Recap of WordCamp Skopje 2019

Recap of WordCamp Skopje 2019

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WordCamp  2019

2019, Skopje hosted the Second WordCamp Skopje, and once again our local community has shown that we too can be the center of the WordPress universe, even for just a day. October 5th Saturday, over 150 WordPress enthusiasts, innovators, and experts were welcomed in the venue by the volunteers and Organizing Team.

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This year was special to us as a team, because we’ve put a lot of effort to fulfill variety of roles we have taken upon. Mitko and Mila were part of the organizing team, Tasha was a volunteer, Olivera stood proudly by our booth since we were a bronze sponsor once again. David kicked off as a speaker for the first time and what better WordCamp to choose than WordCamp Skopje?

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He also made the Kids WorkShop possible by volunteering to be the instructor and no doubt he was great. So now 10 children who attended know how to set up their personal site and how to publish content, text, images, video, etc, and they learned this in less than an hour!

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And since we are so much into WordCamps we’ve decided to make it even more fun for all the attendees, so we’ve organized a simple lottery with a great prize, PS 4. The lucky winner was Milana Cap, a speaker from Serbia.

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Due to the great interest in our community, we had 2 tracks. Hence 2 masters of ceremony, Sara & Damir. Mitko gave the opening remarks and embarked upon an unforgettable experience.

Track 1

The Hidden Power of Technical SEO, by Emilija Gjorgjevska.

Marketer. Engineer. Currently working as a technical SEO @ Codever.io and as a Technical Consultant @ Upwork. Her talk was a mix of programming and marketing and how can we combine both to achieve business growth and outperform our competitors.

WordPress Plugin Development, by Darko Gjorgjijoski.

Darko is web developer with over 7 years of experience in both front-end and back-end development and WordPress enthusiast. In his talk he covered different areas of WordPress plugin development Including: making use of the native WordPress APIs (HTTP, Database, Caching, Widgets, Shortcodes, Filesystem and more.), licensing, publishing the plugin to the WordPress plugins directory and updating.

Security Tips and Tricks, by Dalibor Sojic

Dalibor Sojic is an IT professional with more than 20 years of experience in the industry. At the moment he is running IT company “Live Networks”, dedicated to develop tailored made web solutions, Smart Hotel Systems, and IoT. He taught us how to significantly increase our WordPress site security without paying for expensive services, and how to not overload WordPress with heavy security plugins.

Familiarize with Elementor page builder, by David Sojic

David Sojic is a valuable member of our team! Aside from his rich working portfolio, he also has an abundant “travel” portfolio. He is a regular on the WordPress meetups organized by WordPress Macedonia and a constant supporter and participant in WordCamps in neighboring countries. He considers WordCamp Europe as an opportunity to learn and meet new people.

In his talk, David Introduced the basics of Elementor, its advantages, and disadvantages, compatibility with other plugins and other interesting things about this awesome page builder. David you made us proud, you rocked the stage! 🤘 🙇‍♂️

Can your site handle 100,000 real-time users?, by Vladimir Novachki

Vladimir is the CTO of Cosmic Development and has more than 10 years of experience in the field of IT. He specializes in building high-performance, scalable web applications that can handle millions of monthly visitors. He is the creator of one of the first fully Macedonian mobile applications and is passionate about hardware prototyping and blockchain technology.

Optimizing a WordPress site for high traffic is much more than just installing a couple of plugins. In his presentation, he shared the tricks of the trade for handling high traffic.

Best Principles in UI/UX Web Design, by Rosana Stamenkova

Rosana Stamenkova has the enthusiasm to find the best professional design and realistic solutions. She currently works in Alite International like Graphic/Web and UX/UI Designer & Developer. While web sites and apps developers can certainly help in this regard though that are overly focused on extraneous issues need to be aware of the business and following several tips and pointers she covered in her presentation.

