in this post about contributor day.

WordCamp staff

Our volunteers will be dressed in t-shirts with our logo on them. Don’t hesitate to ask any of them if you need help with finding your way around or have any questions about the event.

Venue address

Nils Ericsons Plan 4
111 64 Stockholm

Check out the venue website for detailed descriptions on how to get there.

Meet Jimmy and Toni, both working in Norrköping, Östergötland, for clients using WordPress. They will share their knowledge on processes and continous delivery.

What are your current titles and roles?

Jimmy: I am the CEO of Angry Creative & Synotio. I oversee process and important projects at Angry Creative & Synotio.

Toni: I am the CTO at Synotio. I architect beautiful solutions and help clients scale their applications.

How did you first get started with WordPress?

Jimmy: I got in contact with it while designing and programming in my dorm room. Earliest contact was already in 2005, but I began working more professionally with WordPress 2007 and full-time in 2009 after I finished my masters degree.

Toni: I worked as a sysadmin, and it is pretty much impossible to do that without coming in contact with WordPress.

How do you work with WordPress today?

Jimmy: We do custom development, management and hosting. We’re very good with the technical aspects and our bureau partners and clients can rely that we deliver a rock-solid service where they don’t have to worry.

Toni: I mainly work with helping clients with very high amounts of visitors optimise their application and surrounding components for peak performance. I also help build process so that we maintain a very high level of security while developers get just the right amount of access for doing their job.

What do you like most about WordPress?

Jimmy: The community and that there are som many people willing to give and share their knowledge. Its a beautiful thing. Open source helps to build both micro and macro economies.

Toni: It has a very large community with a lot of pre-built components. It is pretty easy to fork and/or contribute, making development projects very fast compared to other solutions.

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

Jimmy: I think WordPress will have an even larger market share. I truly hope that more open source projects in the community ship tests with their plugins, and that a lot of the legacy code in strange architecture in core gets revamped. And I hope that we can help with that.

Toni: I think more enterprise clients will choose WordPress, and this will reflect the direction of core and the entire ecosystem.

Why did you decide to speak about “From cowboy coding to continuous delivery” this year?

Jimmy: Our community needs a greater understanding about process and why it is important. By telling about our mistakes over the last 10+ years I hope that we can help others.

Toni: What he said. 

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Jimmy: A ton of them! Im excited to hear Niklas Högefjords talk on “Skyldig tills motsatsen bevisats – om support på open source-produkter”. A lot of people think of open source in the wrong way. The proper way is to think is free as in free speech, not free beer.

Toni: I mostly came for the free beer. 

What is your current title and role?

I’m the Managing Director and Founder of boutique digital agency Bernskiold Media. I spend my days working primarily with web & digital strategy for our customers, but can’t really leave the hands-on development/design things behind either.

How did you first get started with WordPress?

I got into WordPress around version 2.1, which doesn’t feel that long ago, until I start looking back at the history and evolvement of WordPress since then. It’s matured in ways I could never see happen.

I’d recently started up my first small agency, XLD Studios, after having ran several community websites for a few years. WordPress started to get some good PR and after struggling with it for a while (everything has its learning curve), I got into building themes for it…and the rest is as they say, history.

How do you work with WordPress today?

There certainly are less boundaries for when WordPress is not a good fit today than there were even a few years ago. Not only are we building some incredible websites for customers, but we are able to be exploring it as a full backend system with the API as well.

While a lot has changed over the years, many things are the same. I still do a lot of UI development with WordPress.

What has changed most dramatically is how much more of my daily website development work is being done in PHP with plugins, functions and “nice coding structures” today, as opposed to how relatively lighweight-in-PHP themes in WordPress used to be. You could say I’ve in part had to learn PHP with WordPress.

What do you like most about WordPress?

I’ll admit this is not the first time I’ve gotten the question. I think the flexibility and how relatively compact it is out of the box attracts me to it. Compared to many other CMSes of the same relative caliber, WordPress is simple out of the box. I like that.

We could argue for days whether core should be reduced or expanded with more features. But in all fairness, I think we have a decent balance that we should be proud of, compared to other systems. Is it perfect? By no means. Is it still pretty darn good? You bet!