What developers need to know about SEO and Why?, by Biljana Dimovska

Biljana Dimovska is an acknowledged SEO professional with over 12 years of practice in the industry. Her experience comes from foreign markets, mostly where SEO has been established as a recognized and demanded service long time ago. We learned how and why it is important for marketers and developers to work together from the very start of the projects.

The tastiest recipes from the digital marketing kitchen, by Teodora Nikolovska.

Teodora shared her best case practices about the most successful strategies she executed with her clients, she showed 3 successful recipes from the marketing kitchen and told us which ingredient to use?

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in WordPress, by Stefan Velkovski

WCSKP 2019 was Stefan’s first experience as a speaker, he did a great job introducing us to AI and ML and how they can be used into WordPress sites. Are machines taking over the world? Stefan gave us his experience and insights. Stefan talk was the last talk of track 1,  he rounded up nicely the track 1 experience.

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Turning Coffee breaks into productive meetings 😉

 

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Track 2

Progressive Web Apps in WordPress,  by Vineet Talwar

Vineet took the floor as the first speaker od track 2. His positive attitude woke us all up! His talk revolved around progressive web apps, how they are revolutionizing the mobile web. What are their benefits, the concepts, and technologies behind them. How to build one, test and even publish. He also briefly discussed the CMS support, tools, plugins to achieve app-like experience and push notifications in a progressive web app.

Tips on successful SEO and Content Strategy to enhance our WordPress website, by Dian Tankov

In his talk he covered the process of building a successful SEO strategy, the latest trends from choosing a hosting provider, through speed and performance, mobile version, to metadata, link building, and keywords. He also showed us how to take advantage of the content we create.

Components all the way down: Building a component library for WordPress,  by Michael Carruthers

Tight budgets, tighter deadlines, and changing requirements. The agency environment is a challenging one, where you often feel forced to hit the impossible trifecta of good, fast, and cheap. Is it possible to build high-quality websites, quickly, and in a maintainable way? Michael gave us the know-how.

WordPress Through The Terminal, by Milana Cap

Milana gave an unusual presentation talk, about a live terminal commanding where fatal errors are expected; planned even. Building a WordPress website, or few, without doing anything in code editor nor dashboard. She gave a dangerous overview of the WordPress command-line tool, also known as WP CLI.

She also unexpectedly and casually won our PS4! Congrats again 🙂

E-Commerce Future, by Aleksandar Savkovic

Frauds and fake shops/dropshipping affected the e-commerce industry in the worst way by destroying any trust people had in online shopping. Aleks told us how with the use of common sense can we rebuild users’ trust.

WordPress. WooCommerce. Perfect match, by Milan Ivanovic

Why should we start an e-Commerce shop using WordPress and WooCommerce. With Milan we talked about optimization, advantages, possible rabbit-holes and what comes out-of-the-box, and what should we pay extra attention to.

The WordPress security features we don’t see, by Francesco Carlucci

“Is WordPress Secure?” is an evergreen question. In this session, we explored some security threats commonly found in custom-coded applications, saw how WordPress mitigates them and how we can keep things secure in our custom plugins and themes.

Storytelling – just a blah-blah or the art of communication?, by Aleksandar Pasku

With Aleksandar, we’ve heard the best story of how to tell stories (primarily on the site, and in any other creative task – from a regular flyer or banner to branding companies, products or communities) verbally and visually. Why it is important to gain the sympathy of end-users toward a brand or client towards you and what kind of benefits (even) developers can have from this approach. We’ve all enjoyed it and gained a lot!

WP themes and plugins will get you – eventually, by Aleksandar Predic

Aleksandar focused on the steps of how to prevent bad scenario when fixes and updates are prevented because a theme or a plugin was abandoned, he also explained why a custom build theme is better than any popular premium theme.

Final thoughts 

WCSKP 2019 was awesome! It was our pleasure seeing friends again and meeting new ones.

We’re planning visits to a select number of WordCamps this year. Keep up with our travels on our social media and blog.

Where will we see you next?

See you soon in WordCamp Asia 2020, February 21-23, Bangkok, Thailand! 😎