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

WordPress is going to be evolving with the web. We are just seeing the REST API enter service now in December and a lot of cool things are undoubtedly going to follow on with that.

I still want to see some advancements in core, or rather, as some sort of official core addons. Multilingual support I think is an area in dire need of an official framework or API for it to really be great. And I would love to see WordPress take a leaf out of some of the enterprise CMS’s book and keep working on both the media and post workflows. With the new API and modular world comes many challenges to the built-in UI workflow too. I want, and hope, to see changes happening there too.

Why did you decide to speak about “Content Marketing Done Right For Everybody” this year?

What is the web without content? Leaving the buzzword content marketing aside for the moment, we’ve always been focused at content when developing websites. Today though, we have so much we need to know about and apply to build successful websites.

From that point of view, I want to offer a workflow for content marketing. From answering the big question of how to find topics to write about, how to optimize them good-enough for SEO through to analyzing the analytics data to evaluate performance.

Too rarely do we combine the niche topics and give the full, broad picture and workflow. That’s why I’m doing my session this year.

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Short and sweet: Every session.

There’s just a lot of good things in the schedule. Hopefully I get to sit in on some topics that I might not necessarily deal with every day to pick up some new interesting tidbits and gain a better understanding.

In today’s speaker interview we’re talking with Niklas Högefjord, founder of e-commerce oriented Krokedil and organizer of the Arvika WordPress Meetup Group. He will talk at WordCamp Stockholm about supporting open source products.

What is your current title and role?

I’m the founder of Krokedil. My role is to do all the stuff that doesn’t get done by anyone else in the company. On a more serious note I spend my time switching between development, sales and managing staff and projects. 

How did you first get started with WordPress?

I was a freelance web developer and around 2006 I realized that the CMS I had built from scratch probably wasn’t the best solution for my clients going forward. I started looking at available open source platforms and used several ones in different projects. But after I found WordPress and did my first project with it (probably around 2007) I never looked back.

How do you work with WordPress today?

Krokedil is an e-commerce focused WordPress agency and most of our time is spent on developing, maintaining and supporting extensions for WooCommerce used by merchants in Scandinavia and other parts of the world.   

What do you like most about WordPress?

The ease of use and the open and friendly community. 

How do you see WordPress changing in the next few years?

WordPress has gone from being a blogging platform to a content management system. I think the usage of WordPress will keep growing but the largest difference in 5 years from now will be that we will see it used more as a headless CMS. A tool to build web applications on top of.

Why did you decide to speak about “Skyldig tills motsatsen bevisats – om support på open source-produkter” this year?

Since we are plugin developers and handle support tickets every day at Krokedil I thought it would be a good idea to share some thoughts and experiences around this topic. Perhaps give a couple of tips on how to get the best possible support when you submit your next ticket.

Are there any other sessions at WordCamp Stockholm that you look forward to?

Since I’m into e-commerce I really look forward to listen to Ulrich Pogson and his talk Building multilingual e-commerce sites. 

Hello Niklas! Tell us a little bit about Internetdagarna and IIS!
IIS is a nonprofit organization that, besides managing the top level domain .SE (and .nu), invests in the development of the internet.

Actually, our main goal is to contribute to the “positive development of a free and open internet for all”. Internetdagarna is one way to serve the internet community with knowledge sharing, network and fun!

Why did Internetdagarna decide to host WordCamp Stockholm?
Mainly because WordPress contributes to the above, but also because the community is strong and have a great will to learn. Last year we had a full day of Drupal and we have hosted WordPress-tracks in the past.

How do you feel about WordPress as a CMS?
We use WordPress on all our sites and we have a predisposition for open source applications. For, instance our school competition  “Webbstjärnan” revolves around pupils making sites in WP.

WordPress is a great CMS – and helps lowering the threshold for new people to make great content online – without taking away the opportunity for professional implementations. Just as it should be.

 

Internetdagarna.se – proudly running on WordPress

 

How do you see Internetdagarna evolving in the future?
We have been sold out for the last two years so we are quite confident we are giving the community a great service. But we always look at improvements and have no fear of reinventing ourselves.
Maybe we want to add an extra day of un-conference, workshops or hackathons…. We will see…

Don’t forget to join us on the official WordCamp Contribution day on November 23. See the schedule for more information.